Advertising Services

The vendor is required to provide advertising services to partner with an advertising agency with deep and innovative expertise in digital marketing, advertising and brand strategy, with particular expertise in the higher education vertical.
- Marketing communications team to design and implement integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns that effectively display the school’s brand distinctives:
•    AI-forward, analytical, data-driven curriculum that enables confident development of strategy and decisions, helping people lead fearlessly
•    Collaborative, supportive and diverse community that enables the development of teamwork, management and leadership skills
•    Challenging, transformative experiential learning that leverages our strong corporate partnerships, our faculty’s research strengths, and our prime location.
- Requirement:
1. Strategic planning
•    Create a strategic framework for strengthening the smith school brand within the context of achieving its recruitment goals
•    Define appropriate marketing strategies and tactics based on school objectives
•    Define effective multichannel marketing plans that meet objectives and budget guidelines
•    Assess the effectiveness of campaigns
2. Digital marketing
•    Create strategies and tactics that will help the school engage with and market to its target audiences, on whatever platforms or devices they use
•    Develop a/b/n creative testing strategies by channel and tactic to determine the most effective creative for converting prospects to inquiries
•    Create and implement enrollment marketing campaigns that deploy search, SEO, social and display advertising to generate leads that convert
•    Evaluate effectiveness of current email drip campaigns and advise on strategies for effective email marketing that leads to better overall lead conversion
•    Advise on strategies to extend smith’s brand messages across the social channels that make the most sense for the school’s brand
•    Create and implement a communications plan to prospects that incorporates methods and tools such as text messaging, social media platforms and chat groups
•    Advise on modern and effective content strategies to drive organic traffic and improve conversion rates on website
3. Media planning, buying and administration
•    Research and evaluate media opportunities, prepare media plans, negotiate value-added opportunities, place media, monitor media placements, field calls from media reps, and manage billing and accounts payable administration
4. Creative direction, creative production, art design, photography, videography, copywriting and proofreading
•    Provide these services as needed to effectively implement smith school marketing campaigns
•    Source, oversee and manage outside production services where necessary (studio, talent, etc.)
5. Account management
•    Manage the day-to-day business of smith advertising; attend meetings and phone conferences, manage timing, budgets and billing
•    Conduct and lead bi-weekly status meeting with various smith school constituents
6. Metrics and reporting
•    Develop and align on marketing channel KPIs based on overall business KPIs and benchmarks (industry and organization)
•    Provide guidance on marketing campaign tracking and attribution best practices to build sustainable infrastructure for reporting, analysis, and year-over-year performance comparisons.
•    Provide bi-weekly reporting on the current state of marketing activities including efficiency, spending against budget, inquiry quality and volume, inquiry trending toward goals and projections, performance by channel (display, social, SEM, etc.) and placement (Facebook, google, Bing, etc.) KPIS against benchmarks.
•    Provide bi-weekly reporting roll up on previous period’s performance, and plans for upcoming period, including volume projections based on conversion rates and proposed spend allocations by channel to reach goals.
•    Provide quarterly business review showing three-month trended look back, and state of the higher education industry
•    Provide an annual business review showing performance highlights, areas for improvement, recommendations and proposed projections for the following year, and overall industry performance.
•    Provide guidance on marketing and multi-touch attribution and “metrics that matter,” i.e., measurement framework to determine which metrics are driving the business, and which metrics are indicators of success for each channel (i.e., engagement vs. conversion measures depending on marketing channel and tactic) to ultimately ladder up to the larger goals of the organization.
- Budget: $2.8 million

- Contract Period/Term: 2 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: November 6, 2025