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Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.
Emma Herrman is communications director at Greenbush: The Education Service Center, an educational organization based in Kansas. She was initially hired as its hospitality and programs coordinator in 2020, a role that involved planning logistics for professional-development events in school districts across Kansas.
“However, I was hired about three days before the entire world shut down in March 2020, and we stopped having in-person events. Suddenly unable to do the job I was hired on to do, I took the initiative and made myself useful in other ways—I helped monitor our social media, created media campaigns for virtual events we were hosting via Zoom instead of the in-person ones, and started teaching myself design basics using Canva and occasionally the Adobe suite,” she told Marketing Brew.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? My company provides professional development to small school districts who may not have the funding to provide their own PD, and we also host spring and summer camps at our Camp and Retreat Center. My job is to showcase the wide variety of programs we offer, whether that be through focused social media blasts, detailed program flyers, or emailed newsletters!
What’s your favorite ad campaign? Honestly, any ad campaign that makes me laugh. I’m of the ”Idk, my BFF Jill?” generation and I still quote it to this day.
What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I’m loving how digital things are becoming [from] a marketing standpoint. A lot of my company’s marketing is done through social media posts and newsletters. We have some paper flyers we hand out at in-person events, but we see a greater response digitally. It seems kind of obvious that things are going digital, as they have been for a long time, but the pandemic has really highlighted how easy it is to get your message across from anywhere in the world.
My least favorite trend is the increasing reliance on influencers. Specifically, for education marketing, influencers do nothing to help us forward our message and get our name out there. Also, as a personal preference, I’ve never found influencers to be particularly “real” and I’ve found that their marketing usually turns me off of the product they’re trying to push.
What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? For school-related marketing, I highly recommend checking out #SocialSchool4EDU. Education marketing is a lot different than “regular” marketing. And Andrea just GETS that.