So you need to create a marketing plan...

I had a great phone call with Nick from Campbell University today. What originally started out as a reference check for an email provider that he uses (and that I'm thinking about going with) turned into an hour long chat about the struggles of being the resident interactive marketing person in admissions. One of the things we talked about was his struggle in creating a marketing plan, which is not an uncommon problem at all. I've seen it happen a lot when people kind of randomly land in admissions jobs (or in this case, a "e-admissions" job) and maybe they haven't had experience in marketing before. If you find yourself in this position, here are my tips:

There is no "right way": The largest hurdle seems to be that they get wrapped up in what a marketing plan should look like. Let me be clear: There is NO one-size-fits-all approach for creating a marketing plan! This is primarily a document to help you so your workflow and style needs to be an integral part of it if you want it to be valuable.

Get a 40,000 foot view: What I mean by that is that it's important that your interactive plan is integrated with everything else that is going on in your office. What worked for me was having a master calendar that I created in Visio:



If you're doing a lot of collaborative work, you might want to consider a web-based solution like Basecamp. Regardless of the specific program you use, it's just helpful to have a full view of a month at a time. I usually created my calendars in the summer (I considered the start of the interactive recruiting season to be September 1) and would start by inputting any important events or dates. From there, I would back out my schedule. For example, if there was an Open House on March 22, I would find out when the print invitations would be sent for that and then schedule the announcement email campaign to go a week after the print invites, and the followup email campaign to go a few weeks before the event. Here are some things that should be on your calendar:

• Major recruitment events such as open houses or specialty showcases
• Any specialty academic programs your college runs that could be targeted towards prospective students (i.e. academic summer camps)
• Major college fairs your recruiters are attending, with a geographically segmented email component
• Any regularly scheduled email newsletters you do for your prospects
• Any scheduled live chats
• Any type of triggered email
• Any type of special date-specific emails (like a holiday email that gives them the give of a waived application fee if they apply by the end of the year or a FAFSA reminder on January 2 that they can submit their financial aid)

This is the base of your marketing plan. Now, parts of this will be tricky because you're going to have to rely on others in your organization to give you information about their schedules if you want it truly integrated, and they are not always going to be inclined to do that. It's your job to illustrate to them the importance of making sure your interactive plan is fully integrated with traditional communications.

Continue to build out and refine: Now that you've got your base plan, you can continue to build off of it. For example:

• What emails are going to require segmentation? I always found it very worthwhile to segment emails by high school graduation year, even if the content wasn't different, do see how different audiences reacted to different messages easily.
• What are the landing pages you are going to push the students to and is there any correlating web work that needs to be accomplished? For major events, its very helpful to have the print invitations to make sure your online RSVP form matches with the print RSVP form.
• If you do email newsletters, what content will you need to go into those newsletters and is it something that you can get and setup in advance? If you need to coordinate the delivery of this content with other staff members, make it due at least a week ahead of when you ACTUALLY need it because they rarely will get it to you on the deadline you give them.

And so on, and so forth.

Do you have additional web-based features? I'm thinking things like a page on MySpace or Facebook or your own social network, a Flickr account, student blogs etc... You need to work these things into your email plan to keep them robust and effective. What can you do on your website or through email to promote them? For example, does an acceptance of an applicant trigger an email for them to join your homegrown social network? Do you have a link to your Facebook group at the end of every email newsletter? Do you have your student blogs linked throughout your school's website, particularly in places where the content is relevant (i.e. a biology major blogging is linked off of the biology website)? Ensure complete integration is the only way to get your best results.

Keep if flexible: I typically tried to do my plans a year out, but with the caveat that everything should always remain flexible. Your college might win some huge sporting event or something else that you just can't predict that might need to be built into the plan at a moments notice.

I hope some find this helpful. Since I don't work in admissions anymore, I don't feel like I have to hold on to any secrets for the sake of winning the competition for students ;-)