Andrew David Joseph Hall

Marketing

I developed my skills in Marketing working in the Marketing Department for International Banking at the Royal Bank of Scotland and, more recently, as MBA Program Director for the Framingham MBA Program.

The Challenge with the MBA Program was to attract enough, but not too many, well qualified candidates for the MBA on a small budget with little institutional support.

I managed advertising on Social Media, built the web-site and optimised it for web search, used paid clickwords and monitored performance of the advertising using "landing pages" and Google Analytics.

I can help design and implement a low cost on-line marketing strategy for your business.

Marketing The MBA

Framingham MBA

The Budget

The Marketing Budget for the MBA set out in the Proposal to the Board of Higher Education was $30,000 for 2007; $25,000 for 2008;and $20,000 for 2009 and 2010.

2007

Facebook Ad ImageIn 2007, $10,000 was spent on a single Billboard Advert for a month and printing an mailing the brochure for the MBA developed in 2007 was costly. A small web-site had been developed, using the brochure as the source of material for the pages, and a report commissioned on optimising the site for searches. Advertising was purchased on Boston.com and I recorded a 60 second radio ad which ran on a CBS affiliate in Boston for a week.

It soon became clear that the budget would not extend very far using these approaches, so we developed a "Stealth Marketing" plan.

Stealth Marketing

Since the program assumed students would be on Campus at least one night a week I did an analysis of enrollment in DGCE courses by town as a proportion of the town's population which I represented as a map.

Although some students come from as far away as Sandwich or Westfield, the majority come from towns closer to Framingham. See details...

Enrollment in DGCE Courses by Town

The analysis identified about 50 towns as the focus for our marketing.

The next step was to identify highly targetted vehicles for marketing. We looked at Bizo, Linked-in, MySpace, Facebook, and the Massachusetts Society for Chartered Public Accountants (MSCPA) web-site. Bizo looked attractive but made advert development too complex and therefore too expensive. We advertised on Linked-in, MySpace, Facebook and MSCPA on a pay-per-click basis. To keep the costs low, I designed the adverts.

These media allow targeting by town, education and age, which made them perfect for our purposes. The objective was to drive traffic to the MBA Web-site where different "landing-pages" would give them information relevant to the advert and would allow us to monitor traffic through Google Analytics.

The 2009/2010 Plan

Marketing Activities

  1. The MBA Web Site – has Google Analytics embedded in it to allow us to track traffic to the site and to try to evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches.
  2. 44.19% of visits from March 14 to April 13 2008, came through Google Searches.  There is a Google Ad-Words program and the WebSite is optimized for Google searches following advice from Jim Fong.
  3. Brochure and Promotional Materials.  The brochure and promotional materials should be brought up to data and in line with the new “Framingham” image…
  4. GMASS lists.  E-mail addresses from people applying to take the GMAT living in locale.  Used in e-mail “blasts” promoting information sessions.
  5. PR Program – coordinated by Jim Fong.  First Press release went out 2 weeks past.  Next one on Mary and the Wikis?  Then Sandra and her MBA folks helping out the Salvation Army?  Then the “First Framingham MBA Graduating Class”.
  6. Boston.com: Not really a specifically MBA outlet. There have been week-long blasts of advertising for the MBA program.  I recall thinking that this appears to be quite expensive.  It is not very targeted and Boston is probably not our catchment area.
  7. The Massachusetts Society for Chartered Public Accountants – Feb, April and June 2009 at a cost of $1,200 - paid.  Targeted – prospective CPAs have a 150 credit hour educational requirement.  Feb had 235 hits according to MSCPA.
  8. MySpace (19.15% of visits) and Facebook (5.63% of visits).  I have been running adverts for the MBA program on both MySpace and Facebook.  I can target age, town, and education levels and I have run ads for information sessions, on-campus and virtual as well as more general “affordable” and “quality”.  We pay between $0.50 and $0.70 per click through.
  9. Linked-In.  I am now linked in enough for them to allow me to advertise.  Adverts can be targeted by job function and geography.  We can pay by click.  I would like to try this and see what the analytics say about the value of this form of advertising.
  10. Bizo – Bizo manages advertising for other websites like Plaxo and Zoominfo.  Janet and I were going to commit $1,000 for a $1 per click campaign to see if the analytics showed value to this method.  Can be targeted to job function and regional geographies e.g.  Boston Metro and Worcester Metro.  Problem was designers wanted $2,000 for the advert.  Would like to try this next financial year.
  11. Mark has been targeting the larger local companies to get us in to set up tables at lunch time and to be linked to from their HR intranets.  Mark and I visited Philips Lifeline two weeks ago and are visiting Staples on Thursday.  Currently Philips Lifeline, Staples, EMC2 and Middlesex Savings Bank link directly from their intranets.  It is too early to know how many visitors will come from these sources.

The Framingham MBA Marketing Budget 2009/2010

The Framingham MBA Marketing Budget 2009/2010
Item Expense Notes
Google-Ad-Words $1,200  
GMASS list of GMAT Registrants $600 Currently about $1 a day.
Public Relations Program $2,100 Assumes $350 placement costs. Six each year
Massachusetts Society of CPAs $1,200 Assumes four separate months each year.
MySpace $1,200 Assumes Andrew generates the adverts.
Facebook $1,200 Assumes Andrew generates the adverts.
Linked-In $1,200 Assumes Andrew generates the adverts.
Bizo $1,200 Assumes Andrew generates the adverts.
Other outlets to be identified... $1,200 Assumes Andrew generates the adverts.
Stipend for Company Visits $4,000 We set up booths in local companies at lunch-time to promote the program.
Brochure $4,400 Assumes Andrew designs new brochure in In-Design.
Promotional Materials $ 500 New boards and signs.
Total $20,000  
 
Comments to: andrew@managementscientist.co.uk.  
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