Coca-Cola spent about $3.7 billion on advertising last year. Procter & Gamble spent $5 billion — by comparison, Apple’s advertising budget was a “paltry” $1.2 billion.
When you study the world’s great brands, they tend to have at least one thing in common: great advertising budgets.
For those of us responsible for marketing education institutions, it can feel like we’re operating in a different universe. Most education leaders would be thrilled to have 0.1 percent of P&G’s advertising allowance.
How can a school, college, or university increase brand awareness and build brand equity on the lean budgets that are the norm in our industry?
Here are three ideas for implementing your brand strategy on an .edu budget.
3 ideas for implementing your brand strategy on a #highered budget. #mStoner
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1. Focus on Owned Media First
Television commercials, billboards, and magazine ads are impressive, and they carry cachet with fellow marketers. But before you begin storyboarding your first commercial, stop and ask yourself: Do the majority of the pages on your website clearly convey your brand message? How about your print materials and social channels?
Brand rollouts frequently jump straight to paid media, neglecting the millions of people already examining your digital presence, skimming your mass emails, or perusing your print pieces. You don’t have to pay for access to these eyeballs, you just have to make sure everything they see reinforces your brand messages. Be certain the media channels you own and control do a rock-solid job of representing your brand — it’s a cost-effective way of telegraphing your brand story to a huge number of people already engaging with your institution.
2. Leverage Related Brands
If your institution can leverage another well-known brand, it should consider doing so. Emphasizing your association with something people already understand is an astute way to raise brand awareness without breaking the bank.
If you’re located at a school or college within a larger university, this is a relatively straightforward task. It starts with embracing the university’s brand identity and collaborating with the central marketing team on brand architecture. Ideally, you should emphasize the parts of the universitywide brand most relevant to your individual unit, and downplay parts of the master brand that don’t apply to your target audiences.
You may be able to use this technique even if you’re not part of a larger organization. Brands are everywhere. Education institutions are often affiliated with a diverse assortment of brands — from athletic teams, to medical centers, and nonprofits. Cities, states, and regions of the country have their own “brands.” Even well-known individuals have brands. The College of William & Mary plays up its association with alum Jon Stewart in its admission materials (twice) to convey that it’s a college made up of smart, witty people who don’t take themselves too seriously.
Don’t let these external brands drive your strategy — the key to this approach is defining your brand positioning first and then sleuthing around for well understood brands that might reveal something positive about your institution.
3. Empower Your Ambassadors
One of the greatest advantages schools and universities have over their corporate counterparts is an incredibly loyal, passionate, and well educated base of ambassadors. Most corporate marketers would love to have a group of enthusiastic customers that resembles the extended network of students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, sports fans, and public officials gathered around most schools and colleges.
That’s because consumer to consumer (C2C) marketing is more effective than any television spot or glossy magazine ad. When a family member or friend endorses a brand, that support usually carries a great deal of weight, and it’s more memorable than fleeting advertisements. Some of your friends probably buy Bounty paper towels (influenced, no doubt, by P&G’s huge advertising budget), but when is the last time they enthusiastically explained how much they love Bounty?
Education is something people get excited about, but in order to translate excitement into brand equity, your marketing team needs a plan for harnessing the power of your community— both in-person and online. A large, geographically distributed network of ambassadors extolling the benefits of your brand is a powerful way to implement your strategy with scarce resources.
Education institutions likely always will be outmatched when it comes to marketing and advertising resources. But adopting unconventional approaches to executing your brand strategy can give your institution an edge and communicate your position and ideal to a wide audience for a lower cost.
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