Working with VisionPoint: Media Offerings

Back When We Were in School

Marketing was so different merely a few short years ago. You had newspapers, magazines, and billboards. You sent postcards in the mail. You hung up flyers around campus. Maybe you even placed an ad in the Yellow Pages.

But times … they’ve changed.

It’s no longer about focusing purely on print ads (though they still have their place). Now, higher education institutions need to advertise where prospective students are. And that’s online. You need to offer value propositions with evidence to back that up. You need to provide what your students want to hear, when they need to hear it.

And, you’ve got to stop the scroll. (I mean, did you know the typical American scrolls the height of the Statue of Liberty on their phones every day?)

Add to that the fact that paid media is changing every day. New social media platforms, new ad requirements, new keywords, changing demographics. It’s a lot. We get it. Advertising today isn’t like it was twenty years ago … ten years ago. Heck, advertising today is different than it was ten days ago. And you’ve got to understand all of that to be able to use it effectively to grow your enrollment.

Put Your Money Where Your Audience Is

Paid media gets a heavy emphasis in our core offerings. Why?

• Our target audiences are inundated with options. Higher ed recruitment market is a competitive battlefield, and the battle is only growing more fierce. Not only that, but students now have more options outside of traditional higher education than ever before. To win, we must reach our target audiences with compelling messaging on the channels where they live.
• Paid media allows us to target with pinpoint precision. Smart paid advertising allows us to target audiences with pinpoint precision at each step of their consideration journey, squeezing a dollar’s worth of value out of every dime we spend.
• Paid media drives awareness and influences perception. The journey to reach, engage, and enroll best-fit prospective students can’t begin until we’ve captured the audiences’ attention and cultivated a favorable impression among prospects and their influencers. Paid media remains one of the most direct and powerful ways to claim a spot in a student’s considered set.
• Paid media entices and enables students to take meaningful action in an increasingly personalized way for a better ROI. Prospective students expect us to use their data to engage with them through more personalized, nuanced, and insightful ads.
• Paid media gives us a wealth of real-time insight that informs better decisions in creative, targeting, messaging, and calls-to-action all along the prospect journey. By observing what’s working and what isn’t and by learning from various optimizations and experiments, we improve our pattern of decision-making in pursuit of our client partners’ goals.

We Do Things Differently and It Shows

Our paid media excellence hinges on some signature strengths that are core to our methodology and approach.

• Active, Hands-On Management – Unlike many other agencies, our conviction is that beating algorithmic benchmarks requires active optimization. We don’t “set it and forget it.” We are hands-on, and our high returns prove it.
• Omnichannel Capabilities – Typical agencies have a few channels they throw at every media problem. Unlike those guys, our team works hard to stay current and relevant, constantly evaluating and refining our omni-channel capabilities – phasing out our usage of channels in decline, testing emerging channels and vetting them for wider use, exploring new creative approaches within tried and true channels, and refining our sense of which channels best reach which audience segments.
• All In-House – The real people actively managing, optimizing, and reporting on our campaigns are right here at VisionPoint, unlike other agencies who provide management but farm out the actual campaign work. Here, you can interact directly with your campaign managers, the people actually pulling the omnichannel levers that deliver results. Our in-house team of talented media experts are able to collaborate with you to plan and then execute tailor-made media approaches. This leads to better quality work, deeper in-the-trenches partnerships, and even efficiencies in time and cost that will directly benefit our you in the long run.
• Data Sophistication– Better data leads to better decisions. Our team does a stellar job of tracking and managing both:
  • Leading measures – predictive indicators that help us optimize forward toward our goals.
  • Lagging measures – the results measures that track not only whether we achieved our goal but also what return we’re delivering on client partners’ investment.

VisionPoint’s Media Offerings

Based on the project’s goals and directional strategies, our Media Team will recommend the best way to allocate your media budget across various channels (digital, traditional, or both, depending on scope). Media plans address budget, channels, timing, audience segmentation, geographic targeting, and more.

VisionPoint Marketing’s media offerings include:

• Media Planning – Based on the project’s goals and directional strategies, our media team will recommend the best way to allocate a client partner’s media budget across various channels (digital, traditional, or both, depending on scope).
• Campaign Management – Our team then readies, buys, launches, and actively manages the campaign according to the terms outlined in the media plan, monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and optimizing along the way to deliver results against the client partner’s goals.
• Reporting – We regularly assess campaigns’ performances and keep you in the loop through our 24/7 Marketing Performance Dashboard, campaign updates in our progress calls, and formal campaign performance reports on a quarterly basis and once campaigns conclude.

Want to learn about campaign variations that could fit your institution’s needs? Visit our media services page.

Work With Us

Maybe paid advertising is overwhelming for you, or maybe – like so many higher ed institutions – you just don’t have the time to focus on this with so many other things needing your attention. We get it, and we’re here for you. Reach out to Dana Cruikshank or fill out the form below to start a conversation about how VisionPoint’s media services can help you succeed in meeting your enrollment goals.