Idol or Bust (Digital Marketing)

Idol or Bust is the (tongue-in-cheek) name for the professorship’s internal digital marketing team.

We currently have four main research and development projects. Each project has a project leader, who works with a marketer from the IB digital marketing team to get the word out. At the same time, the marketers form a community of practice at the professorship, effectively an internal digital marketing agency (sic!).

Why you may ask? Research and development projects need marketing, if they want to be taken notice of. If all you care about is a publication list to be submitted to your employer, you probably don’t need marketing. However, beyond this, there are several reasons why professors invest in marketing their projects:

• Increased citations. Whichever way you go, more attention makes your research work more easily findable, driving up reads and citations.
• Improved projects. If your projects are found more often, in particular if they are open source projects, you can benefit from collaboration.
• Easier research funding. At least in Germany, all grant programs ask (and make part of the evaluation) how you intend to have an impact.
• Improved transfer. If your projects are turned into startups, said attention increases initial momentum and supports commercial fundraising.

Marketing on the web is highly competitive. The complexity of tools and techniques to create marketing content, to position the content for search engines, to effectively use social media, etc. is considerable.

We have learned over time how to do it right and codified much of it into a handbook. Our community of practice ensures knowledge and know-how is shared among members. This way, we get new marketers up to speed quickly. Still, effective marketing rests on the shoulders of competent people. If you’ve got what it takes, please be in touch!