The Most Overused Terms in College Marketing
Over the years, I’ve seen numerous lists of words overused in press releases or other marketing materials. Today, I’ve come up with my own list of terms I see overused in college recruitment marketing brochures, advertisements, and websites.
If you really want to set your school apart from others, avoid using these words and phrases that others use.
- Small class sizes (most overused!)
- Hands-on (often used in phrases like hands-on research, hands-on experience, hands-on education)
- State-of-the art
- Cutting-edge
- Unique
- Innovative
- Personal attention (also personalized attention)
- Rigorous academics
- Award-winning (usually pertains to faculty or the overall university)
- Conveniently located
- Quality education
In most cases, adjusting the copy slightly can help you avoid these overused terms.
Give concrete examples of the “hands-on” work students do in a laboratory or classroom. Tell me what supercomputer or specific top-of-the-line microscope you have instead of telling me you have “state-of-the-art” facilities or labs. Provide examples, quotes, or anecdotes that show experiences that differentiate your college’s offerings from other colleges, rather than just calling your services or offerings “unique.”
Additionally, if you’re looking for words to replace these overused ones, check out Rhyme Zone, an excellent free online thesaurus that provides not only synonyms, but also related words. Even if you don’t use any of the words they suggest, it may help you brainstorm and provide the creative inspiration you need.
How do you avoid using overused terms in your marketing materials? Leave a comment on this post or tweet me @DanasCreative on Twitter.
Image credit: Created courtesy of Wordle.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics. Twitter: @DanasCreative
College Marketing: Finding a Voice That Speaks to Today’s Teens
Before a recent campus visit at a small liberal arts college campus for a copywriting project, a colleague of mine and I discussed how to find the right voice to speak to prospective students in high school.
She confided in me that she recently went to a local bookstore and picked up stacks of magazines, including Seventeen for girls and, for lack of a better option, a skateboarding magazine for boys. In the past, I had done a similar thing: looking to magazines that targeted at teens to discover catchphrases and study the tone of voice used.
When we met with a group of current college students—mainly freshmen and sophomores—of the campus, our eyes were opened when we asked them what magazines they read.
“Magazines?” they said. “I don’t really read magazines. But I do go to a lot of websites.”
Of course this would be their answer. These students are part of the new crop of Generation Z students: the digital natives. Their answer reminded me that those magazines targeting teens are written by “old folks” like me, too, who are trying to be the voice students want to read.
So how do you capture a voice that high school students want to hear? Read what teens are reading. Go to websites where teens go. And find content written for teens, by teens.
According to Niche, Inc., which had high school students in the Class of 2014 rank the websites they use most often, a few of the most popular websites among teens are:
Other studies show video-sharing site Vine and photo-sharing site Flickr increasing in usage among teens.
If you’re not familiar with these sites, check them out. You may learn something about the teenage audience and their interests—and you can then adjust the voice and style of your copy to better speak to them. It also could inform your decisions on where to spend your online marketing dollars.
Image credit: Courtesy of imagerymajestic/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics. Twitter: @DanasCreative
Importance of Packaging for College Recruitment Materials
College and university marketers can take a lesson from Newegg.com in how to package their recruitment and admissions materials.
Just look at the packaging on a recent item my husband received from Newegg.com:
In case you can’t read it, the package says: “May contain awesome. Take it from a geek.”
Newegg.com knows its customers—and the packaging shows it. Because of these eight words printed on the box, it creates even more excitement for the person receiving the package to open it.
How much excitement do the envelopes that enclose your recruitment marketing materials create? If your envelopes simply have your university’s logo and return address, I’m guessing not much. That level of excitement—or lack thereof—may impact the reach of your materials. We all know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but we all do.
How does your packaging show you know your audience? As shown in the Newegg.com example, a little copy, plus a little design can go a long way. It can show (rather than tell) your prospects (and/or their parents) that you understand them. And it may set your materials apart from the piles of materials they’re getting from other colleges.
Distinguishing yourself from the others via your packaging can mean the difference between your piece being tossed in a recycling bin or being opened.
