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.