Can your university afford to “spend money to make money?”
If you work in higher education marketing right now, you undoubtedly have whiplash. One minute, you’re sifting through endless photos of students sunbathing on the quad with a book over their face to wondering when you’ll have a student back on campus. During the summer, we are all familiar with a sort of “Ghost town,” but now our campuses are beginning to resemble an apocalypse with no signs of life.
So, what can we do as marketers? How do we keep messages fresh, accurate, and compelling while staring down the barrel of an academic year unlike any we’ve experienced?
Is it tone deaf to create ads, write feature stories, and produce vignettes of experiences students and faculty had but won’t have this year?
At the end of the day, we can’t let our institutions fall off a cliff. But, with budget shortfalls, can universities really afford to “spend money to make money?” The short answer is yes. Someway, somehow, we must.
Based on pre-COVID trends, we should look to double down on digital while shifting away almost entirely from print (especially if your campus is going remote), lean our internal processes, and provide professional development for our team members so we strengthen our in-house resources (ultimately saving on freelancer / vendor costs. Professional development in the time of a crisis is more important than ever, but that’s a topic for another day.
As a marketing communications office, our jobs are to be revenue generators, not cost centers. According to the 2019–20 Gartner CMO Survey, marketing spending in Education is 12 percent of the total company revenues.
To maintain status as a revenue generator, our jobs have always consisted of spending budget dollars creatively — through targeting, optimizing spend, and tailoring content to specific audiences and platforms.
In a pre-COVID environment, how were marketers across industries allocating dollars?
In the Web Strategies Inc. article How Much Should You Budget For Marketing In 2020?, reports from Forrester Research and eMarketer, reflect the following insights.
Investment in paid search, display advertising, social media advertising, online video advertising and email marketing is predicted to account for 46% of all advertising by 2021.
Online video will represent the highest growth category, with the anticipated investment more than doubling 2016 numbers by 2021.
Social media advertising investments will continue to grow, with a 17% compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2021. Social media spending overall averaged 11–12% of total marketing budget in the August 2019 CMO Survey.
None of us quite know the winning combination of marketing messages, tactics, and spend, but we can use pre-COVID industry benchmarks as our guide while assessing the realities at our own institutions to identify resources. The truth is, many marketing communications offices at universities are small. These teams typically consist of specialists in public relations, graphic design (print), social media, and writing.
Whether you’re a team of one or an office of 30, we cannot let our institutions fail and in many ways as the creative messengers who should deeply understand our audience’ behaviors, marketing professionals have a real opportunity to shine.
