How to Repair and Align Disjointed Marketing Strategies Across Different Departments

A university is like an ecosystem. There are main functions that allow your institution’s system to thrive and under that umbrella, your micro-ecosystems would be your schools. All too often, we see higher education prospects come with a list of all the schools within their university and armed with each separate marketing team, the leaders, and the strategies laid out. While this is helpful for kick-offs and understanding the depth of each strategy currently in progress, it can also be the source of inconsistent results and show the holes in internal marketing knowledge.

In an effort to be organized, sometimes bringing in all these plans at once seems overwhelming. How could one school possibly tell another that its marketing plan isn’t working? The truth is, almost every school does require a unique marketing strategy since no strategy, and its needs follow the “one-size-fits-all” method.

At Investis Digital, we personally specialize in training departments to help better align schools’ success and even the marketing higher education playing field; both internal and external. That’s why we’re giving you a list of the best practices for your school’s central marketing department.

Tips for creating a centralized marketing strategy across schools and departments:

Choose the right promotion channels

Picking the best social media platforms is one of the keys to success here. Takedown an inventory of those individual channels everyone has. This isn’t meant to judge quantity but quality. Conduct a quick study among the deans/representatives of each school and wait and see which platforms were the most popular and what is being least talked about.

Align with your peers on what channels are expected of you to manage and produce. Do you all agree that your university as a whole’s KPIs will make sense with this platform and give the best chance for a clean conversion hand-off? Discuss what is within the range of the university to cover on their social media vs what schools are expected to have accounts for and cover.

Agreeing on branding guidelines

Have a brand guide and media kit ready and by your side. The last thing you need is getting new talent in and accidentally utilizing Comic Sans instead of your logo. Create a library of creative assets available to you and your team for 24/7 access to your university’s proper colors, fonts, and logos. This isn’t just a “nice to have” it’s a need to have.

If your goal in the future is to become a recognizable institution beyond your headquarters, this is the way to catch your attention. The right attention is clear, focuses on your school and university’s goals, and still showcases the school branding but clear partnership signs that indicate your school can be easily recognized with your institution.

It also minimizes the amounts of ways social media managers, or anyone for that matter, alters your brand.

Focus on Your 1st party databases

Build your own databases! Your biggest fans will always be your current audience, professors, students, and former alumni. This also helps avoid all the schools dipping into one master contact list, accidental cross-over promotions, and some contacts getting too many outreaches that they unsubscribe. It may become even more of a problem when Google finalizes its elimination of 3rd party cookies to gather user data as well. Some schools host incredibly similar majors so it’s good to keep your program’s sign-ups, course information, and descriptions clear to ensure that your audience knows what they are getting.

It also helps you understand what is popular among your own audience or what they are interested in. This can help you continue a conversation in the future or refer/suggest another school based on the needs they’ve explained so that way even your warm leads stay within your organization.

Assign an executive manager to manage the managers

Someone has to consistently push to be the liaison across all departments and upkeep this relationship even when months after this initiative is finalized. The manager will serve as the accountability coordinator. Coming together to report to a centralized marketing department allows for you to agree on KPIs, brand standardization/integrity checks, tracking every school’s ad spend budgets, ongoing campaigns, and the results produced.

Contact Investis Digital

Ready to synchronize the marketing strategy across all of your departments? We can help. Learn more about our performance marketing solutions or contact us.