Category: communication

Friday Five: #AMAHigherEd recap

One of @QuietMarketer's many sketchnotes from the 2014 #AMAHigherEd conference
One of @QuietMarketer’s many sketchnotes from the 2014 #AMAHigherEd conference

The American Marketing Association’s annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education wrapped up on Thursday.

I missed that third and final day, which featured a keynote speech by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. (Judging from the tweets on the #AMAHigherEd stream, he capped off a series of excellent keynotes in stellar fashion.)

Even though I was able to attend only two-thirds of the conference, it was enough to send me home with a head packed full of ideas, thanks to the many smart people I met and heard from during the event, and a suitcase crammed with new notebooks and swag from the vendor booths.

Here are my top five takeaways from the conference.

1. Tell your story

The importance of storytelling as an essential element of effective branding and marketing was evident all around that conference. From the keynote speeches to the booths of the marketing firms attending the event to the swag those vendors were giving away, storytelling was everywhere. As someone who loves storytelling, I have a bias for its use in marketing, so perhaps I’m filtering out other important messages about marketing from the conference. But if there was one thread that seemed to tie much of the event together, storytelling was it. From cowboy poets to university presidents, the theme of storytelling connected the conference’s several disparate themes, speakers and elements.

A thought: How can storytelling connect the disparate elements of our institutions to weave together a tapestry of solid brand identity?

2. Know your place

For the opening keynote, DJ Stout, a partner in the design consultancy Pentagram, teamed up with singer-songwriter Darden Smith to lead us through a session on the importance of place. (I won’t call it a speech or a talk, because the session combined Smith’s musical musings on guitar with Stout’s commentary, video of Texas cowboy poets reciting their work, and visuals of Texas scenery and client work.) Stout and Smith, both native Texans (Stout is sixth-generation), talked about the importance of staying true to your roots when telling your story. Their point: A sense of place is essential in branding your organization.

A thought: When thinking about branding and marketing our institutions, think about where we’ve come from and where our roots are. Think about our geography and our history.

3. But don’t just stay there

While Stout and Smith focused on the importance of roots in their keynote, University of Arizona President Ann Weaver Hart talked about branching out in hers. The University of Arizona’s brand positioning talks about geography, but extends the brand identity quite well with a platform captured in a single word: Boundless. Hart’s luncheon keynote also focused on the importance of building a brand that is connected to the university’s strategic plan, and described how the Boundless theme emerged from Arizona’s Never Settle strategic plan.

A thought: Do our institutions’ marketing and branding efforts align with our strategic plans? Can we easily and effectively demonstrate that alignment? Leaders and decision-makers want to see that connection.

4. NPR and higher ed have much in common

Emma Carrasco, another keynoter, is the first chief marketing officer of a well-established media organization, National Public Radio. As she described the brand-building challenges facing NPR, it occurred to me that NPR and higher education have a lot in common. Both have been slow to embrace branding, journalists can be as skeptical of marketing as faculty, and both NPR and higher education have been focused more on how their administrative bodies want the organization to be run than on figuring out what the customers or audiences want. Carrasco said NPR has “turned the microphone around” to give the audience a voice and to listen to what the audience is saying. In another turnaround for NPR, she said, “We can no longer wait for you to find us. We have to find you.” As a longtime NPR fan and supporter (KMST), I was encouraged by what I was hearing from Carrasco and about the ascendancy of brand-building at the national level. I hope that emphasis translates to local stations like the one I support.

A thought: Sometimes we in higher ed marketing think the challenges we face are unique. They aren’t. Listen to and learn from other organizations. You might find something in common. And you might find new approaches to challenges. Also, listen to your customers.

