Bob Johnson's Blog on Internet Marketing

If you haven't already discovered the Sloan Consortium's research work on onlined education, then you are missing valuable background information to plan your future marketing efforts in the online world.

Go along to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey06.asp for a summary of the findings from "Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006." If the summary is interesting enough, you can download a free PDF with the full report.

Chief Academic Officers Say Online Quality is Fine

Most encouraging is the news that Chief Academic Officers believe the quality of online education is at least as good, and sometimes better, that the traditional format.

This survey focuses on the Fall of 2005. The great majority of online students, as is the case in higher education overall, are undergraduates. But 443,000 were taking master's degree courses and 39,000 were in "first professional" programs.

Online Enrollments Will Continue to Grow

Looking ahead, a key finding is that enrollment growth online is expected to continue to grow. And that means more undergraduates emerging with bachelor's degrees who might well be looking at online programs as a strong choice to coninue their education while also grappling with new employment demands.

If part of the future marketing success of your institution rests with post-bachelor's education, then online programs are an inevitable part of your future. So far, that seems to favor larger schools over smaller ones with fewer resources to devote to an online effort. The 2006 survey results show that online education is "critical to the long term strategy of my institution" for 65.1% of the respondents, a steady climb from the 46.5% saying that in the 2003 survey.

Carol Aslanian's Online Marketing Conference

Online marketing, including the quality of your website as well as your online advertising and communication programs, will become more important tomorrow than it is today. In that context, time for a plug for Carol Aslanian's upcoming May conference "Advanced Online Marketing: Recruiting Adult and Graduate Students in the Information Age" at http://www.aslaniangroup.com/events/default.asp

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Late on a fabulous Friday afternoon here in Michigan. I've just read an article by Sean Carton prepared especially for non-profit organizations that know what they should be doing on their website but often don't have the money to do it. Or think they don't have the money.

Years ago in Baltimore at an AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, Sean gave a refreshingly different keynote talk using nothing but a few notes on cards, a lot of insight, and quite a bit of charm. Since then he's done a stint as a communications dean at Philadelphia University and now he's back in the consulting world. And he's still refreshing.

In an April ClickZ article, Sean repeats "Seven Ways to Get the Most Out of the Web on a Budget" from a presentation communicators at non-profit organizations with limited budgets.

Two of the points are especially noteworthy:

• "Your Website is your most important communications vehicle, Period."
• "If you have a dollar to spend on communications, spend it online."
• "Stop printing. Just stop."

To move in this direction of course takes Courage and Fortitude. And also a basic awareness of what's happening in the communications world today. Let's not argue about whether or not print is dead. It isn't. But let's also not argue about the consequences of clinging too closely to old print communication patterns and then not having resources to create website capabilities expected by people today. If you don't have the resources for both, then you have to cut back on print budgets to help build the web communications budget you need. And just maybe, that reduction will be drastic.

Sean's other 4 points are worth reading about as well, along with his further comments on each of the points above. Find them at http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625576

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A new position has just been added to the August 8 list of web editors and web writers. That raises to 37 the number of schools included.

Thanks to Jill Caseria at Fairfield University for sending along her title of Web Managing Editor.

From questions asked at recent presentations and from a late day phone call yesterday, I've been reminded recently of how difficult it can be to find someone with web writing expertise. From my own perspective, the best background includes experience in direct marketing copywriting. Journalism is also good preparation. And at the CASE IV district conference last week, someone added writing for broadcast new reporting to the list.

As a friend said recently, "Writing a traditional press release and posting it to a website does not a web writer make."

These "experience profiles" help make the point that the web is not a place for people to write classic great literature. Reading on the web isn't easy to do. And that awareness continues to spread so that more and more web content is gradually becoming "web friendly."

Congratulations to Fairfield for helping to move things in the right direction, one school at a time.

If you have a position that belongs on the list send it to me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com

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AdAge today follows the print article highlighted in my last post with a interview with Matt Creamer, editor-at-large.

Matt continues the theme of the print piece... marketers are aware of the "clutter" impact, especially in TV, but nothing much yet is being done about it. And Matt doesn't think any serious changes in agencey practice will happen until clients become more aware of the problem and decide that TV ad spending isn't bringing the results it should.

Too many agencies still promise clients that their especially effective creative will break through the clutter for them. And too many clients want to believe that. Alas, the results are different.

How does clutter impact online advertising? Matt notes that this hasn't been studied very well yet, but points to a forthcoming report this summer that should shed light on questions like: "How many ads on a web page is too many ads on a web page?"

Ads on mobile devices, a still small and emerging area, will add to the consumer's sense of bombardment.

Take a few minutes and listen to the Matt Creamer interview, "The Money-Waster that Marketing Ignores" at http://adage.com/article?article_id=115932 Access should be open for a few days.

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One of the most popular AdAge articles so far this month (as measured by how many people have sent it by email to their friends) is a report on the impact of huge numbers of ad messages bombarding people every day... and how ad agencies are essentially ignoring the declining impact of their advertising and producing more ads to bombard people more frequently in both traditional and new places.

The article, "Caught in the Clutter Crossfire: Your Brand," is at http://adage.com/article?article_id=115873

The ad industry, from the creative to the media placement side, is in a tight spot these days. After all, profit is in no small part driven by frequency and duration of ad campaigns. But the companies who pay for these campaigns are getting more and more interested in measuring the "engagement" they produce. The old bit about knowing that only 50% of marketing efforts are effective but not know which 50 percent has less and less meaning these days.

What does this mean for colleges and universities working to recruit students?

The need for very careful targeting of usually scarce dollars is even more important now than ever before. The main tenet of direct marketing is alive and well: the better you can profile your audiences (defined as those most likely to enroll, not who you wish might enroll in a perfect world), the more successful your marketing efforts are likely to be.

This holds true for traditional students, for adults students, for any type of student you want to earn your degree.

That same direct marekting practice will help you build your brand where you most need to build it. Very few colleges and universities truly have the resources to launch and maintain a comprehensive brand building campaign to enlighten the general public about the mission and merits of the institution. For most schools, that means paying primary attention to audiences that are already key elements of your strength before diverting brand building efforts in new directions.

• Are you really sure that there is no more room to grow enrollment by building a stronger brand identity where you are already known?
• Are you really sure that your present conversion percent from inquiry to enrolled student can't get any better than it is now?

The "Crossfire Clutter" concept means that your marketing efforts are more likely to bring new benefits when they are directed at people who already know who you are and are open to learning more. Those folk are less likely to simply ignore you when something flits past their ears or eyeballs that they haven't ever heard of before.

Consider signing up at AdAge for regular email newsletter to follow along with the dilemma of the marketing industry. it just might help you guide your own internal marketing discussions in a more effective direction. You can do that at http://adage.com/register.php 

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Down in Dallas getting ready for two presentations this afternoon at the CASE IV meeting... including one that explores the future of integrated communications when so much online content is being produced by everyday people rather than the communication "experts" that are usually in control of print and web content.

And that growing tension between what some have called "the mob" and the experts is an early subject for discussion in Gerry McGovern's just opened blog at www.giraffeforum.com

Make a visit... posts will be by Gerry and partners, including yours truly. Anyone can comment and we are hoping that we'll all end up with new ideas and perspectives on issues that are sure to dominate marketing communications for some time to come.

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