Solutions for marketing strategies: there has never been a better array of software to help you support your integrated marketing strategy

University Business, July, 2005 by Robert Sevier

Colleges and universities can use any edge they can find to boost their marketing message and gain a competitive edge in recruiting students and attracting donor dollars. As even a quick look on the web will reveal, there are literally hundreds of software and web-based solutions clamoring for your attention, and your wallet. To help you make sense of this plentitude, what follows is an overview of some of the more useful--even indispensable--marketing support products.

To help provide a bit of structure, I'll break this discussion into three key activities:

* Market research * Planning and execution of the marketing strategy * Web-related software

MARKET RESEARCH SOFTWARE

There is so much excellent market research software that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. However, serious researchers almost always recommend two packages. The first, Excel is hard to beat for basic and not-so-basic data manipulation. Because Excel is part of the basic Microsoft Office Suite, the odds are high that you are already familiar with it. Any time spent learning the intricacies of Excel will be well-rewarded.

The second package is SPSS, which many of us may remember from our college days. Today's SPSS, however, is more user-friendly and much more sophisticated, especially if you buy the add-ons. Denton DeSotel, associate research director at Stamats, suggests three additional modules for the sophisticated user:

* SPSS classification trees * SPSS regression models * SPSS advanced models

If you are using research to help answer complex questions, especially those questions with political implications, these modules are essential.

A couple of other research programs were also recommended including: Apian Software's SurveyPro. A very friendly and intuitive package, it will help you design market research studies and even specific survey instruments. It also has modules for web surveys, kiosk surveys, telephone surveys, and scanned survey entry.

WebSurveyor. This is very useful if you are inclined to conduct Largely web-based research. It helps you design the instruments, analyze the results, and share findings. Importantly, WebSurveyor allows you to host the surveys on your site or on the company's server. Like all good research software, it exports to Excel, SPSS, Lotus, and other analysis software.

Microsoft's PowerPoint. Interestingly, this was repeatedly suggested by my informal brain trust (see sidebar). Bart Herridge, of Abilene Christian University, reminded me that even the best research studies are enhanced through the use of graphics. In addition, he says, because most research will be judged as much by the final presentation as the final report, good presentation software is important. However, took beyond the simple templates that come with the basic PowerPoint package. A Google search of PowerPoint templates returns 2.1 million hits for aftermarket templates that will jazz up your data.

SOFTWARE FOR MARKETING, PLANNING, AND EXECUTION

Because so many packages fall into this category, I broke it down into a number of elements including:

* Planning and management software * Media relations software * Design software * Constituent relationship management * List management

PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

While there is a Lot of great planning software available, my cabal of marketing experts avoided software such as Marketing Plan Pro from Pale Alto Software that can sometimes be unduly regimented with their "fill in the blanks" approach to plan creation. In general, these programs are not particularly suited for colleges and universities. Instead, we opted for more general planning software. At the one end of the scale is MS Project (www.microsoft.com). Project is extremely sophisticated and able to handle even the most complex plans. Unfortunately, it has a fairly steep Learning curve (imagine a vertical line). Our favorite "best of both worlds" planning software is AEC Software's FastTrack Schedule. FastTrack is easy to Learn (you don't even need to bother reading the manual), sophisticated, and inexpensive. Importantly, FastTrack allows you to keep track of such key plan elements as who, how much, and when.

One suggestion about planning software: Before you rush out and buy planning software, check with your facilities people. Chances are they have some planning software you can borrow.

There are two other software packages that will help you with your planning process. The first is Microsoft's MapPoint. (One of the best map plotting software packages around, MapPoint gives you a highly visual sense of your marketplace. You can plot where your alumni live, major donors, prospective students, even feeder high schools and churches. The result is an amazingly rich and highly visual dataset that will help you plan everything from road trips to media buys. The accompanying illustration shows how MapPoint works. The map contains two datasets. First, a college's prospect pool is represented by black dots. And second, that same college's incoming class is represented by the stick pins. Based on these data, it is not difficult to determine the college's primary market.