Faster, Smaller, and Integrated – Now What?

As we continue our series of predictions posts, we take a look at the quickly changing world of mobile devices, and share some thoughts on some ways that higher education marketers can respond to these changes.

1. 2012 – The Year When Mobile Smart Phones Reach 50% Of The Market

Back in March, 2010, Nielsen projected that the U.S. cell phone smart phone market would finally reach 50% of the total handset market by Q3 of 2011.As it turns out, they were a little premature in their estimates – the majority of Americans still have feature phones (according to comScore’s latest survey, which puts smart phones at 38%). However, with smart phone prices down, tier 2 carrier smart phone inclusion, and increased competition, we can expect to pass that milestone in 2012. With almost half the population accessing the internet on their mobile devices – from social media to shopping sites and more –we can expect the marketing pendulum to begin the swing in favor of “mobile first, desktop second.”

2. The Rise of the Tablets To Main-Stream

The increased competition in the tablet market will drive prices down and increase sales as new models come out allowing the devices to be more main stream. More Americans who use their PC for simple activities like e-commerce, news, web, email, will buy tablets when they want to replace their PC.

So what does all this mean for higher ed marketers? Schools can no longer afford to build and test their websites purely with a desktop user in mind. Sites that are optimized for mobile (including touch screens) will offer a better user experience and in turn, drive better results.

3.  Social Sites and Apps will Continue to Dominate Mobile Traffic

All analytics and indicators show the strong dominance of social sites and social games. This theme will continue throughout 2012, and we’ll see more and more marketers exploring ways to leverage that trend to increase brand awareness. In particular, we expect more attention on Android and iPhone GEO Social apps with creative uses of targeting them.. This recent Nielsen Study reinforces this prediction.

4. RIM Losing Market Share

Research in Motion, the manufacturer of Blackberry, is in serious trouble. With sales already on the decline and a series of network issues in the recent past, they will continue to lose marketshare going into 2012, with the other 3 major players (Google, Apple, and Microsoft) benefiting.

While it’s still possible that RIM could find it’s way back by introducing an advanced touch OS with features and benefits equal to – or better than – Android and iOS operating systems, this doesn’t appear likely at this point. Having said that, marketers should keep focusing on optimizing their mobile presence for all handset types in the market with mobile web design best practices in mind.

5. The Beginning of the Start for Contactless Payments adoption via NFC & Virtual Wallets to Replace Credit Cards

This trend is unlikely to directly impact higher ed recruitment any time soon; however, our list of mobile predictions would be incomplete without it.

Many new smart phones that are coming out now and the rumored new iPhone5 to come will probably have NFC. Allowing users with these handsets to store credit card information in a virtual wallet on the phone and start using the phones at terminals that accepts them like the MasterCard PayPass for quick and easy checkouts.  One example is the Google Virtual Wallet.

6. The Rise of Smart Phone-Connected Gadgets

Finally, if you are up to date with the latest trends and hip gadgets craze, you may have noticed new gadgets in your electronics store that take advantage of the smart phone’s connectivity features to enhance everyday life activities. Today, smart phones enable everything from listening to music through Bluetooth connected stereo phones to tracking fitness and health through app-supported devices like the UP  bracelet or the Fitbit activity and sleep trackers. Expect more of those life-enhancing gadgets to show up and to satisfy our technology-driven lives.

While this is another trend that doesn’t have immediate/obvious ramifications for higher ed marketers, it is worth watching how this evolves. As more companies come up with ways to take advantage of smart phone connectivity, marketers are bound to follow.

As we continue our series of 2012 predictions for higher education marketers, one overarching trend stood out that we thought deserved a deeper dive. Across all industries, the availability of data has been growing exponentially over the past few years. For marketers, this unprecedented access to real-time data has the potential to have startling a startling impact by allowing educational institutions to make quick, well-informed business decisions. At CUnet, we have a team of people dedicated solely to analyzing and reporting on that data for our clients; they pulled together the key “data-driven opportunities” that we see making the biggest impact for our clients in the coming year.

