STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA Southeastern Community College Request for Proposal #: 124-SCC05152024

Proposal Opening Date: June 12, 2024 At 02:00 PM ET

Direct all inquiries concerning this RFP to:

Katrina Batten

Procurement and Equipment Specialist

Email: Katrina.batten@sccnc.edu

Phone: 910-788-6209

5.0 SPECIFICATIONS AND SCOPE OF WORK

5.1 GENERAL

Southeastern Community College (SCC) invites proposals from qualified advertising agencies specializing in higher education marketing. The selected agency will be responsible for identifying and communicating with prospective and current students to generate interest in the college, increase applications, and improve completion rates. The agency will be expected to demonstrate expertise in digital advertising strategies and techniques to meet SCC’s enrollment and marketing goals.

Proposals should clearly specify the direct marketing strategies, techniques, expertise, and technological tools that will be used to meet the above-stated goals. Through this RFP, the college seeks evidence of the proposer’s experience providing enrollment management services that enable higher education institutions to achieve their student recruitment goals with a focus on digital advertising. Proposals should clearly articulate your firm’s capabilities in the following areas:

– Provide targeted recommendations, development of marketing materials and implementation of campaigns for efficient and effective enrollment strategies, operations, and practices. Vendor must provide clear strategies for impact on potential enrollment growth. Recommend and implement strategies to increase awareness of SCC to prospective students to increase the quality and volume of applications.

– Develop and implement strategic actions that make efficient and effective use of limited college resources. Vendor must build from established messaging and creative with a minimal discovery process. The vendor must have a proven marketing and enrollment track record of student search and inquiry generation marketing campaigns that utilize current technologies. This proven track record must include the ability to demonstrate modern uses of cutting-edge enrollment marketing techniques appropriate for the age group being recruited, a significant and positive return on the college’s investment, as well as significantly high industry rates of student response.

– Identification and communication of qualified high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors through the use of multiple channels of available “search” sources.

– Provision of direct marketing services including message development, publication design and creation, distribution management, digital strategy, communication planning and tracking, and responding to the leads generated by direct marketing campaigns.

– Communications that are optimized for all devices including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

– Dedicated parent efforts across campaigns designed to build an incremental parent pipeline and deepen engagement overall.

– Development and delivery of online resources such as electronic inquiry forms with the use of the college’s CRM (Element451).

Advise best CTA and use of CRM as a single point of entry for all inquiries. Suggestions on best practices of how to tag, organize, and use data collected by CRM. Call tracking/reporting.

– Evidence of assisting institutions with effective prospect funnel engagement from initiating student search programs, converting the prospects to inquiries, and inquiries to applicants by providing services that include: identifying and purchasing the names of prospective students from multiple channels and maintaining communication with prospective students to encourage them to inquire and apply for admission.

– Evidence that the vendor’s recruitment strategies attract the best-fit students who are more likely to enroll, persist, and graduate.

– Development and delivery of analytical reports that demonstrate the effectiveness of direct marketing efforts as well as real time campaign reporting that can be accessed by the college at any time.

– Demonstrate successful campaigns for institutions like SCC in size, profile, and student body. Provide a turnkey operation to include: strategic and creative development, ability to print and mail information, email deliverability and response. 

– tracking, routine monitoring and analysis services, social and digital ad placements as well as tv and streaming buys.

– The college requires the ability to utilize a mix of tools to engage students such as: direct mail, email, digital media campaigns, retargeting, social media advertising, geo-fencing, radio, tv and streaming buys and other modern outreach strategies, and mobile optimized web response personalized recruitment sites that optimize student engagement. Outbound marketing is a critical component and must be personalized and be effectively delivered to maximize interest and engagement. All components must fully meet the ADA standards for accessible design.

5.2 SPECIFICATIONS

As part of the services for this partnership, the awarded contract will be responsible for the following scope of services:

1. Based on established messaging and creative, develop a strategic direction for comprehensive campaigns and yearly plan. The campaign strategies must be fully integrated across a variety of media and response platforms to include geo-targeting, web, mail, email, all advertisements, CTAs, and social media.

2. Develop compelling messages for different student audiences that can be adapted for use across multiple platforms.

3. Develop creative concepts for specific audiences.

4. Audience identification/targeting, list source and timing recommendation, and list order placement services.

5. Multi-channel marketing campaigns including lead generation, geo-targeting, personalized direct mail and corresponding landing pages, email, and other proven tactics through CRM management.

6. Vendor shall create predictive/behavioral models to guide recruitment efforts based on the demographic markets the college currently reaches and aspires to help define target audience development, campaign messaging and media and effective CTAs.

7. Must be prepared to work directly with various list providers and acquire the list data immediately upon release of the new student information from each identified list source.

8. Provide the ability for prospective students to respond.

9. Provide real-time market analysis throughout each campaign to allow for progress tracking and ROI.

10. Provide a detailed response analysis to include list source, gender, geography, etc.

11. Deliver a real-time online reporting portal that provides on-demand analytics including metrics on response, audience interaction, and student information.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

1. Vendor’s project team should include a professional analyst who will monitor results and make recommendations for improvements throughout the campaign, as well as present to the campus community updates and trainings.

2. Each project of the campaign will be defined with specific deadlines and expected outcomes.

3. Vendor to provide full online production and deployment of data tracking of each response channel’s performance (broken down direct mail, email, QR code, etc.) as well as a measurement and metric dashboard.

4. The vendor must have a proven ability to communicate effectively with the college’s CRM. Please explain the firm’s protocol.

5. Vendor will manage processes, data collection and campaigns in concert with the college. All assets and communication platforms developed must integrate with the Element451 platform.

6. Vendor may submit information on any related services that are unique to them that assist in meeting the overarching goal of this RFP.

5.3 TASKS/DELIVERABLES

1. DELIVERABLE SERVICES:

a. Develop a comprehensive Market Analysis to determine and manage list purchases and marketing strategy.

b. Provide assessment of SCC digital landscape and social/digital analytics in relationship to enrollment as well as  offer recommendations for digital and social content and timing.

c. Provide results reporting on programs results throughout the cycle so that the college can make informed decisions  about other marketing tactics that may need to be implemented.

d. Provide predictive and behavioral modeling tools for list buys to develop affinity models and identify specific prospects  for outreach.

e. Manage list purchase and preparation for data for inclusion in marketing campaign.

f. Develop, design, and deploy an email workflow plan that is behavioral based with varying email formats, structures,  and design assets.

g. Develop, design, and deploy personalized landing pages with dynamic content to implement with social media, print, and digital advertising.

h. Develop and deploy engagement tracking and behavioral scoring.

i. Design, develop, and deploy print piece mailing.

2. APPLICATION OF SERVICES:

a. Manage list purchase and preparation of data for inclusion in marketing campaign.

i. Across all campaigns and determined audiences, contractor will coordinate, design, and deploy appropriate digital advertising strategy throughout the year by developing and deploying campaign digital ad strategies and build a social  media plan which may include: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and other emerging social media platforms student- specific strategy.

ii. Social strategy for parent ads and potential school counselor ads.

iii. Display ads based on name matching, student-specific strategy (image/video as approved).

iv. Geotargeting display ads focused on key markets e.g. high school areas.

v. Retargeting from landing pages based on audience strategy.

b. Search Engine Marketing that is targeted towards students, first-year, and parents in key markets who are searching online for college information.

5.4 PROJECT ORGANIZATION

Vendor shall describe the organizational and operational structure it proposes to utilize for the work described in this RFP and identify the responsibilities to be assigned to each person Vendor proposes to staff the work.