I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop at the 2022 AMA on “Combining Marketing and Communication for Long-Lasting Brand Impact” with all-star higher ed leaders Jenny Petty (University of Montana), Binti Harvey (Scripps College), and Teresa Valerio Parrot (TVP Communications). We showed campuses how they need both marketing and communications professionals to collaborate to achieve institutional goals.
Brand fragmentation is a consistent theme we see in our industry and client research. There are lots of reasons for this, but mainly the folx charged with “managing the brand” are thinking about “the flagship.” When you embrace the adage that “brands aren’t what you say they are, they’re what they [your audience] says they are,” the fragmentation is obvious.
Your campus is working to tell a cohesive, compelling brand story, but if you’re not working with a collaborative shared strategy, your message is being drowned out by conversation from accounts managed within departments, colleges and units, research centers, and other disparate areas of campus telling a different story in a different way in hopes of meeting very different goals. Let’s count the ways your brand is fragmented.
Ongoing social listening analysis allows you to better understand your baseline conversation and create personal benchmarks, track seasonal changes, evaluate the effects of crises, and measure the impact of new campaigns.
If you work on a small campus, chances are you’re a master at multitasking. Depending on the size of your campus, social media may be the responsibility of one person, or less than one, so it’s important to get the most out of everything you do. If that’s where you sit right now, we can help.
In higher ed (like every other industry), brand management is one of a campus’s top priorities. With social media molding the public’s perception of your brand, it’s your job to stay on top of your reputation—creating content that contributes to the conversation and aligns with your strategic goals.