Refining of inquiry scoring strategies

Inquiry scoring is a useful tool, but has fallen off the radar for some schools over the past year for various reasons. I believe that 2012 will see a renewed push toward using scoring especially in evaluating marketing spends. In the past, scoring has been mainly used to differentiate how a school connects with potential students. Moving forward, more emphasis will be placed on using scores for tiered pricing structures as opposed to other strategies.

Increased focus on demographic and segmentation information

What is a great way to target your potential students? How about data points that typically aren’t asked for on the average inquiry form. Where do these potential students live and work and what do they do in their spare time? Do they like HBO or Showtime? This type of information has become the norm for a number of industries and the higher education space is certainly no exception. Schools want to know how to reach their target markets, and this type of information is a gigantic step in attracting new students. Combining this with tiered pricing through inquiry scoring will also be of greater interest in 2012.

Conversion metrics evolve

Applications and starts are certainly still important, but ultimately student retention (graduating and finding a rewarding career) will be the primary goal. This trend gained significant momentum in 2011 and will escalate in the coming year. Student retention helps to ensure a given school’s dedication to education, building strong brands, and adding qualified and successful individuals to the work force. Schools will spend more time and effort analyzing the factors that impact retention, and use that data to help refine recruitment efforts.

Predicting program trends

With more and more data available, schools will look for ways to identify program trends as before they take shape, so they can quickly respond by adjusting program offerings. For example, the IT field has grown in popularity in the for-profit space significantly in the past few years, and we expect this trend to continue. Even as budgets become more refined as 2011 progressed, interest in IT programs has not only held steady but grown as an overall percentage of total inquiries. 2012 will see even more emphasis placed on IT specific program offerings and will continue to generate even more interest in the coming year.

Source: CUnet seasonality and data findings for 2010 and 2011

Pay-per-click (PPC), or paid search, plays an important – and in many cases growing – role in the recruitment marketer’s toolkit. As we look ahead, we’ve identified five key PPC trends that we expect to emerge in 2012. What do you think?

1) Larger portion of marketing budgets allocated to Paid Search

In light of the heightened regulations surrounding the higher education space and the need for more transparency, schools will be moving further away from third party inquiry generation and allocating a larger percentage of their marketing budgets to paid search initiatives. Concerns regarding compliance with affiliate lead generation, coupled with the inability to track the full effectiveness of more traditional methods of print, radio and TV, will result in a shifting focus to paid search. Through paid search, every dollar spent can be tracked for the most effective ROI, all while managing consistent, compliant messaging.

2) Rising search volume for associate degrees

Search volume for queries related to associate degrees rose substantially throughout 2011 and is expected to continue to rise into 2012, resulting in higher cost-per-click rates and more competition on related keywords. Associate degrees have become more popular over the past few years as people looked to go back to school after being laid off from work. Associate degrees are usually less expensive and can be completed more quickly than bachelor’s degrees, allowing the student to get back on the job market sooner than other programs. Schools that offer associate degrees will be able to capitalize on the increased traffic potential, but competitive bids will be necessary to obtain top positions.

3) Expansion to Third Tier Networks

With tightened budgets and more competition in the main engines of Google and Bing, more advertisers will look to third tier networks in 2012 to supplement inquiry volume at lower CPCs. Though the options for geo targeting and robust reporting are more limited with these networks, they have provided many schools with quality inquiries that can convert into enrollments and starts. Competition for online programs will only continue to grow, resulting in CPCs exceeding the $20 range for top position in Google on core phrases such as “online colleges.” Schools that cannot afford to remain competitive for expensive key phrases will be forced to turn to these third tier networks to expand their reach.

4) Growth of Mobile Paid Search

As the mobile phone market continues to grow and more people own them, the ability for a school to advertise via mobile phones will become even more important. According to comScore, 234M Americans now own mobile devices, 90M of which are smartphones. More and more potential students are relying on their mobile phones for researching and planning, making it more crucial to run mobile paid search campaigns and to drive traffic to a mobile optimized landing page. Most paid search campaigns target just desktop and tablet users, leaving the entire mobile market untapped. Schools that have not yet expanded their paid search campaigns to mobile should definitely look to do so in 2012.

