Introducing the Office of Marketing and Communication
If you were unable to attend the fall All College Meeting, then here’s one small part of the program that you missed:
Public Relations Is Now Marketing and Communication.
Prefer to just read the presentation instead of watching it? That’s fine, too. Here’s a transcript:
The Office of Public Relations became the Office of Marketing and Communication over the summer. This new moniker more accurately reflects the unit’s purpose, and putting the word “marketing” out front also signals its priority above all of the other work that we do, and we do a lot of other work. When I say we, I’m talking about just four people. They are:
Ryan Herman and Sarah Gerass, public relations assistants…
Matt Gagliardi, web marketing specialist…
And me.
A couple years ago, Middle States reaccreditation required offices to articulate their missions.
Our office landed on the idea of increasing strategically valuable stakeholders’ awareness of, engagement with, and affinity for SUNY Niagara. This is our unique value-add, and it leans into an institutional imperative: revenue generation.
Over the last several weeks, a collective has come together to look holistically at what brings students here.
Academic Affairs develops programs to bring to market. Admissions engages prospective students. Institutional Effectiveness finds useful patterns in consumer data. OIT smooths technical wrinkles. Integrating these activities fuels marketing.
One of Marketing and Communication’s key contributions is advertising. I’m going to spend the next few minutes summarizing the four digital advertising campaigns we’ve run over the summer.
The Adult Learner Campaign supports SUNY Reconnect, the program enticing 25-to-55-year-olds to go to New York’s community colleges.
The Enrolla Campaign prompts users to take a survey that matches their interests to academic programs that SUNY Niagara offers.
The humanskills.ai Campaign promotes artificial intelligence courses from the company that the college has been working with on AI.
And the General Enrollment Campaign targets the college’s apex audience: recent high school grads.
Combined, these campaigns required about 150 advertisements — more ads that the college placed across all media in 2023. In fact, the college had never run four concurrent ad campaigns before this summer.
The office placed these ads on social media platforms like Snapchat and display networks like Google. We targeted specific consumers based on demography, geography and behavioral intent.
A footnote here is that since most college employees are not good candidates for most of what the college sells, you probably won’t see many digital ads for SUNY Niagara. However, others do.
From May 21 when the first campaign began, through Aug. 12, when I collected the data for this talk, our digital campaigns generated 8.7 million ad impressions — that’s the number of times our ads were seen.
People responded to our ads, for example by clicking through to the college website, over 150,000 times.
Our campaigns’ landing pages were the Nos. 2, 4, 5 and 7 most visited webpages. For reference, No. 1 was the homepage, No. 3 was the Banner log in, and No. 6 was the library homepage, all of which are heavily trafficked by internal users.
Collectively, our campaigns drove 24% of all website sessions.
From mid-May through mid-August, the “Apply” page was viewed just shy of 70,000 times. By comparison, during the same period last year, it was viewed about 16,000 times.
Digital campaigns brought people to the college’s front door for revenue generation this summer nearly four times as often as they’d arrived there last summer.
It’s been pretty busy, but we’re looking ahead, too. I’ll finish by mentioning two initiatives ramping up this fall.
First, we have a new photo library called Smugmug that employees will be able to access. It has a search function, so you won’t have to sift through folders to find pictures.
Next, we’ve begun implementing Merit. This tool syndicates student achievement-related content to the students themselves, students’ parents, the school districts that students graduated from, elected officials from legislative districts where students live, media outlets and social media.
Merit is another vehicle to give SUNY Niagara greater presence among strategically valuable stakeholders.
And that brings me right up to the edge of my five minutes.
I hope this glimpse into the office’s last three months and the preview of a couple things in the hopper right now gives you an idea of what Marketing and Communication does and the impact it has on SUNY Niagara.
Thanks again.