The Dean and Marketing

Here's a short story for you.

A few days ago, I was attending a meeting at the college where I work. All the deans were attending, and we were talking about marketing. One of the them said something like, "we don't have to focus on marketing, because everybody is satisfied with the quality of our website. All the information to new and potential students are at our website, so why use resources on marketing?"

Now, I have to give you my reply.

I started by saying that, "it's great that most people are satisfied with the quality of our website, but does the quality matter much if nobody visits our website?"

I told the deans that the reason we do focus on marketing, is to get people to notice us, and then visit our website (and see the quality), and in the end, apply to our college.

... and of course, quality is what it's all about, but marketing is about getting people to notice the quality.

I told them about some of the techniques we use to drive traffic to our website. There are at least 19 ways to drive traffic to our website, and a lot more if we include offline marketing.

We can attract the traffic, pay for the traffic or "steal" the traffic. We don't use all 19 techniques, but here's the list:

1. Pay Per Click Advertising
2. Banner Advertising
3. Text Link Advertising
4. Paid Reviews
5. eZine Advertising
6. Article Marketing
7. Discussion Forums
8. Press Releases
9. Classified Ads
10. Social Marketing
11. Viral Videos
12. Blog Commenting
13. Reviews
14. Blogging
15. Viral Reports
16. Search Engine Optimization
17. Joint Ventures
18. Traffic Exchanges
19. Creative Traffic

The discussion ended, but it's always interesting to attend meetings were people talk about marketing in such a way.