5) Thorough Brand Monitoring

The increased focus on paid search moving into 2012 will require brand monitoring on search engines to be even stricter. Most search engines place no restrictions on the use of brand-related keywords, allowing competitors and affiliates to bid on other brand terms, driving up the CPC for those valuable keywords. In one example, after detecting and cleaning up brand violations, a school saw an 87% decrease in average CPCs on their brand terms. Although search engines may have established procedures for filing complaints, they don’t proactively monitor brand usage, leaving the responsibility of actually monitoring for inappropriate bidding and improper use of brand terms in ad copy up to the brand itself. Schools must take an active role in protecting their brand through policing for brand violations, and then enforcing a reach out policy to handle detected violations. The use of brand monitoring tools will grow in 2012 as more schools take a more proactive approach to protecting their brand across the paid search landscape.

There’s no doubt that call centers are one of the biggest areas of regulatory concern for schools and their third-party vendors, particularly when it comes to complying with the Department of Education’s misrepresentation rule.  And there is good reason for the concern – phone calls are, by their very nature, unstructured and even the most extensive scripts cannot account for every question that might arise during a conversation with a prospective student.

Considering that, it’s not surprising that a growing number of schools refuse to accept inquiries from third-party call center affiliates (~16%,  up from ~12% in 2010 based on CUnet client data). Furthermore, many clients who still accept third-party call center inquiries are scaling back the budget they allocate. These decreased budgets are largely tied to concerns about quality assurance and representation, regardless of conversion rates.

While this concern is understandable, it’s important to realize that with the right processes in place, schools do not need to eliminate their reliance on call centers completely. In fact, call centers can remain an important source of highly qualified inquiries, assuming they are following a number of best practices.

This message was reinforced in the recent document published by the APSCU Student Recruitment Task Force which provides guidance on the Misrepresentation Rule. Their suggestions include requiring third-party call center affiliates to only use school-approved scripts and regularly monitor call recordings. An optional step above that involves “live monitoring” calls so ensure agents are following scripts and not giving customers misleading information.

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The rapidly growing mobile market offers a great platform for schools to extend their brand message and engage prospective students. So, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing a huge growth in  mobile marketing campaigns in higher education.

What is surprising is how many of these campaigns are not correctly targeted or well optimized for a huge portion of the mobile market. In this post, I’ll explore one of the most influential mobile channels (Google Mobile Pay Per Click) and provide some tips on how to ensure your mobile campaign is reaching it.

Why Do Different Phones Display Different Search Results?

Many online marketers have no idea that a parallel universe exists of the web called the mobile web (or if they do, they may be unsure what to do with it). Understanding this is the first step in ensuring that your mobile PPC campaigns reach all mobile users.

In order to ensure mobile users reach the best/most helpful search results from their mobile device, Google has a dedicated index of mobile-compatible websites (a.k.a. the mobile web). These sites are indexed separately from the standard Google search index, and are served up in search results from feature phones (in paid ads, these sites get a cool mobile icon next to them like the one below).

In other words, doing a Google search query from a feature phone will serve up mobile web results; doing the same search on a smart phone or desktop will serve up results from the standard Google index, resulting in a different set of both organic and paid search results.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• If you have a smart phone (full HTML mobile browser), your organic search results will be similar to desktop, but the paid search results may be different (only ads that are set up to target smart phones will appear).
• For Feature Phones (phones with a WAP browser), both organic search results and paid search results will be different than those on a desktop/smart phone. To reach feature phones with a paid search, a dedicated campaign is required (paid search campaigns that only target mobile WAP devices do not overlap with regular online paid search campaigns).

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Earlier this year, the team at CUnet passed a pretty impressive milestone which we think deserves some public recognition. So, today, we’re excited to share that CUnet is now a Google Analytics Certified Partner, thanks to the hard work and dedication shown by our account teams (CUnet previously achieved the Google AdWords Certified Partner (GCP) status in 2009).