5. Marketing is coming of age

The lineup of keynote speakers was interesting. We had a university president, the CMO of NPR and a former White House press secretary-turned-university CMO talking about the importance of marketing. If a university president extols the virtues of marketing, if a well-established media organization sees the importance of marketing and if high-level White House staffer finds higher ed marketing to be a good career move, then these are signs that point to the rise of marketing as an important field in our sector. The number of universities who have chief marketing officers is also on the increase — another indication that marketing is coming of age. We heard a lot about the importance of marketers and chief communicators having “a seat at the table” of campus decision-makers.

And yet, at the conference, I continued to hear the complaint that marketing doesn’t get the respect it deserves. The ascendance of marketing is not evenly distributed in higher ed. Some schools are in the forefront, but many lag behind.

A thought: Be an advocate for the importance of marketing at your institution. Build the coalitions and relationships necessary to create a greater connection between marketing and leadership. That greater connection with not only benefit you and the institution’s marketing enterprise, but also the university as a whole.

Bonus 1: Best tweet of the conference

The award goes to @ICChris, who posted this gem early on in the conference:

Update: Chris explains in a follow-up tweet that he was quoting conference speaker Bob Sevier of Stamats. But that doesn’t detract from the popularity of his tweet.

Bonus 2: Best note-taker

Meagan Steele (@QuietMarketer) wins this award for her awesome sketchnotes, which she shared on Twitter. Thanks, Meagan!

The problem with content marketing

Blog-images-FINAL460X460_your-content-marketing-sucksA few weeks ago, I wrote in this space about “predictive” content marketing as the wave of the future. One of the sources cited in that post mentioned that most content marketers take a hit-or-miss approach that falls short of the mark 80 percent to 90 percent of the time. That source suggested that predictive content marketing would equip marketers with the tools they need to drop that failure rate tremendously. He attributed the misses to our lack of predictive marketing ability.

But since that post, I’ve been thinking there may be a more basic problem with much content marketing. And I think the problem boils down to one thing:

A lot of our content sucks.

I’m talking specifically about higher education content, although the same charge could be leveled against most organizations. A recent Business2Community post says essentially the same thing.

Our content doesn’t suck because it’s poorly written and sloppily edited (although that is sometimes the case). It sucks because it is more focused on the institution or business than on the customer or audience.

If we try to implement predictive content marketing without first making our content more focused on the customer and less focused on our institutions, then I predict our content marketing efforts will predictably fail.

Customer first, content second

Think about the kind of content a typical university churns out. Is it written to meet the needs of our audience, or is it written to make ourselves feel good?

Does much of our content focus on the accolades our universities, faculty, students and staff receive more than on what might be of interest to our audiences?

Are we more concerned with announcing the latest appointments and administrative reorganizations than on what prospective students, alumni, research supporters or other customers are interested in?

If so, then it’s no wonder our content marketing isn’t yielding the results we’d like to see.

Back in May of 2013, I wrote about the need to take an audience-centered approach to marketing first, then develop content tailored to that audience. (This wasn’t an original idea; I’d read about it here and also here.)

So, while predictive content marketing may help us out in the future, it won’t do any good if we don’t take a new look at our content. It boils down to the old advertising maxim to sell benefits, not features. For more on this, here’s a terrific blog post: Features tell, but benefits sell. (That post’s lede sums it up: “People have little interest in purchasing a bed; what they want is a good night’s sleep.”)

Jay Baer knows this and talks about it in detail in his book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype. The gist of Baer’s book is that organizations that offer content that helps people solve problems will be the winners in the new digital economy. Gini Dietrich knows this too, and she talks about it a lot in her book Spin Sucks: Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age. Both books are must-reads for content marketers.

I know that colleges and universities crank out a lot of great content. But we also crank out a lot of stuff that has little or marginal value to our customers or audiences. The latter might make the boss or an important faculty member happy, so you’ve got to balance those needs with your marketing goals and deal with it. The boss, the boss’s boss, the faculty member, etc. — those are important internal customers. But the more content we create that adds value to the customers that we are trying to attract and keep, the better chance we will have to make more of our content marketing stick instead of suck.

Image via Catalyst, Your Content Marketing Sucks.