“Social media has flipped out many marketers in our field,” Suzanne Kart told participants at LERN’s annual Executive Leadership Institute in Tucson recently.
“People are stressed out about marketing today,” she says. She advises lifelong learning programs to focus on the top eMarketing priorities that generate registrations, rather than trying to have a presence on all of the social media platforms.
Social media is an excellent medium for retention and engaging with your customers. And numerous practitioners have reported that social media have pumped up participation in a single course or event. Nevertheless, there is not a lot of hard evidence that social media is generating significant registrations for lifelong learning programs right now.
Here are the percentages of LERN members report being active with these social media platforms:
-Facebook, 75-80% of programs reporting
-Twitter, 50%
-YouTube, 25%
-Instagram, 10%
-LinkedIn, 10%
Here are LERN’s recommendations for your marketing priorities in 2015.
- Focus your top priority on your Print Brochure. Devote 70 percent of your time and resources to your Print Brochure, which generates 70 percent of your registrations.
- Keep your website current. And over the next year, make it mobile friendly.
- Make sure online registration is current, including updating links, dates and other registration info.
- Send out emails to your customers.
- Add a blog to your website.
- Explore and be engaged with social media.
