Jump Partners with University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy

Jump Company is pleased to announce our newest partnership with University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, MO. The University is working with Jump to develop a new marketing campaign to promote the school’s recent rebrand and drive enrollment. 

“Jump has a long history partnering with educational institutions and this is perhaps the most challenging environment they have faced in the last twenty years,” said Jon Tiede, President and CEO of Jump Company. “The challenges being faced by higher education today are daunting between rising costs, enhanced competition from online sources and legislative actions. We believe that branding and positioning is vital to be able to develop a message which targets the right students so that those who enroll feel they have found the right school for them, go on to graduate and ultimately become successful in their career and dedicated alumni to their school.”

Over the course of the first-year agreement, Jump will work with the University to create omni-channel marketing materials including video, audio and online to launch and optimize an enrollment campaign targeting all programs across the University – both undergraduate and professional paths.

One Thing Higher Education Teaches Students, But Doesn’t Practice Enough

Perhaps the most important thing that can happen for a student on the campus of a college or university is better understanding who they are as a person. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What makes them unique in the impending job market? What do they value and how do they represent that to others? Simply put, they are defining their brand. Whether they do it consciously or unconsciously they innately understand their brand will help define their choices, inform their decisions and lead them to success. Institutions of higher education benefit from the same self-discovery when defining their brand, and these are three lessons they learn along the way.

Your school is not for everyone

Colleges and universities offer unique experiences from size, location, campus life, areas of academic focus and institutional support. That uniqueness is exactly why no one school can be the right fit for every student. School pride goes hand-in-hand with student experience. When those and more factors align with an individual student, then their experience is rewarding and a lifelong commitment to the school crystalizes. One of the most difficult positions a college or university can put itself in is to constantly chase every potential student instead of focusing on being the perfect school for a specific type of student, and then focusing on finding those students. In other words, they must get on brand.

Branding isn’t just for the incoming class

When a college or university does define and commit to their brand, they sometimes don’t take it far enough. Branding not only drives the lead generation and outreach campaign for the incoming class, but it also translates across alumni engagement, development campaigns, long-range institutional planning and academic investment. A brand is foundational to investment and revenue across the campus. The vital distinction is that your brand does not determine what you talk about; it frames everything you choose to talk about. Recruitment efforts can focus on student resources and academic opportunities while a capital campaigns can evoke the historical legacy of the school. A well-defined and positioned brand allows you to talk to each audience about the topics that are applicable and motivating to them, while remaining universally aligned and reflective of a single institution.

Digital makes branding more important than ever, not less

As academic experiences move online, strong branding combats the commodification of academic experience. The rise of remote learning and the financial challenges of traditional campus-driven experiences can create a false sense of branding having less importance, but the reality is branding aligns your university across all departments and audiences and that makes it more important than ever. What makes your student experience and your educational approach – wherever it takes place – the right fit for the right student is also the recipe for your school’s lifetime value to that student and the subsequent benefits of that school pride become sustaining energy for your future.

As an agency, Jump is a strong advocate for higher education. Our experience branding companies across a number of industries – including higher education – has enhanced our belief that being the right choice for the right person is always better than being the second choice for every person. And to be frank, that’s true of agencies and clients as well.

To learn three ways educational institutions benefit from working with Jump, read this article.

Three Reasons Higher Education Needs an Agency Partner

Jump is fortunate to have several team members who have worked in higher education as administrators or faculty, and one thing those expats agree on is that colleges and universities benefit from having an agency partner.  These are three reasons why.

Off-campus perspective

The internal voices within a college or university can be deafening against new ways of thinking and objectivity can suffer under the pressures of tenured leadership. One of the key benefits of an external agency partner is having a broader perspective and more options to solve key challenges. Agencies can also bring proven solutions from other industries that can apply to higher education challenges like lead generation, retention, and alumni engagement. While higher education is an industry all its own, the communication platforms, the media landscape and the principles of data-driven, strategic campaign management are applicable across industries, and an experienced agency partner can provide a depth of experience you may not find in your on-campus resources.

Full-service solutions

The right agency partner can provide colleges and universities with a single point of contact for a myriad of marketing needs. Most higher education clients are not in need of a single service, but a little bit of support across a number of services like branding, campaign strategy, design, video, media planning and buying and reporting and analysis. A full-service agency may have the ability to offer all those services to whatever degree necessary as opposed to having to build all those disciplines internally and often to a greater capacity than what is required. An agency partner can offer fractional team members while an internal team requires hiring fully-dedicated individuals.

100% focus on marketing

Jump understands the multiple directions that internal marketing teams are pulled in at colleges and universities. Between managing leadership and addressing the needs of key faculty and academic departments to coordinating with student organizations, alumni organizations and campus events, there are only so many hours in the day and it becomes necessary to maintain periods of status quo simply to meet the volume of demands. The greatest benefit an agency partner can provide is a singular focus on the challenges they undertake on your behalf to free your internal teams to focus on the relationships and communication that is often the priority.

Jump Company brings an appreciation of the unique challenges of higher education environments to our work as an agency partner without losing sight of our responsibilities to help identify the right students, drive enrollment and retention and strengthen the branding of the school across all the audiences it touches. And we do it without having to pull an all-nighter.

To learn one thing higher education teaches students but doesn’t practice enough, read this article.