Inform your marketing

"Is it working?" It has never been so critical to demonstrate results. While true attribution of moving prospective students from the top of the funnel to their seats in the classroom is still difficult to pin to specific strategies, stepping back and taking a look at the collective body of marketing strategies is now possible. Gettysburg College Communication and Marketing board reports used to break down different significant key performance indicators to illustrate a full picture of how all their efforts performed in digital spaces. Feedback about this reporting style challenged them to find a simpler way to tell the story. In response, they developed a weighted index that normalizes all their data from two similar time periods into a single number for each, for comparison. As their Digital Marketing Performance Index (DMPI) has continued to evolve through its use over the past few years, the value of the process has become clear. The team can easily explain an increase or decrease in effectiveness when comparing two time periods in relation to expenditures. Additionally, the DMPI has helped them understand which strategies best move the needle and how to responsibly plan future spends. A close partnership with Gettysburg's Admissions team promises to elevate the DMPI further, with an opportunity to integrate thoughtful prospective student engagement scores into the weighting system. We plan to share information about the tools we use for aggregating data, to explain how we incorporate each data point and how we weight them, and to discuss what modifications might be made for marketers at other institutions to adapt our formulas to inform their own reporting.