A Rant on Inefficiency
Do you have an annual marketing strategy? How about one covering just the next six months? If you can’t answer yes to either of these questions, then your office is probably not running as efficiently as it could be. But here’s the good news - this stuff is totally fixable, if you just spend some time strategically planning and ad in a bit of empowerment for the people you work with.
Cyclical Process: Our industry is nothing if not predictable - the calendar year doesn’t change, and unique situations aside, our audiences behave pretty much the same year after year. If you can’t plan an annual roadmap, then you just aren’t trying. Go month-by-month - look at what you’ve done over the last three years and consider whether or not that tactic was effective. If you’re doing the same basic thing, year after year, and consider if effective, isn’t it a pretty good bet that you’d want to do pretty much the same thing again? Good. Mark it on your calendar for next year, along with a few notes on how its executed and you won’t be scrambling when it comes up again.
Lack of planning - I’ve written several times about a tactical organization versus a strategic one but it’s a point that’s worth hitting on again - if you’re planning everything on the fly and don’t have an overarching strategy guiding you, then you are setting your organization up to be inefficient. Doing things on the fly leads to constant changes being made, and every single one of those changes takes time. After a while, that time adds up. Having a plan from the start would have negated all that extra effort.
Come up with a strategy and tactics…and stick with them! Even worse than a lack of planning is having a set strategy, which is abandonned at the last minute in favor of hastily put together plan. Have you ever been in a situation were you come up with a plan, everyone agrees on it and does work towards it and then at the last minute, a decision maker freaks out and you have to throw the whole thing out? What a waste. The original strategy probably took some time to develop, since everything in higher ed takes lots of meetings and politicing to get a group of people to agree on anything. And if you got a group of people to agree, than the original strategy probably had some sort of reasoning behind it (I’m going out on a limb here…). And then WOOSH! It all gets blown away in a hurricane of undisciplined managers who refuse to give a carefully thought out plan a chance to work! Not only is this bad for business (replacing a carefully thought-out plan with a hastily put together one), but it’s bad for morale - you’ve just told a group of employees that you don’t value their time or effort. So show some discipline - this is higher education and it’s not the end of the work if a particular tactic doesn’t work! If anything, it’ll give you an opportunity to learn something about your audience and do it better next time.
Lack of Trust - For me, lack of trust is really the biggest issue of them all, since it’s a lack of trust that led to higher ed being the land of rule by committee in the first place! When people aren’t trusted, they aren’t empowered (regardless of their qualifications). When no employee is empowered to make decisions within their area of expertise, then a group meeting is always necessary…on everything….big or small. When you spend your days organizing meetings, no matter how short, to discuss things like whether a link in an email should start with a noun or a verb or whether a phone number should be listed before or after an email address, you’ve gone round the bend. These things add up after a while. It’s a complete waste of money, and would not be necessary if people were trusted to do their jobs in the first place.
If you could do one thing to increase efficiency in your office today, what would it be? Leave a comment!
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March 17th, 2009
Having a marketing plan in place makes it much easier to see how to adjust the overall plan (be it adjustments in content or timing) to accommodate tweaks, experimentation, address unforeseen circumstances, etc., on the fly. These should be exceptions rather than the norm, of course.
Thoughts on improvements should be incorporated into the plan (annually) before it is executed, but having the ability to be nimble in adjustments based on market conditions (this cycle being a great example) can make the difference between a successful year and layoffs, wage freezes, etc.
If you repeat the previous year’s marketing plan, you typically get similar results. A consultant may use that concept negatively, but predictability is extremely useful if you are already experiencing success. (Or, conversely, if you are NOT experiencing success and need a basis from which to make adjustments.) Changes and adjustments should be intentional (i.e. thought out) rather than jumping on the latest fad.
One element of a good boss is one that acknowledges that adding something in or changing something from the previous year does create work both in new content development and, sometimes more difficult, for making some adjustments to the timing of the overall plan.
I’d also add that a marketing plan is useful for inter-office relations at many higher ed institutions depending on who develops printed projects, electronic projects, etc. As an example, admissions might have a marketing plan where work within that plan is executed by a graphic arts office, a Web office, etc.
In this scenario, even if admissions doesn’t share (?) their actual marketing plan spreadsheet of projects in advance with these other offices, consistency in timing for projects each year adds some predictability for these other offices.
One final comment. With a marketing plan in place, you can realize cost savings. As an example, postcards can often be printed less expensively when a few projects are printed together, for instance. An entire year of postcards could be printed at once, since models can predict quantity needs.
The downside is the need to hedge bets and order more than you know you will need for certain. That can kill some trees. If you are an environmental school and find this to be a particular concern, use the saved money to sign-on to a logo’d resource management plan that you can add to print pieces, to plant trees to offset usage, etc. or something else that can be used for environmental benefits and for further marketing.
March 17th, 2009
This was probably an assumed step in your plan, but as it is dangerous to assume anything about higher ed, we should probably note that goal-setting has to precede strategic planning.
For instance, if you want to increase out-of-state enrollment, then naturally, most of your money should be spent in those target markets and you should have a different communications strategy for reaching those students.
In addition, from the outset, define those metrics that will be used to judge the efficacy of the strategy as well as checkpoints where the results will be analyzed and the strategy tweaked along the way.
By defining the success metrics before even launching the strategy, you can be sure you are honestly judging the success of your marketing efforts.
March 17th, 2009
Ha….this sounds an awful lot like the marketing framework i’m putting together for my CASE presentations, based off the one i did at Stamats….i swear, sometimes you and i share a brain
March 18th, 2009
That’s a dangerous thought!
March 20th, 2009
I don’t agree with your assumption that lack of trust is what drives committees. I think it’s a desire to be inclusive and hear all views. Within that structure, sure, power dynamics come into play. But trust is earned through team participation. Higher ed doesn’t, won’t, and probably shouldn’t support the heroic mode. There’s enough of that in capitalism.
Personally I like it when people can discuss the impact variance of starting a sentence with a noun or a verb, but I like nuance. Wish I’d been there.
March 22nd, 2009
I think one thing that would increase efficiency at my college is education. I know that sounds crazy. In many cases, those in marketing, senior leadership and other areas of campus were educated on development process, capabilities of technology, trends, and ways to improve marketing efforts (i.e. using analytics to track the success of offline and online campaigns). I see this education leading to increased efficiency.
March 22nd, 2009
Hi Mike,
Actually I think you bring up a really great point - what I see a lot of times is people put in charge of marketing efforts who have never been formally trained in marketing! I think I touched on this in my presentation at Stamats, but there are a lot of people who consider themselves marketers, but couldn’t tell you the different between marketing and communications if they had to. It creates a lot of problems and a lot of short-sighted mistakes.