Does your university use a creative packaging to deliver your materials to prospective students? Please leave a comment or tweet @DanasCreative on Twitter. I’d love to see the creative ways you’re packaging recruitment marketing materials.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics. Twitter: @DanasCreative
College Marketing: New Insights on Student and Parent Digital Communication Expectations
Have you seen the latest Noel-Levitz E-Expectations survey results? The results were very insightful. Here are three findings that surprised (and pleased) me:
1. Nearly all high school seniors and their parents will open an e-mail from a campus they are considering. As a former college recruitment marketing professional, I often wondered if the e-mails we carefully and strategically crafted each year had an impact. It appears students and parents do at least look at the e-mails, as long as the student is already considering your school.
This is good news and validates all the time and attention spent on crafting these e-mails. And it reinforces the importance of e-mail communication with students and parents who have not only inquired, but also who have applied and been accepted to your college.
2. Nearly 40 percent of high school seniors use Twitter. Just a couple of years ago, I heard much debate on college campuses on whether it was time for the recruitment offices to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. At the time, only a small number of teenagers were on Twitter, and at smaller colleges (with smaller communication and marketing staffs) they wanted to make sure they put their resources where they would reach the most potential students.
This new stat means that if your college isn’t on Twitter, now’s the time to jump in. And if the recruitment and admissions team isn’t involved in your college’s social media, now’s the time to get them into the fold.
3. More than half of students and parents are willing to receive text messages from campuses. As smartphones have become commonplace (90 percent of high school seniors and 80 percent of parents have access to a mobile device, according to the survey), it seems students and parents are becoming more receptive to receiving communication from colleges on their personal mobile devices.
This finding is contrary to a commonly held notion that teens think of their device as “their space” and don’t want colleges or marketers to infringe on that space by texting them. It appears texting is becoming a more widely accepted method for colleges to communicate with students. If your marketing team hasn’t yet considered incorporating texting as part of your recruitment communication flow, now may be the time to start exploring it.
Did anything surprise you in the Noel-Levitz survey? Leave a reply here or message me on Twitter @DanasCreative.
Image credit: Kromkrathog/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
Amazing Faculty Work and Personal Stories Create Impactful University Magazine Articles
When I was asked to write a couple of articles for the summer edition of Mount Mary Magazine, the magazine issue theme intrigued me: raising women’s voices. For the articles, I had the opportunity to speak with several Mount Mary University faculty about the work they and their students do to help give women a voice and to strengthen women’s voices in the community and the world.
What I found were amazing faculty! The faculty members had very personal stories that impacted the professional work they do, and the women that they teach.
- Dr. Kristen Roche, the MBA program director, witnessed early in her business career how gender may impact job titles given to employees with the same experience. She now is passionate about helping students learn to negotiate in the workplace for better pay, benefits, and jobs.
- Rachel Monaco-Wilcox, chair of the justice program, became a lawyer after being frustrated about the lack of help available for certain populations. Recently, she founded a free legal clinic, Legal Options for Trafficked and Underserved Survivors (LOTUS), to help human trafficking victims and other survivors of crime. She’s also revolutionizing justice education by focusing Mount Mary’s program on a survivor-informed perspective of justice.
- Dr. Jennifer Peterson, assistant professor of communication, discovered how misconceptions about AIDS and HIV impacted women and their voices during a research project in grad school. As a professor today, she teaches her students, particularly students studying health communication, to find a cause they are passionate about, as well as to ensure all people’s voices are present in conversations about health topics.
- Dr. Bruce Moon, chair of the Art Therapy Department, overcame his turbulent teenage years by engaging in art. He’s spent his career helping others cope with their feelings and life struggles through art therapy.
- Dr. Lynn Kapitan, director of the Professional Doctorate in Art Therapy program, began her career as a public school art teacher and ultimately become an art therapist. She travels to Nicaragua each year for community-based art therapy research, which helps women survivors of domestic abuse participate in projects to develop their voices and leadership skills.
