Brain Waves Blog

Higher ed marketing isn’t synonymous with pushing boundaries, but some CMOs are trying to change that. We sat down with Jenny Petty, University of Montana, and Gabriel Welsch, Duquesne University, to pick their brains on the importance of boundary pushing in higher ed marketing. 

As presidential digital leadership evolves, marketing leaders and their teams are more likely to support an executive social media presence. Even if you haven’t done this in the past, presidents change, and each change in leadership brings with it a change in social media presence. Being a leader on social media without a strategic focus is risky, and every executive should have a thoughtful approach to their online presence. Marketing leaders can help guide and mold the presidential approach to social media.

Defining your target audience is key to your brand messaging. In Episode 2 of Social Strategy Fundamentals, we walk through finding your audience based on demographics and how to tailor your strategies to the platforms they're on. 

Every time a new social platform surfaces, we hear the question “should my campus be on this platform?” While TikTok has been around for a few years, it’s still incredibly popular with your prospective and admitted students. According to Statista, almost half of TikTok’s users are under age 29 and 25% of them are ages 10–19. 

For most of the last decade, the way campuses show up on social media has become eerily similar. Campuses are on the same channels, posting similar content, chasing similar metrics. Social media has become just another set of channels on which to broadcast marketing messages in a one-to-many fashion. The pixel size is different or the on-screen images might move, but much of what is posted on social is just a few creative steps away from a billboard or a TV commercial. I refer to the mentions on social networks holistically as “online conversation,” but let’s be real—there’s very little actual conversation happening.

Lions and bots and trolls—oh my! Online conversations provide organizations with honest thoughts and feelings from their audiences, but are all of those mentions actual people? Bots and trolls aren’t just for science fiction and fairy tales anymore.