MARKETING MARSHALL

The university communications team is taking a dynamic new approach to selling the Marshall brand.

By Katherine Pyles

When Marshall President Brad D. Smith conducted a 100-day listening tour to kick off his presidency, he wanted to learn what matters most to the university community. He met with over 1,000 people — students, alumni, faculty, staff, community leaders and others — in 38 separate listening sessions. Out of the sessions emerged a handful of topics that were identified as key opportunities for improvement, which Smith labeled “The Big Five.”

One of those five, it turned out, was marketing.

“A resounding theme that emerged was the desire to tell our story in an increasingly digital world,” Smith said. “The pride in our university and the global awareness of our brand were highlights, but our level of investment in digital marketing was cited as an area of increased emphasis. With that input, we began the journey to ‘punch above our weight.’”

Enter Dave Traube, a 2010 Marshall alum and the university’s new chief marketing and communications officer. Traube joined Marshall in October 2022 to lead what he calls a “reimagining” of the university’s approach to marketing. Previously, Traube explained, Marshall produced excellent communications work but outsourced most of its marketing efforts.

“The university’s communications department was a high-functioning team, and it served the university really well, but in a very communications-focused way,” Traube said. “Outside groups were helping to market the university and tell the Marshall story.”

That all changed when Traube joined Marshall last fall from the University of Charleston, where he was vice president of communications and marketing. Traube is “a proud son of Marshall and a top-tier marketing professional,” Smith said, “and his mastery of storytelling is inspiring.”

For Traube, marketing his alma mater comes naturally.

“When you’re an alum, you can be passionate about the university in a way that no one else can,” said Traube, who majored in broadcast journalism at Marshall. “When you’re telling the Marshall story, you’re also telling your own story. You’re weaving in your own experience. And that can be powerful.”

Current marketing efforts place an emphasis on “moments,” he said, and inviting prospective students to “live their Marshall moment.”

“We’re personalizing the power of the moment — those rare moments that you can find and create during col lege,” he said. “Marshall offers such a unique canvas for those moments, for figuring out who you are and what your future could look like. We want people to get excited about that and understand the opportunities that await them at Marshall.”

Traube said the trend of declining enrollment in higher education, “all over the country, at institutions big and small,” creates a sense of urgency. To reverse that trend at Marshall, he and his team are collaborating with the admissions and recruitment of fice to expand the university’s pool of prospective students, taking a dynamic, personalized approach to recruitment and outreach.

That includes working to reach students outside West Virginia.

“Beginning this fall, students from 59 counties in the Tri-State region will be eligible for our metro rate, which, in many cases, is lower than the instate tuition rates in Ohio and Kentucky,” Traube noted.

The eligibility covers a 100-mile radius from the Huntington campus.

“Part of our central messaging is the affordability aspect for people right outside West Virginia’s borders,” Traube said. “We want to invite students in the metro areas to take advantage of what Marshall can offer them.”

Prior to Traube’s hiring, Smith brought in a consulting firm to evaluate Marshall’s marketing efforts and identify effective strategies going forward. He also welcomed alumnus Kipp Bodnar (’04), chief marketing officer of HubSpot, to the university’s Board of Governors. helping our marketing team achieve the next level of success.”

Bodnar joined HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company, in 2010. He was named chief marketing officer in 2015.

Bodnar works closely with Traube and regularly lends his expertise in marketing trends and strategies to the Board of Governors. He said he’s pleased to see Marshall’s leadership embrace the role of marketing in strengthening the university.

“With Kipp Bodnar we have access to one of the best marketing minds in our generation — and he happens to be a son of Marshall,” Smith said. “Kipp is a world-class digital marketer and is fully engaged in

“The Board of Governors is an amazing group of people, with an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge, and it’s exciting to see the buy-in to the importance of marketing,” said Bodnar, who majored in journalism and was executive editor of the Parthenon while at Marshall. “We’re asking things like, ‘How will this decision build the Marshall brand?’ and ‘How are we going to leverage this decision to increase admissions and meet our other core goals?’”

He said Traube is helping Marshall differentiate itself from other institutions by looking at marketing’s bigger picture.

“Most universities have a pretty similar strategy when it comes to marketing,” Bodnar explained. “They spend a lot of money on paid advertising and social media and search engine optimization — and then it all falls apart when students get to the website. The website doesn’t work; it’s too hard to use; the experience is too painful. But Dave and his team are transforming the entire online experience. They’re building a web experience that makes it easy for students to understand why Marshall is a fit for them and easy for them to take the next step in their journey.”

Traube described it as “building out the underbelly.”

“What I’ve spent a lot of time on so far is the logistics of launching a digital experience that is successful, well thought through and built around our goals as an institution,” he said. “We’re laying the groundwork for a new digital marketing era for the university.”

He said alumni have a key role to play in “building the Marshall brand,” which, if you’re wondering, has nothing to do with logos or shades of green. In marketing, branding is how people feel about a product or a company — or, in this case, a university — when they see it. It’s “how you feel when you look at a photo of campus, or read about an academic program you’re interested in,” Traube said. In other words, the Marshall brand is everything that makes the university unique.

“One thing that I think is so special about Marshall is the way people feel about it after they leave,” Traube said. “So many alumni still love the university and engage with the university in different ways. It’s not just supporting athletics, although athletics are part of it. It’s having gear; it’s being proud to tell people where they went to school. I don’t think every school has that. Every school wants to have that — but at Marshall, we have it.”

As higher education faces a paradigm shift, he said, the personal side of the Marshall story is what will continue to set the university apart.

“There’s so much competition in higher education today. There are so many degree options, so many vocational programs and alternatives to college,” he said. “But engaging with something that stays with you for the rest of your life — that’s special. It’s one thing to say, ‘You should try it. You should enroll. This could be a great experience for you.’ But it’s another thing to say, ‘I tried this. I enrolled. I loved my experience.’”

The Marshall story belongs not just to the university but to every member of the Marshall family, he said, and the marketing and communications team is working diligently to make sure that story is heard.

“If you’re not helping people understand who you are and what you offer, if you’re not telling your story, then people are going to find the story somewhere else,” Traube said.

“And quite often, what they find is not going to be correct. It’s going to be whatever version of you someone else tells them. That’s where marketing comes in. People can give you a million different definitions of what marketing is, but at the end of the day marketing is telling your story — and inviting people into that story.”

Katherine Pyles is a freelance writer and editor living in Huntington. She is a 2009 graduate of Marshall University, where she was a member of the Society of Yeager Scholars.