If you dig marketing and you work at an educational institution you need to be creative – you will never have all the resources you require to do things the “right” way.  If you want to do great marketing, you’ll need to take unconventional approaches to gathering information and assembling talent. I know. I’ve been there.

(On this point, I want to send major props to Robert Moore, Managing Partner at Lipman Hearne. Recently on the CASE Communications Listserve, someone asked for recommendations for commissioning a research study. Rather than reply with a recommendation or a plug for his own firm’s services, Robert responded with a helpful suggestion about starting off with free, readily available research before incurring the cost of commissioning one’s own. That’s really helpful advice for someone working with limited budgets. I will attach the complete body of his e-mail to this post in the comments section for folks who want to read it.)

One of the things you will need to judge is which marketing services you absolutely need to hire outsiders for and which you can do in house. I’m a consultant, so of course I see the value of hiring outsiders but I also understand how resources are strapped. I know that institutions can’t afford to hire consultants for everything they would like.

If you’ve got limited dollars and are constrained in how much you can use outside talent, here’s the one absolutely essential marketing function for which you must hire an outsider. This is the one that simply cannot be done in house:

writing the marketing strategy

If you’ve got in-house talent, you can do the viewbook and the web site yourself. Maybe you’ll outsource specific tasks, like having a freelancer do just the writing or the design. You can be creative with the research. Maybe you’ll combine readily available tools like the ones Robert Moore mentioned with work of a dedicated volunteer committee. But the one thing you can never under any circumstances do yourself is write the marketing strategy. Not if you want it be effective. No way, no how.

The reason no insider can ever produce an effective marketing strategy is because in order to produce one you cannot be inside the institutional bubble. For this task, you need the perspective of an outsider.

Why? Anyone who “does strategy” will tell you that 90% of designing a marketing platform boils down to cutting away unnecessary fluff and relentlessly focussing on the one or two points that have the potential to make a difference. You just can’t do that in an organization. Your lens is too clouded by the politics and priorities of the internal culture to be able to write an effective marketing strategy. For that, you need an experienced outsider, someone who will take the time to understand your organizational priorities and dynamics but will retain the perspective of an outsider. That’s what he or she needs to cut away the fluff.

What put me in mind of this was a conversation with a past client. We had worked together to increase applications to an engineering school at a medium sized private university. We were both reflecting on how easy it turned out to be to increase apps by 20%. The story there is one of clearing away clutter and focusing on the core message that prospective students wanted to hear. It turned out that within the competitive frame of this engineering program, many students were drawn by prestige, of which the larger university had sufficient quantity. All the prospects needed to know was that the engineering school was a going concern. That would be enough to open the flood gates. Our marketing strategy was very simple, basically all we wanted to do was depict cool engineering projects. We stripped away as much of the institutional rhetoric about points of differentiation as possible since virtually all of these reflected internal priorities that did not resonate with students. That’s all it took. In short order we grew applications by 20%. But an insider could never have had the guts to pursue this approach. He or she would have been too invested in the institutional rhetoric to give it the necessary hair cut. It wasn’t rocket science but it did depend on an outside perspective.

So if you want to do great marketing in an academic institution, accept that you’re going to need to look for creative combinations of internal and external talent. But keep in the back of your mind that when it comes time to write the marketing strategy, you need to tap outside professional help. This is the one thing that no organization can do for itself – not if you dig marketing and want to achieve genuine and lasting gains for your organization.