First, a quick intro: My name is Eric Greenberg. I live in the Philadelphia area and have been working in Higher Education marketing for 15 years. I have also periodically provided consulting services to organizations in the higher ed realm. If you would like to get in touch or see what else I have to say in the Higher Ed or Marketing Technology area, please feel free to follow me or connect on LinkedIn.
The Past
Over these 15 years, I have had the opportunity to build an enterprise-level, closed-loop attribution system (with the help of an amazing team), which has the capacity to grow and nurture leads over long amounts of time for multiple products, as well as determine the outcome of every dollar spent on advertising. If you are a martech geek, it is a wonder to behold!
But during this time, I have also had the experience of talking to many of my Higher Ed peers at various institutions around the world and one thing is very clear: most organizations have nowhere near the money, staff, or time to create these kinds of systems. Coordination between departments is often limited, budgets are cut, and staff are often tasked with many competing priorities.
Marketing technology, marketing automation, or even just plain marketing often gets short thrift. As a result, many, perhaps most, institutions never have the opportunity to build and experience a marketing automation platform that is working to grow leads and drive revenue.
Instead, what happens is an organization buys an expensive marketing platform under the (perhaps subconscious) idea that they are buying outcomes when really they are buying a highly complex piece of technology with an unclear concept of how to populate it or use it.
Two ideas came from these observations:
1. Schools should strive to crawl, walk, and then run and not jump right to running. What this means is that if a school is doing mostly untargeted email blasts, then the next step up is targeted email blasts. Get good at that and then upgrade again (there will be another blog post on specific steps, later).
2. I realized that, through the use of open-source technologies, I could create a scalable and repeatable process for getting schools up and running with a higher-ed-oriented marketing automation platform that would provide a major headstart for schools trying to use these technologies. And I could do it for significantly less than current SaaS marketing tools.cheapestreplica watch salelouis vuitton phone casehave a peek here
The Present
That set in motion approximately two years of part-time research which eventually resulted in HeadStart Marketing Platform™ or “HMP”.
HMP is developed as a slight fork of Mautic, an open-source marketing automation platform that was first released in 2014 and is now owned by Acquia™, the primary team behind Drupal.
I worked to build out a solid, secure, education-specific instance of HMP on the Amazon Web Services platform with the help of the open-source specialists at autoize.com, after which I populated the platform with clone-able assets. These include emails, dynamic content, automatic workflows (called “campaigns” in Mautic) which provide several fully-working “drip” campaigns, reports, and more.
If you’ve read the HMP homepage at all, you will know that the entirety of the above is duplicated and runs in a separate Virtual Private Network for each client, along with a unique database, ensuring security and FERPA compliance, as we as GDPR compliance.
The Future
The future of HeadStart will, of course, depend on whether it is adopted by schools that may otherwise have difficulty procuring and using sophisticated tools. But, assuming “yes” (and why shouldn’t I assume “yes”?), the next roadmap for HMP includes an integrated analytics package to rival GA360™, a CRM component, and an application portal all integrated with one another under the HeadStart Marketing Platform brand and ready to use by Higher Ed marketing and admissions teams.
I hope you’ll keep in touch and see how this experiment works out!