To read more about these amazing professors’ stories and work, see my articles on pages 3 through 9 of the Mount Mary Magazine Summer 2014 edition.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics. Twitter: @DanasCreative
Editor’s Perspective: The Right Way to Treat Titles
Recently, a client asked for my advice on how to treat book, journal, and article titles in her organization’s communications materials. The question came after some debate within her organization on whether certain titles should be in quotation marks or italicized, and how that formatting would reflect on the organization’s competence and brand.
So what is the right away to format book titles? Well, a post from Writer’s Digest (yes, I did just put that magazine title in italics), has the right answer: it’s up to you, but you (and others at your organization) need to stick with whatever format you choose.
For example, the AP Stylebook encourages using quotation marks for book titles. The Chicago Manual of Style recommends italicizing titles of books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, plays, movies, and TV programs. It also suggests using quotation marks around titles of articles, poems, songs, and TV episodes.
In my experience working with magazine and book publishing companies and university communication and marketing offices, most organizations use the Chicago Manual of Style way for titles, even if they normally adhere to AP style. In fact, all five universities featured in my recent post on editorial style guide examples follow this approach.
It’s okay to have exceptions like these in your editorial style guide. That’s why it’s important to have an editorial style guide specifically tailored for your university or company and the unique editorial situations you encounter.
Overall, what matters more than being right is consistently using the same style (and exceptions) in all of your external and internal communication pieces (website, magazine, brochures, e-mail blasts, etc.). And, if the exceptions are in a written style guide, it helps to have that guide to show anyone who questions your editorial style decisions.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
College Marketing: Why Maintaining Social Media Takes Time
Time to regularly create and maintain websites, blogs, and social media content is a big concern to many of my clients, particularly colleges and universities. Many colleges and universities are hiring full-time social media managers to handle all of this content, while others continue to add on this responsibility to one (or more) staff members’ job descriptions.
In my experience, some top administrators (you know, the ones who set budgets and make hiring decisions) don’t fully understand the thought, time, effort, strategy, and tracking involved in managing these “free” tools. It’s not always as simple as spending 15 minutes a day creating posts. (Just check out this Business Insider post that shows how a single corporate tweet can take more than a month to create.)
So, why does maintaining social media take so much time?
1. It requires lots of content. The person who manages your social media has to have her pulse on anything and everything happening at the university. To do that, she needs to network with students, faculty, and staff across the entire campus. She needs to coordinate photography of events or happenings to feature on social media. And if new stories, blogs, event listings, or other fresh content aren’t already regularly posted on your website, your social media manager may have to interview sources and write this content herself.
2. It requires a strategy. Some people may advise you to just jump right in and get started with social media without a strategy or plan. But before you spend your time on this, consider these questions: Does the social media tool you want to use really reach your target audience? What is your goal in using a particular social media tool? How are you going to measure success? What type of content are you going to post? Who is going to develop that content and how will that impact their other job responsibilities?
3. It requires constant attention. One of the goals of using social media is to engage your audience. Some of the best, most meaningful interactions you can have with your target audience on social media will be impromptu interactions. Constituents who post questions on your Facebook or Twitter page expect an answer right now.
Your social media manager not only needs to develop fresh content, she needs to interact with your audience members who are trying to engage with your organization. This means she needs to respond to posts, and sometimes she may have to research answers to questions your audience asks.
4. It requires writing and scheduling. Keeping social media posts fresh involves lots of planning. The social media manager needs to strategically decide when items will be posted. For example, you wouldn’t want the post about tonight’s upcoming soccer game to go up tomorrow, would you? The social media manager also needs to write the actual social media posts, confirm the URLs she plans to link to actually work, and convert any images to web-ready formats.
Using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite can help streamline scheduling, but have you tried writing something in less than 140 characters? It’s not always easy. It takes times if you want quality content in the appropriate voice to support your university’s brand.
5. It requires reviewing others’ social media posts. Part of maintaining social media is finding ways to engage with your followers and the people you follow. To engage with your target audience, your social media manager needs to monitor mentions of your organization or hashtags relevant to your mission or initiatives. Once she finds a relevant mention, the social media manager needs to decide which items to share, retweet, or respond to—and then actually do the sharing, retweeting, or responding.
