Chicago AMA "Hot Seat" Challenge Next Week

Next Thursday I am going to be on the 'hot seat' challenge with the AMA's Higher Education SIG in Chicago at Catalyst Ranch at 656 W. Randolph, Jitterbug Room at 5pm..  People will ask me questions and I will answer to the best of my ability.  Since I am a professor I always have an answer for everything so I am looking forward to the evening!

I think the big topics for higher education right now are engagement and content, the same as for most marketers.  My students have been doing AdWords projects this semester and one entire class is working specifically for units within the University.  Higher education is competitive now and the keywords are expensive, many too expensive for the budget of a student project.  Some of the students have taken the approach of asking their University clients to improve their web pages to facilitate organic search results.

Although I would not recommend abandoning paid search, I think the best strategy for a University is also to develop meaningful content on the web site that will allow for higher rankings in search engines during organic search (the results that are not ads).  Blogs, videos, images, whitepapers and other types of content are looked upon favorably by search engines in organic or 'natural' search rankings.

My blog (which is with blogger, a company owned by Google) gets ranked highly on my own personal search engine results page when I am logged in to Gmail and I can also see which of my professional acquaintances has posted on relevant topics.  You can see above I recently created a post on 'tag management '  However, blogs are given weight by all search engines, as are other forms of content.  When my class did a viral video project, the organic search rankings for our program soared.  This success is documented in +Aaron Goldman's book Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google.

I would ask what organization is better suited than a University to create original content?  Universities have experts available in every academic department.  These experts can be showcased on the University's website to enhance the social 'reputation' of the University.

These experts can also help with engagement.  Another topic is engagement and social media can work to improve engagement.  DeVry University is connecting current and perspective students with subject matter experts that are available on faculty and staff.  I think the challenge will be to incent and motivate faculty and staff to contribute.  When faculty see that social media participation improves how they are viewed as an expert in their field, I think they will be more likely to participate.  I look forward to 'engaging' you on these topics at Catalyst Ranch.  Register for the event here.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Joel Book on Interactive Engagement

We had a great time at "Hot Topics in Internet Marketing" at NIU's Naperville campus yesterday. We spent a full day with some great guest speakers that I will be highlighting in my blog (hopefully a few of the participants will help out as guest bloggers for the sessions that I missed). Food and facilities were great also so Thanks to our support teams at NIU Naperville and NIU Outreach. Keep following us on the hashtag #niunet on twitter.

Folks really enjoyed Joel Book (@joelbook, http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelbook) from Exact Target's presentation on innovative brands and how they are using interactive marketing to attract and retain customers. That's Joel in the picture above 'engaging' with two of my colleagues from NIU Outreach. Joel said that successful brand are using a triangle offense of email, social and mobile to engage customers once they have come on board. He said that 58% of consumers begin the day with email, which aids the buying process, improves service and maximizes retention for customers. Those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.

Best Buy stays connected with its customers via email after the sale and so does Scott's Turf Builder. Johnston & Murphy personalizes its offers based on customer information. Multi-channel interaction is a must and the true challenge is to manage the customer conversation in both inbound and outbound channels. Exact Target is working to become an Interactive Marketing Hub where the audience and content can be managed and reported on centrally. Campaign management certainly needs some help as our students learned managing just two channels in their live project for Restaurant.com this semester.

Some other Joel Book gems include "Serving has become the new selling" and "Think it through, not just think it up." I am sure that we will all be quoting Joel on these and many more gems from his talk. I am so glad that we have a relationship with thought leader Exact Target and have been using the tool in the classroom since 2004. More on the conference to come!

Students rock ROI; Razorfish helps to explain why

We went over this week how to calculate Return on Marketing Investment, ROMI, in the simplest sense. For our project each group got $200 to drive traffic to the Restaurant.com web site. Most groups have made back their money, for a positive ROMI of dollars made/dollars spent of 100%, with some groups making over a 600% ROMI. I told them to put this all on their resume as employers would like these numbers.

Of course these calculations are also just marketing acquisition numbers and don't tell the story in terms of customer lifetime value. I heard a presentation yesterday at the CADM luncheon from Razorfish (Chad Maxwell and Teresa Caro presenting) on their work on marketing segmentation by communications preference and the engagement expectations by channel (http://liminal.razorfish.com/).

In our class, our Students have to pick two communications channels for their project Our groups in class using email have done quite well and individual email and the company web site are still the most valued communications channels in terms of customer's engagement expectations, according to this research.

The goal once the customer has been acquired is to keep them around and keep them engaged. Razorfish, working with Virgin Airlines developed four customer segments based on engagement preference. In spite of the fact the company is quite a savvy online marketer, not all of its customers were socially savvy (only 22%) and those who were traditionally engaged and like email newsletters for example (11%) of the sample, were also among the most profitable for the company.

I will talk to the students next week about engagement now that we have spent a semester on customer acquisition, and had some fun to boot!