Almost every college/university President and CMO I talk with tells me they need and want to develop a more data-driven marketing and communications function. But most laugh nervously when I ask them, “What is your budget for market research?”
Here at SimpsonScarborough, we do a ton of research for colleges and universities each year. We interview thousands and thousands of prospective students, parents, guidance counselors, faculty and administrators, business leaders, and more. We’ve conducted hundreds of surveys of these audiences. We do segmentation, discrete choice modeling, message testing, brand strength measurement, brand concept testing. Where does the money come from to pay for this work? I have no clue! But I do know that it rarely comes out of the operating budget of the marketing and communications department. This needs to change.
An organization cannot become truly “data driven” if the resources that support data creation are one-time allocations. A CMO should not have to go to the President or CFO to beg and cajole for an investment in the data that is so desperately needed to aid in decision-making. The marketing function, in general, is often criticized for lacking data to support strategy and prove results. Yet few marketing budgets include a designated line item for the research that would provide these insights.
Think about all the critical knowledge that, if you only had it, could completely change the way you approach your marketing efforts: How is alumni sentiment changing? In what ways is the university perceived to be relevant or irrelevant? How are changing attitudes toward higher education, in general, affecting the college’s reputation? How are we going to continue attracting top students? What messages are going to help us better engage alumni and fuel their loyalty? The answers to such questions are key ingredients to success for any organization because they help us understand our many and varied “customers.” If we don’t know our customers’ needs and motivations, we cannot effectively communicate with them.
The budgeting season is upon us. It’s time to start mapping out all of our needs for `18-`19 ... and beyond. The most sophisticated higher education marketing and communications operations are identifying their most important target audiences and listing what they don’t know about them that would help improve communications—and from there, setting a budget for gathering this mission-critical data.