This company-level accreditation is one of the highest certifications available from Google, awarded to firms that meet a rigorous set of requirements and show a organizational commitment to optimizing their clients use of web analytics (in other words, you have to be pretty darn good at it).

In order to earn Google Analytics certification, our team had to demonstrate an in-depth understanding of web analytics through a series of exams and referencable case studies. These case study projects represented work that displayed an ability to go beyond simple, standard implementations projects, resulted in an exceptional degree of impact to the client, and indicated a high degree of understanding of web analysis.

At CUnet, we’re constantly working on ways to ensure our clients’ online marketing campaigns and websites are optimized and producing the best possible results. To do this, a deep knowledge of web analytics is required; this certification shows the extent of that knowledge among our analytics team, as well as a level of dedication, commitment and expertise that CUnet brings to our clients.

Huge congratulations go out to all the team members who worked so hard to earn this achievement!

Yesterday, National Louis University announced they are running a Groupon “deal of the day” coupon offering a 60-percent discount on tuition for a grad-level course. This interesting approach has, at the very least, garnered a great deal of “buzz” for the school, with over 100 articles to date, in a wide range of publications (not to mention a lot of activity on Twitter and other social media sites).

As the first offer of its kind, the school took on a number of risks by testing out this marketing strategy. I suspect in the coming days, we’ll hear the usual suspects share in their criticism over how this is another sign that the for-profit sector is turning education into a commodity, and how it illustrates that for-profits are willing to stoop to any level to recruit new students.

But when you read the fine print, it actually appears that the opposite may be true. In fact, the Groupon deal offers a discount on an “Introduction to the Profession and the Craft of Teaching” course that was designed specifically for Groupon, to “guide you through making the right decision about whether this vitally important profession is for you.” Upon completion, the course credit can be applied to a Masters in Education degree at the University, but no further commitment is required.

This may actually be a really effective way for prospective students to ensure they are a good fit for both the school and the course material, without the financial and other personal commitments a full degree requires. And by using Groupon to promote the deal, I suspect the University reached a much broader audience than they could with through other, more traditional channels.

Many schools struggle with retention concerns; one of the biggest challenges is finding ways to better screen for students that are prepared to take on the demands of a program before they begin. Maybe National Louis University is on to something here by offering a highly-discounted opportunity for students to “test the waters before taking the plunge”.

Results of the survey were announced today at LeadsCon, following an online survey of 293 marketing professionals in higher education.  Highlights of the survey include:

- 65% of for-profit marketers identified the Department of Education regulations as a significant or major concern, with nearly all schools reporting one or more plans for change in response to the regulations, ranging from demanding transparency from third-party affiliates to increasing academic standards

- 63% of schools are planning to increase their social marketing spend

- For-profit higher education marketers are reporting success with certain phone inquiry solutions, including hot transfer phone call solutions – more than half are planning to increase their spending

We will  be releasing a full report of the survey in mid-March.  LeadCouncil members can access it at www.leadscouncil.com.  Non-council members can register at blog.cunet.com/2011SurveyReport to receive a copy.

Catchy headline, huh? Well, it’s not mine. It actually graces a delightful manifesto published by Faris Yakob, chief innovation officer at MDC Partners and the former chief technology strategist at McCann Erickson New York.

In his blog post, Faris presents two reasons that relying on self-reported information is at best inaccurate and, at worst, a complete waste of money.

The first is that we don’t know why we do what we do. According to him, most of our decisions are made at a subconscious level, making our explanations of those decisions no more accurate a depiction of our decision-making process than the shadows dancing on the wall in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave are an accurate depiction of reality.

The second reason is that “the gulf between claimed attitudes [and intentions] and actual behavior is vast.” Here, Faris particularly calls out focus groups as providing poor data by creating “utterly artificial data as a response to utterly artificial situations and social dynamics.” I don’t think any movie fans would be surprised by this. It’s no scientific measure, but if you consider the movies that have had their endings changed because of a focus group’s suggestions, and how well they were received, you can see this principal at work (points to Deep Blue Sea, though, which is my go-to film whenever I need background noise while working).

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