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5 Tips to Spring Clean Your Data

Chuck Romans, Education Database Marketing Consultant, MDR — Friday, May 24, 2013

Spring is that time of year when thoughts turn to cleaning up, clearing out, and starting fresh. It also happens to be the sweet spot in the education marketing calendar between finalizing one year’s sales results and preparing for the new school season. With four to six weeks needed for a data cleanse project, there is no better time to evaluate and update the condition of your customer data.

Here are some tips on what to prioritize in a springtime data review:

Strategize and Set Your Scope
Out With the Old
Align to the Truth
Get to Know Your Best Customers
Add-on for Growth

Education Marketing Gets Personal

Mike Subrizi, Leader of Operations, MDR — Friday, April 26, 2013

One of the oldest adages among fisherman is to fish where the fish are. But fishermen need to be ready to react when fish take to different waters. Education marketers are experiencing a major shift in how they target and reach educators. The wall that divided work life from home life has eroded, and with that opening comes five new opportunities for marketers to most effectively connect with educators.

Understand teachers as individuals
Recognize how teachers use the web to research and influence
Develop digital strategies customized to teachers’ online behaviors
Tailor marketing efforts to teachers’ specific consumer traits
Fish where the fish are

What's Next with Funding and Common Core: Webinar Recap

— Friday, April 12, 2013

Recently, MDR hosted “What’s Next With Funding and the Common Core,” a webinar presented by Anne Wujcik, Education Research Analyst at MDR, and Geoff Fletcher, Deputy Executive Director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Designed to update listeners on the latest federal budget news and on the Common Core, the webinar focused particularly on state and district readiness for the Common Core assessments. Among the major points made:

The federal budget for FY2013 is now final, with the new Continuing Resolution keeping FY2013 spending level with that of FY2102.
Sequestration went into effect on March 1, with almost all non-defense federally funded programs subject to a 5.1% across-the-board reduction of their FY2013 budget.
State spending is rebounding, with slow but relatively steady growth.
The Common Core State Standards are alive and well.
The path to readiness for the 2015 administration of the Common Core assessments is bumpy, but states and districts continue to make progress.

Read on for more details on some of these issues or better yet, listen to a recording of the webinar to get the full flavor of what our experts had to say and the questions on the minds of the audience.
Read More »

Integrated Content Marketing

Erin MacPherson, Senior Editor, WeAreTeachers — Friday, March 29, 2013

A good content plan can help streamline your marketing efforts and save time while helping you to make great strides in customer engagement, brand awareness, and more.

Here are three quick tips to guide you as you incorporate content marketing into your plan:

Use your brand’s area of leadership to create an integrated content marketing campaign.
Strike a balance between the various types of marketing content on your social channels.
Engage your audience in new and creative ways.

While Channels Change, the Need to Integrate Stays Constant

Moira McArdle, VP of Marketing, MDR — Friday, March 01, 2013

Integrated marketing: we’re all talking about it, and most of us get it, at least conceptually. As we continue to evolve our marketing strategies in a changing digital environment, the constant has always been working to integrate branding, messaging, timing, and offers across channels. It’s deliberate, it’s coordinated, and I’ll admit, it’s hard because it takes a lot of planning. Read More »

The Impact of Repeating Patterns: Enhance Your Campaign ROI with Digital Marketing

Kim Booth, Web Advertising Product Manager, MDR — Friday, February 01, 2013

Part of what made humans successful as a species is our ability to identify patterns, such as what are good things to eat versus what things are likely to eat you. Our brains are trained for it, and we find it uniquely satisfying when we can quickly identify something new as something known. It is this pattern recognizing instinct that makes integrated marketing such a successful strategy for brands. Each instance or venue where a brand or product reappears triggers a recognition response: “I know what that is. I’ve seen it before.” For every marketer that is fighting the good fight against waning email response rates, rising direct mail costs, or decreasing lead generation numbers, finding a way to trigger more positive response from each campaign is critical. Adding a digital component to your existing marketing efforts can broaden and maximize the impression each message makes…increasing impact without breaking the budget. Read More »

Customer Data: The Engine of ROI

Christopher Ziemnicki, VP of Product Development, MDR — Friday, January 04, 2013

In good times, it may make sense to generate and pursue tons of leads. In leaner times, a more targeted approach is necessary. In the last article, we talked about expanding your horizons to new digital channels that can help reverse the slide in email marketing response rates. In this article, our focus will stay closer to home: maximizing the value of your customer file. While this may seem like a back-to-basics approach, every other marketing effort depends on the quality and utility of this data. Read More »

The Changing Face of ROI

Christopher Ziemnicki, VP of Product Development, MDR — Friday, November 16, 2012

Email marketing has been a great learning opportunity for the education market. It is the channel that has taught us the power of targeting, testing, quantifying results, and attributing leads back to the source. But as email has matured as a channel and become almost ubiquitous—according to our 2012 Digital Trends Report, 94% of education marketers use email—it has started to suffer from its own success. Crowded inboxes are eroding the effectiveness of this once fertile channel. Marketers who have experienced the response rates email once delivered are loath to see those numbers decline. Some have doubled or quadrupled email frequency to recapture those earlier results, only to realize they have simply accelerated the decline of email as an effective channel. So where do you turn to bring leads and sales back to the levels of the early email days? Read More »

Content Marketing: Telling Your Brand's Story

Moira McArdle, VP of Marketing, MDR — Friday, October 19, 2012

The 10-second elevator pitch. The 140-character Tweet. The mobile-optimized web page. In many ways, the real estate available to education marketers is shrinking. At the same time, content remains an indispensable platform for brands to tell their story and convey their value—a message that doesn’t fit inside a Tweet. While these two dynamics might seem to be in conflict, they are driving the emergence of one of the most potent tools in the marketers’ toolkit: content marketing. Read More »

Why Building Brand Matters

Sandy Fivecoat, Founder, WeAreTeachers.com, and Senior Consultant, MDR — Friday, August 17, 2012

You’ve established your brand in the marketplace. Everyone knows who you are, what you offer and what you stand for, so you can focus on product sales and short-term revenue gains, right? Sorry, but like so many other aspects of marketing, brand is shifting under your feet. Read More »