Colleges fertile ground for digital marketing

DIGITAL LITERACY: Alen Yen, president of iFactory Group, seated, with Dante Bellini, executive vice president at RDW Group. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
DIGITAL LITERACY: Alen Yen, president of iFactory Group, seated, with Dante Bellini, executive vice president at RDW Group. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

Marketing firms are going back to college.
Not for classes or to brush up on a foreign language, but to capitalize on the growing higher education market for digital media services.
The Internet and global demand for American education has prompted universities to bolster their digital outreach, including websites, microsites and social media campaigns, beyond what they are able to manage in house.
At RDW Group in Providence, the university market has proven particularly lucrative.
Executives say the firm has contracts with more than 30 schools and a particularly strong presence with MBA programs, for which it serves nine of the top 20 programs in the country.
“The market is definitely growing from a digital standpoint,” said Alen Yen, president of the RDW’s iFactory division, which specializes in the technology side of the company’s media offerings. “In this region we are an unexpected powerhouse. From small, liberal arts colleges, state schools and community colleges to graduate programs, we really do serve all ends.”
The schools on RDW’s roster include a who’s who of Ivy League heavyweights and local institutions, including Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Stanford, Yale Law School, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Rhode Island and Providence College. The firm expects to complete a contract with a large for-profit school in the next few weeks.
College marketing has been a part of RDW’s business for most of the firm’s history, but its more-recent growth in that area has been a result of its digital work.
Yen said a major difference between digital and traditional advertising is speed.
The firm can create a new microsite attached to the school’s main site in a week to 10 days, reaching potential students while tracking traffic much faster than it could through traditional channels.
As an example, Yen offers RDW’s work for a Massachusetts state university where slack demand for its graduate programs was triggering discussions about whether some of those programs may need to be canceled. RDW built a new microsite for the programs and enrollment increased 36 percent after three months, Yen said.
While most of RDW’s new higher education clients have started out on the digital side, eventually the relationship usually grows to include integrated full-service marketing.
Sometimes, as in the case of Cornell, it happens the other way around, with a school initially in the market for public relations or a traditional media campaign and then taking advantage of digital services later, said RDW Executive Vice President Dante Bellini Jr.
Bellini wouldn’t provide specific dollar figures regarding what percentage of the firm’s business is now higher education, other than to say it is “less than half but growing and robust.”
Where digital shines is its ability to target a particular audience united by skills and interest, but often spread out over multiple countries and continents.
Reaching those people with a traditional campaign is not only expensive, but difficult to measure and track.
“Digital rules the day on the MBA side,” Bellini said. “It’s too expensive to go out there with a shotgun approach. Using traditional means of print and television would involve a tremendous amount of waste, and business schools in particular are conscious of return on investment.”
Offering another example, Bellini said an Ivy League MBA program, with total tuition of more than $100,000, had charged RDW with bringing in 500 qualified applicants within 18 months. One year in, Bellini said they were on track with about 300 new applicants.
While on a fundamental level the move to digital marketing hasn’t changed what agencies provide universities, it has added to the skills their employees need.
Echoing some discussions in the journalism world about the technical skills writers and reporters should have, Yen said a good portion of the agency’s creative people have at least some programming ability. “It used to be we had people who were creative and those who were digitally savvy and now we have writers who are coders,” Yen said. “A lot of what we have is related to responsive design, so when we write copy and headlines, it works the same across all kinds of screens.”
Other agencies are getting in on the higher education market too.
At (add)ventures in Providence, Executive Vice President Mary Sadlier said in addition to recruitment, colleges are looking for help with digital reputation management and optimizing the virtual campus experience for students.
“As colleges continue to flood the mailbox with glossy brochures and oversized postcards, they are increasing their digital presence to keep pace with their digitally savvy marketing targets,” Sadlier said in an email. “An authentic online presence is vital to recruit Generation Z, who grew up with the Internet.”
Those internal capabilities include “one-password” access to grades, course selection and campus mapping apps, Sadlier said.
To some extent, the expansion of digital marketing in higher education simply tracks larger patterns in the larger media world.
But looking to the future, Yen said universities hold vast potential, through the scholarship of their faculties and all of the events and interactions taking place on campus, to produce much more profile-raising content.
Although most, if not all, schools now have their own in-house communications departments dedicated to promoting research breakthroughs and star professors, the amount of potential content being produced is often more than they can handle.
“The struggle is taking 100,000 books and converting them and tagging them so you can find content and allow the general population to find it,” Yen said. “We can design a site telling people you are top-ranked in Silicon Valley, but if you really want to get people excited, capturing that they are working with Apple and Google and the dialogue between people is the way to really deliver online.” •

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