The AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education increases knowledge on the best uses of marketing principles and practices for colleges and universities. Through the symposium, marketers increase their abilities to build and maintain strong brands, achieve enrollment and fundraising success, improve competitive positioning, and maintain financial strength. Sessions focus on the practice of higher education marketing, provide ideas and offer solutions participants can apply at their own institutions. You can apply to present your experiences and knowledge with more than 1,200 fellow higher ed marketers who attend this event annually.
Currently, we’re striving for a hybrid event (happening November 7-10) that would include options for a limited in-person gathering in Denver as well as online education. We’re talking with members of the higher ed community and we hope to have a final decision on the event details by early Summer.
During the submission process, you’ll be given the option to select whether you’re open to presenting in-person, online or both.
Proposal submissions are now closed for this event.
Who Should Submit?
- Practitioners at colleges and universities
- Practitioners for graduate, professional and specialized schools
- Research and planning specialists
- University leaders and policymakers
- CMOs at colleges and universities
- Agencies, consultants and solution providers with experience serving higher education*
* Vendor sales pitches are not acceptable session content. Vendor-only proposals have a very low acceptance rate, but will be considered if they share proven methods across a number of successful clients or industry landscapes. To increase chances of selection, vendors should invite a higher education institution to co-present. If vendors do not wish to go through the proposal process and would like to present alone, they are encouraged to reach out to our Alliances VP, Julie Schnidman, about a sponsored session slot.
What Topics Are Preferred?
Below are the conference track topics we’re hoping to address at this year’s symposium:
The New Normal and Beyond
- COVID response marketing strategies
- Post-COVID solutions that may endure
- Virtual/hybrid engagement strategies for donor, alumni, student, and other events
- New institutional policies that have a marketing impact
- The evolving role of marketing professionals
- Measuring the impact of your pandemic response
- Ongoing/Evolving response to societal issues
Research, Measurement & ROI: Using research to understand and respond to audience needs and desires. Assessing if your efforts are working and refining execution based on qualitative or quantitative measurements
- Market research best practices or innovations – qualitative or quantitative
- Market segmentation
- Competitive analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Identifying new opportunities through research
- Dashboards and analytics
- Measuring marketing performance – traditional and digital measures
- A/B testing and optimization strategies
- Program effectiveness assessments – academic or extracurricular programs
- Refining marketing tactics based on research or assessment
- COVID response marketing strategies
- Post-COVID solutions that may endure
- Virtual/hybrid engagement strategies for donor, alumni, student, and other events
- New institutional policies that have a marketing impact
- The evolving role of marketing professionals
- Measuring the impact of your pandemic response
- Ongoing/Evolving response to societal issues
Brand and Content Strategy: Strategies for refining your brand promise, value proposition, messaging and approach to content delivery
- Brand development, launch, and evolution
- Internalizing the brand, brand as catalyst for institutional change
- Building academic reputation
- Innovative storytelling through visuals, narrative, messaging, media, experiential marketing and more
- Brand identity management
- Ensuring brand alignment or co-development with strategic plans or capital campaigns
- Licensing, sponsorship, and merchandising
Audience Engagement: Delivering marketing messages whether in physical, digital or omnichannel spaces
- Advertising – traditional and digital
- Innovative use of traditional or digital channels
- Content marketing: planning, creating, distributing and evaluating
- Social media management: engagement, monitoring and analysis
- Use of emerging technologies for audience engagement
- Prospect marketing
- Reaching and engaging specific strategic audiences
- Employee communications and engagement
Effective Leadership: Best practices for managing “up, down and across”
- Organizational and funding structures
- Successfully managing creative teams
- Advancing an equitable and inclusive culture
- Fostering incremental and radical innovation
- Doing more with less—people, budget, time
- Project management
- Leading change
- Crisis and issues management
- Marketing yourself: advancing your career
- Building marketing collaboration, buy-in and consensus on campus
How It’s Made
- Case studies
- Post-crisis communications examples
- Tactical work
- How-tos
How Do I Submit My Proposal?
Our submission portal is hosted Ex Ordo. Once you are there, you will need to create a separate account to access the Call of Proposal information and forms.
On that site, you’ll also find more details about what you’ll need to submit, our selection process, presenter benefits and more.
Proposal submissions are now closed for this event.
Questions?
We’re here to help! Contact Tracey Zdravkovic with any questions or reach out to our AMA Support Center team at (800) AMA-1150.