Aaron Mabry is the Director of Marketing and Communications at Haywood Community College. He entered the field as an intern while earning a Bachelor of Arts degree at UNC Charlotte. Aaron is a multimedia professional with a track record of success in strategic marketing management, branding, project execution, leadership, digital operations, process improvement and solution delivery. He is skilled in developing strong, effective internal and external media in order to accommodate identified demographics through customer analysis and strategic brand development with proven experience creating web, print, social and collateral media content.
How did you get started in the marketing business?
While I was an undergrad at UNC Charlotte majoring in English with a minor in Technical Writing, I secured an internship with a Sporting Goods publication, SportsOneSource Media, of whom specialized in reviewing and reporting analytics and market trends for the aforementioned vertical. Essentially, my job was to research and interview key organizational leaders at companies such as Nike, Adidas, Puma, Oakley Sunglasses and Vibram, just to name a few, and gain insight into the products they were developing and planning to launch in the near future. The end-users for this publication ranged from sporting goods business owners to investors looking to gain insight for potential capital ventures. As a general rule, if a product was currently in a store, we reported on it approximately 6-12 months ago. By engaging in this dialogue, I began to understand the value of how good data and research can affect change within the market. While there, I was also introduced to best practices in effective layout and design principles and learned the value of how a good story can humanize data in a way that engages an end-user. I was eventually hired on full-time and after a year, relocated back to WNC to establish myself in an area in which I wanted to reside.
What is your background? What different jobs or industries have you worked in your career?
My career has carried me through best practices in marketing for the following industries:
- Sporting Goods
- Business Equipment
- Healthcare
- Real Estate
- New Home Construction
- Religious Organizations
- Higher Education
How do you determine the marketing needs for Haywood Community College?
Marketing needs are specific to every organization and relate directly to the goals associated with it. For instance, good marketing requires a goal, good data, the vision to see it, and the skill to realize it. As such, it is my responsibility to work with key leadership at the college, primarily the President and the Administrative Council, in determining what those goals are. Once goals have been determined, whether they’re campaign-specific or relate to the overall visual perception of the college, it’s my responsibility to correspond with my team in determining a good approach that will satisfy those goals. Often times that will mean a press release, web content, social media engagement, effective artwork that tells a story distributed via print ads, television and terrestrial/digital radio, as well as direct mail pieces designed specifically for various demographics associated with each campaign.
How do you prioritize the marketing needs for Haywood Community College?
Marketing can be as simple or as hard as you make it. And it all comes down to effective planning and execution. In prioritizing marketing needs for the college, or any other organization for that matter, it’s important to maintain a mile-high view and develop an understanding of how each gear works together to ensure the vision and mission of the organization is met. At its root, Haywood Community College is a central hub for community support in the delivery of higher education and workforce training that leads to jobs. Period. As a result, my personal mission and professional responsibility is to engage with the community to tell the story how HCC is changing lives both at home and abroad, as well as protect the public perception of the institution as a whole and the Office of the President.
What do you enjoy most about your career choice?
By using the office and the resources afforded to me through the college, I have the ability to directly impact end-users at a very personal level by conveying the message that education changes everything. In private industry, you don’t always get to feel so proud about what it is you’re marketing and how your efforts are ultimately serving the community. As such, this position is equally civic as it is business-centric. At any rate, there is a great deal of personal and professional satisfaction associated with my job.
What do you find most challenging?
My greatest challenge derives from my own personal ambition to continually push the envelope in terms of our design and innovative methods of delivery. As a result, I constantly find myself in a state of retrospect that impacts my decisions about campaigns. And when you’re constantly trying to reinvent the wheel and deny all sentiments of what’s already been done, it becomes an uphill battle that you’ll never quite surmount. However, it’s also important to maintain stylistic consistency as it relates to your brand. And even though we continually try to transcend our past initiatives and strive to show something new to our community and constituents, it’s my responsibility to also hone it all in to be sure that we maintain a certain image. That balancing act is my greatest challenge.
How do you keep up with best practices in your industry?
For me, keeping up with best practices involves what I call the three ‘Rs’ – reading, researching and reinventing yourself. In terms of reading, I satisfy this necessity by subscribing to what I consider to be industry-leading publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Communication Arts, Fast Company and Marketing News. I also make time each week to conduct research on new industry standards that aren’t specific to my vertical. As a marketing professional in higher education, I’m already well-versed in the best practices associated with it. However, I’ve come to find that looking at others are doing outside of my industry as a good starting point for affecting innovation in higher education. And lastly, being open to reinventing yourself is integral in terms of your own development. Just because you’ve always done it a certain way doesn’t mean you’ve been doing it the best way. I’ve learned that best practices incorporate a certain amount of malleability that will lead to greater success if I’m simply open to change.
What future trends do you see on the horizon for the industry?
Marketing is an animal that’s constantly evolving and for the better part of the 20th century, didn’t evolve parallel to the technology that was being created around it. However, as millennials mature and begin to inhabit the workforce in greater numbers, it’s obvious that best practices in marketing and IT will go hand-in-hand. No longer will an effective marketer have the ability to work in autonomy from data. And as that data becomes more readily available through the tools that are currently being developed by technology leaders, dollars spent will be subject to even greater scrutiny and understanding your ROI will not only be preferred, but required. Also, as we become even more entrenched in the constant stream of media, creative content writers and inbound marketing strategies will take greater precedence in marketing departments and the campaigns they create. In lieu of taking the direct approach of asking for business, the trend will be to earn trust and build fans by developing creative content that elevates the credibility of the organization. The idea is that in time, a fan will eventually become a customer, or in our case, an enrolled student. For example: instead of constantly knocking my end-users over the head with their need to register within the finite time we’ve provided, an inbound marketing strategy would involve leveraging the resources we have at the college, such as our expert faculty and writing articles that pertain to the interests of the community. This practice builds fans and cultivates trust between your business and the end-users. And as a fan, when their ‘aha’ moment comes and are in need of something, they’ll immediately think of you as the best provider.
What would you consider the essentials of a marketing toolkit?
- MacBook Pro
- High Speed Internet
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Web Analytics (Google, Piwik, etc.)
- An Open Mind and the ability to admit when you’re wrong
What kind of formal education and additional specialized training would you recommend that a person should acquire to enter into this profession?
To be ensure immediate impact in the current business landscape, an ideal education would be a B.A. or B.S. in Marketing or Public Relations with a Concentration in Analytics or Content Marketing. For the future, a more specialized concentration would be in UX or UI Design that helps to develop an understanding of the user experience as it pertains to digital media.