6. It requires tracking to measure success. If you’re doing social media, but aren’t tracking your impact or results, you might be wasting your time. Your social media manager needs to take time to analyze social media analytics, so she can make better decisions about the content to post in the future. After analyzing the data, she can create reports to let the administration know whether all the time spent on a particular social media platform is worth it.
7. The technology is always changing. Twitter and Facebook aren’t the same as they were when they first launched years ago. Social media platforms are always evolving their functionality and design. New social media platforms are launching. Your social media manager needs to keep up-to-date and react to the changes in the technology and tools available.
Of course, there are social media management tools out there that can help automate the process. But many of them cost money, and it takes time to research and learn how to use the best existing tools (and emerging tools) that meet your university’s needs. And, no matter how automated the posting, tracking, and monitoring gets, someone still needs to generate the initial content, review the tracking reports, review the mentions, and then make decisions on what (and where) to post tomorrow.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
College Marketing: 5 Editorial Style Guides to Model Yours After
A couple of weeks ago, Dana’s Creative Services shared information about why having an editorial style guide is important. It’s not just large universities that have editorial style guides—colleges of all sizes have style guides to ensure their communications and marketing pieces have a consistent style and voice to support their brand.
Today, I’ve found five examples of college and university style guides that you can use as an example when creating your own style guide. If your university doesn’t have editorial style guidelines (or if you’re hoping to update your university’s guidelines), you can use these as inspiration.
1. Iowa State University. This university’s editorial style guide is part of its overall visual identity system that supports its brand. The guide addresses items like acceptable abbreviations to use, how to capitalize academic and administrative titles, formal names for departments, words to avoid using, and capitalization rules.
2. Saint Leo University. Because of this university’s multiple centers across the country, it’s important its staff at all locations adhere to a consistent style to support the university brand. This comprehensive style guide addresses standard descriptions of commonly used terms; key university messages; punctuation; official terminology for university buildings, landmarks, and center locations; and commonly used acronyms.
3. University of Missouri. This university established its writing and editing guidelines to help “ensure clarity and cohesion while reinforcing Mizzou’s distinctive identity.” The editorial style guide include an A-Z list of common terms and word usage (such as adviser, not advisor), info on how to write good captions and headlines, and tips for finding facts about the university, interviewing sources, and fact checking articles.
4. Beloit College. This Wisconsin college’s style guide covers commonly used terms, names and descriptions of campus facilities, how to list alumni graduation dates, and more.
5. Swarthmore College. This Pennsylvania college’s style guide includes guidelines on everything from academic degrees and student organization names to punctuation usage and class note style.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
College Marketing: How Does Your College’s Online Presence Compare?
On average, it costs colleges and universities $1,641 (not including admissions staff salaries and benefits) to recruit a student through enrollment, according to the recent 2013 State of College Admission report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC).
In the same report, colleges ranked the university’s website as one of the top three most important aspects in their new student recruitment strategy. Even though websites (and even other online tools such as blogs and social media) are considered important, not all colleges and universities are using them to their fullest potential.
So how does your school’s online presence compare to other colleges and universities? Let’s check out some more stats from the NACAC 2013 State of College Admission report to see how your online presence stacks up.
1. Content for parents and guidance counselors. We know it’s ultimately the student’s decision where to go to college, but parents and high school guidance counselors (particularly at private schools) are big influencers (whether the students admit it or not). However, only 85 percent of colleges and universities reported offering information on their website tailored to parents of prospective students and only 68 percent said they offer information for high school counselors.
Does your website have information for parents? How about for high school counselors? If you’re in the minority here, you may want to consider adding content directed at those important influencers.
2. Contact methods. Does your website prominently display the school’s phone number as a way to contact the college? If so, you’re not aligning your methods of contact with the ways students and parents prefer to contact schools.
According to the 2013 State of College Admission report, e-mail/Internet is the most popular way for students to contact colleges, with 40 percent of all admission inquiries being received via e-mail or the Internet. Of all the methods used to contact schools (college fairs, high school visits, written sources), phone calls were the least popular method for contacting colleges. So, make sure the admission office’s e-mail address or an online contact form is displayed prominently on your site.
