Smart brands listen for what matters most
Stop telling stories and promoting. Start understanding what makes your organization important. That’s especially true during a global pandemic.
I worked with a medium-sized audio-visual company that figured this out. They read a pretty simple branding book and used it to find out what made their brand so successful.
These are smart guys – they listen for a living.
They were quickly able to create a simple, measurable marketing system that got the most bang for their marketing dollar, implemented customer service changes and allowed them to anticipate issues that might impact business several years down the road. It didn’t cost $1 million. It took time.
Facebook isn’t marketing. Snapchat isn’t marketing. Those are fickle promotion channels. Marketing is what you do, where you do it, who you do it for and why you do it – and how much it costs.
Listening creates good, measurable information, too. Imagine if you made it a point to interview one prospective student a month for 10 years, asking them the same questions. What would you learn about your brand? We’re already churning out a ton of this content and giving little or no thought to what it says about our organization and its goals
Themes would emerge – things that were important. Things you could measure – with enough, you could measure them to the student or gift dollar.
The hard truth is people hate higher ed right now. They’ve lost faith in the system. No one wants to say that, but it’s true and it needs to be said. Transparency isn’t a someday – it’s a must. Without it, many higher ed brands will face all kinds of self-inflicted struggles that could have been avoided.
As much as we think of branding as a bunch of clicks and impressions and conversions, there are only a few key measures that matter at your institution – gifts, enrollment, research – They correlate with brand value.
With some simple math, you could create a measurable, testable system that could be refined and help engage your community with the brand.
Smart brands listen for a living. Smart schools do, too.
Darren White is the principal consultant at D. White & Co.
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