What's new, what's next, what's best, and how it all fits in to a successful digital marketing strategy… Get inside our head with these helpful resources—from blog posts to best practices guides—written by our team of experts.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect on May 25, 2018.
Back in November, Forrester Research predicted that 80% of firms that are impacted by GDPR will not be ready to comply by May 2018. And as of February, only 26% of firms based in Europe said they were compliant.
For many web teams — regardless of the industry — site accessibility remains a reactive issue. Too often, the drive to adjust site content to make it more accessible comes on the heels of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) complaints filed against the organization.
While that approach does ensure that the web continues to evolve toward a more accessible space for all users, it also ensures that process will be a slow, uphill battle for both users and content creators.
The ideal approach is to evaluate and adjust your own content proactively.
Personalization is the next tactic in your marketing toolkit, giving you the keys to make one-to-one marketing a reality for higher education. Many marketers are intrigued by the possibility of personalization, but wary of the content demands. But, marketers shouldn't be intimidated. If organizations have a good content strategy with solid content assets, personalization is all about leveraging and reusing these assets.
As marketers, our goal is to build trust with our constituents, and through that, develop a two-way, one-to-one relationship based on loyalty. We need to provide value to our constituents, so that they become our loyal advocates. But to do so, we need to know and understand them — with data at the source of this knowledge.
A website redesign can be an invigorating exercise for a college or university — people are excited about a new look, a new direction, and a new strategy.
But it can also be challenging to find the best way to engage internal audiences throughout the process. Common questions include:
As the marketing technology stack evolves, we have access to more data than ever, and thus more insight into our audiences and their behavior. You have the keys to unlock the future of data fluency in your team and in your organization. But the volume of this data can be overwhelming, as well as the sheer number of metrics available, that seem to be invented daily.
So where should you start? At the core of our entire suite of marketing efforts along the consumer decision journey is your website. So let's start there.
When we audit and review a website before embarking on a website redesign project, we typically see a range of content issues, including:
Haven’t made the move from HTTP to HTTPS yet? You’re not alone, but it’s time.
The good news is that over one-third of the top 1 million websites use SSL by default, an increase of 150% in the last year, according to BuiltWith. The bad news? That still leaves two thirds of the top websites using a less secure protocol.
When we kick off a website redesign project with a client, one of the first things we discuss is an area where the bulk of the work might not happen for months down the line. That’s right, I’m talking about content.
To be frank, it can be a scary conversation. With these kinds of projects, the content expectations can be daunting — especially if you wait to think about it until you are well into the design phase. By that point, a significant number of content decisions have already been made, and you’ll end up in a tight spot if you don’t have a plan for how to address them.
As we head into 2018, it’s time for our fourth annual report on Google Analytics benchmarks for college and university websites. We reviewed traffic from a wide range of college and university websites — graduate programs, universities, liberal arts colleges, adult programs, and law schools — from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017. When available, we looked at only external traffic sources to get the best reads on how prospective students and alumni are experiencing the website.
A new year brings new enthusiasm to accomplish some of the biggest challenges in the field of higher education. From artificial intelligence to big data, the industry is being hit with buzzword after buzzword, as we weed through the trends to unearth solutions that will bring the industry to the next level.
With the help of insights from higher ed marketing executives and CMOs, we pulled together a list of digital marketing priorities for the new year.
It can sometimes be difficult to know if the way you’ve structured your team is the “right” way. For most, whether you are meeting your internal goals and rising to the demands of your institution is the only method to measure. There’s no real, concrete way to compare your own structure and your own success against that of the rest of the industry.
We wanted to change that.
The next generation of CMOs are digitally fluent and data-driven, critically analyzing marketing solutions to bring integrated campaigns forward, and motivating teams and peers through the power of data. Above all else, they’re "connected."
Throughout this year’s American Marketing Association (AM) Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education — appropriately titled CONNECTED — senior marketing leaders united to discuss the new and improved ways their institutions can attract, engage, nurture, and retain their audiences using digital channels.
When it comes to acquiring new patients, market research shows digital channels strongly topping referral and print acquistion strategies. One survey reports 76% of prospective patients use digital channels to select a care provider. If you want to improve conversion from your hospital website, streamlining your website to align to prospective patient needs is a necessary step.
“I’m not a technical person” is perhaps my least favorite excuse for avoiding new tools and trends. Working in web development, and being the person who is in charge of introducing my clients to new technologies and strategies, I hear this line almost daily.
Although it can be frustrating to hear, I know what people are actually saying when they tell me they are “not a technical person.” They mean: “I won’t understand this.”
In a quest to connect and engage with prospective students, college and university marketing teams are turning to student social media takeovers of official social media accounts. These first-person, student produced narratives help schools to tell stories from new angles, to present an authentic, unmoderated perspective, and to grow their audiences.
Three experts on the topic shared their experiences and processes for letting students take the reigns during a panel at the annual CCA conference:
Do you ever feel like your website is a mess?
It’s like a cluttered garage that you wish someone else would just clean out–get rid of the trash, sweep it out, and put anything of value back on some nice shiny shelves.
You could turn around, walk away, hire an agency, and tell them — fix it!
But, it’s your job to clean it out.
To help you dive in, we’ve outlined a seven-point action plan — if you follow it, you’ll end up with a good understanding of what’s in your “garage” and some first thoughts on all of the key areas for a new website.
Each year, thousands of developers, designers, content strategists, and industry leaders gather at DrupalCon to share their ideas and experiences using one of the world’s most popular open-source content management solutions. For the 2017 conference, two of our developers and several other members of our team had the opportunity to attend the conference in Baltimore.
Recently, in a kickoff meeting for a higher education website project, the vice president of marketing announced that to get the website done on schedule, she was informing the president that the internal marketing team would cancel an issue of the alumni magazine and some other annual projects from their schedule.
“It’s the only way the site will get done. We need to free up resources,” she said.
I appreciated this straightforward, no-nonsense approach to resource planning for a website.