3. Social media tools. The report found that 96 percent of schools provide links to their social networking sites, and an increasing number (52 percent) have blogs by current students. Some colleges even have blogs by admission officers and offer podcasts. What’s your social media presence like? Are you in the 4 percent that doesn’t link to your social media sites? Is anyone from your college blogging?
The report didn’t go into specific social media platforms used by colleges and universities, but many news outlets have covered how the social media tools used by teens are changing. Some studies show teens are moving away from Facebook, and moving toward other social media tools like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. In fact, a recent survey shows that Twitter is now more popular with teens than Facebook. Is your school in the online places where your target audience is spending time?
4. Visibility of online application. How easy is it to find (and fill out) your online application? In our technology-driven world and with the change from targeting Millenials to Generation Z (aka “digital natives”), online applications are becoming increasingly important. According to the 2013 State of College Admission report, for the Fall 2012 admission cycle, four-year colleges and universities receive 89 percent of their applications online, an increase from the previous two admission cycles.
If a link to your online application isn’t prominently located on your college website, now’s the time to make a change.
Hopefully these insights from the 2013 State of College Admission report will help you as you evaluate the state of your current online presence, maintain your college website, and determine where to put your resources (particularly valuable staff time).
Image credit: Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
College Marketing: How to Make a Case for Increasing Your Marketing Budget
Budgets. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. Most higher education marketing professionals lament about limited marketing budgets, but somehow university magazines still need to be printed and mailed, marketing brochures still need to get produced, websites need updating or redesigning, and ads still need to be placed across multiple media platforms.
What’s a marketing professional to do to get more money in the budget? Here’s the approach I took at a university I previously worked for to get more advertising and marketing dollars for recruitment marketing. The approach took time, but it was well worth it when the extra dollars showed up on the budget lines.
Step 1: Save. No, we don’t necessarily mean save money. Save information you receive on places where you’d like to advertise or types of marketing materials you’d like to create. The information will come in handy in Steps 4 and 5.
Step 2: Track. Tracking results of marketing campaigns can sometimes be challenging, especially for small or understaffed communications and marketing departments, but track as much impact as you can. Use whatever data are available—event attendance; enrollment inquiries, applications, and deposits; donation increases; email opens and/or click throughs; web analytics; and more.
Step 3: Analyze. Using the tracking data, look critically at the current places you’re spending money and then ask these questions:
- Do the things you spend money on have an impact?
- Is the impact worth the cost?
- Could you get a bigger impact by adjusting your approach or redirecting the money for a different use?
Also, look at costs for producing existing marketing pieces—consider graphic design, printing, and mailing costs. Ask these questions:
- Can any printing projects be combined to save costs?
- Could you adjust marketing piece sizes to reduce mailing and/or printing costs?
- Could you create a template for certain recurring materials so future design costs are reduced?
Step 4: Plan. Take out the information you saved in Step 1 and use that with the information gained during Step 3 to determine which marketing opportunities (current and new) make the most sense for your institution and your goals. Use Excel to create a “wish list” of opportunities you want to pursue and their annual estimated costs. Be sure to include costs for marketing projects you do every year. For advertisements, remember to include the placement and the ad design and copywriting costs. For any printed materials, don’t forget to include estimated writing, editing, design, printing, and mailing costs.
Step 5: Show the numbers. Once you’ve got your “wish list” completed, use a little Excel magic to automatically add the annual totals. Then, compare it to what your current budget is. If it’s more than your current budget (hey, we can all dream!), can you make a strong case for those costs? What benefit will they provide the university? How will it increase brand awareness, impact recruitment, or increase donations?
If you can justify all the expenses on your wish list, you’re ready to present your budget plan to the administration. Start with your direct supervisor, make any adjustments as necessary, and then meet with a VP or decision maker about the budget in your department. Make sure you present the plan at the appropriate time of year (for example, before budgets are set for the following year, not right after).
Worst-case scenario is the administration will say no to a budget increase, but in the best-case scenario, your detailed plan will show them exactly what they’re going to get for their money and may increase the likelihood they’ll find some extra money to add to your budget. Happy budget planning!
Image credit: digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
Dana's Creative Services, Dana McCullough, Freelance Writer and Editor 