AMA Virtual Conference: Marketing in Higher Education

Keynote: Effective Higher Education Marketing: The C.A.R.E. Component

Drawing on nearly three decades of experience as a scholar, marketer, and higher education practitioner, Shanita B. Akintonde will unpack time-tested strategies for attracting, retaining, and measuring successful higher education marketing tactics.

Shanita Baraka Akintonde

Professor, School of Media Arts, Columbia College Chicago

Content Strategy - Leading With Your Brand While Maximizing Efficiency

Higher Education organizations are increasing their advertising and marketing budgets across the board, but how do you ensure that your school makes an impression and stands out from the crowd? Learn how to bring your institution’s unique story to life, and how implementing a content strategy that prioritizes distinctive assets and brand management will lead to more efficient content workflows for your marketing staff, and increased brand awareness amongst prospective students.

Join Jenna Johnson, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at Charleston Southern University, and Ariana Keil, Marketing Manager at Canto, as they guide you through how to develop your school’s branding, build a functional library of creative assets, and maintain your brand through content workflows that keep your team on message without sacrificing creativity and authenticity.

Jenna Johnson

Executive Director of Marketing and Communication, Charleston Southern University

Ariana Keil

Marketing Manager, Canto

Redefining Higher Ed Events for Optimal Audience Engagement

For higher education event leaders and marketers, March 2020 will be forever etched in stone—the month when life as we knew it stopped and colleges and universities scrambled to move recruitment events, reunions, alumni weekends, and other gatherings online. Amidst all the uncertainty, innovations emerged as you reimagined and tested new strategies to reach and engage a broader audience and create “boundless” experiences. The result? New event formats support a multitude of event types and audiences that have been tested and proven two years later. Enter our new normal. College campuses are open, and event leaders are reshaping their programs to include virtual, in-person and hybrid events, which combine in-person and virtual programming and delivery. But what does “hybrid” really mean? And what types of events should be hybrid? As face-to-face gatherings become a reality again, it’s time to take a step back and look at what we’ve learned—with the added benefit of being able to put event goals and audience needs back at the forefront of planning. This session will discuss key themes to support as you redefine your event strategy with a focus on audience engagement.

Rob Vignali

Regional Sales Vice President, Cvent

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Session details coming soon.

Keynote: Modern SEO for Higher Ed: How Google’s AI Changes the Game

Search engines are evolving. Specifically, Google is deploying increasingly sophisticated AI to power its rankings. This shift will impact your university’s organic visibility. But, how do you optimize content for modern AI search engines?

Join Dale Bertrand, a 20-year search marketing veteran with graduate-level training in AI, as he details specific organic visibility strategies that leverage our new understanding of AI search engines. This session will help you develop a rudimentary understanding of Google’s AI to increase online awareness of your university’s activities and boost enrollment.

Dale Bertrand

Founder & President, Fire&Spark

Reactive to Proactive: A Wrike-Inspired Journey of Continuous Improvement

Is your marketing team stuck in a cycle of constant reaction? Take a deep dive on a continuous improvement journey with Mitchell Bausch PMP from Texas A&M University. In addition to his professional journey, this presentation demonstrates how strategic project management, intentional process improvement, and structured collaboration helps higher education marketing teams become more organized, productive, and proactive. With teams consistently being asked to do more with less, the importance of the process must be communicated to leadership and our peers to drive positive change and prepare for the future of work in higher education.

Mitchell Bausch

PMP, Assistant Director of Marketing & Communications, Texas A&M University School of Law

Panel Discussion with Industry Experts: Enrollment Marketing Strategies

This is your chance to ask questions from our panel of industry experts!  Moderated by our very own AMA Vice President of Professional Development, Molly Soat, she will be leading our panel in a discussion on Enrollment Marketing Strategies.

Using Private Sector Marketing Techniques to Solve Challenge of Recruiting Adults

Data analytics pioneered about a decade ago during sophisticated national political campaigns can help solve higher education’s challenges of finding and engaging prospective adult students. Learn how CollegeAPP has harnessed the power of person-level predictive modeling to help colleges and universities find adults with high intent of seeking education or retraining to make marketing more efficient. This session will include a live demo of our database and the models we use to predict behavior.

Andrea Shaw

VP of Strategy and Client Services, CollegeAPP

Doing More with Less! Tools and Tips for Institutional Marketers to Drive Enrollments without Big Budgets

Old ways of engaging with and communicating to prospective students aren’t delivering results like they used to.  And your marketing budget probably isn’t going up anytime soon.   How can you rethink your marketing tactics, teams, and skills to better engage student prospects without breaking your marketing budget?  In this interactive session, Shannon Denton, Co-Founder and CEO of Wripple and the former Global CEO of Razorfish, will explore the future of marketing for institutions with a focus on tools and tips for building high-performance, agile marketing teams.

Shannon Denton

Founder & CEO, Wripple

Reaching Digital Natives: How to Create Meaningful Youth Engagement

Youth audiences can be particularly difficult to connect with: privacy regulations are constantly changing, youth are exposed to more than 6,000 ads each day and their online habits are evolving. Compounding those challenges, higher education institutions often have unique process, compliance and branding needs.

Backed by decades of youth advertising experience, John Reid and Jamie Pragnell will demonstrate how to develop a messaging strategy that resonates, analyze the most effective channels to create impact and provide real-life examples to tie it all together. The time is now to take your youth advertising strategy to the next level.

John Reid

President, Glacier

Jamie Pragnell

Account Manager, Glacier

Breaking Down Website Barriers: Strategies To Boost Student Recruitment

Your website is the most important digital asset for your higher education institution. In fact, it’s often one of the first interactions that a prospective student may have with their future college or university. So what barriers does your website journey present? And where are you losing prospective students along the way? Join Jillian Als, VP of Marketing and Jasmine de Guzman, Manager of Revenue Marketing from Monsido, as they dig into strategies that can ensure your website is making a good first impression for prospective students and their families, and that your content is optimized, on-brand and inclusive for all.

Jillian Als

VP of Marketing, Monsido

Jasmine de Guzman

Manager, Revenue Marketing, Monsido

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