Centralize Education Marketing Strategy
A common challenge when working in higher education marketing is budgets are spread between departments and decentralized. In a recent webinar, the University of Albany vice president Joe Brennan argued that being able to centralize marketing expenditures is key to running an efficient higher education marketing program.
This may not be feasible at all institutions, but standardizing KPI’s and creating a centralized place for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is a step in the right direction. We’ll talk more about ways to do this in the next section.
Without centralized reporting, it’s easy for different departments to fall into a pattern of using the same strategies year after year just because that’s what they did the year before. Oftentimes, departments are resistant to change, and the only way to sell new tactics or branding is with data. Woodbury University found this when they redid their branding a few years ago.
Woodbury CMO Sharri Gibbons: “It takes concrete data to be able to sell that ‘Look, this is working with younger students so let’s go with it, rather than let’s go with what we are used to.'”
Optimize your email program with AI
If your institution is cold emailing prospective students, there’s a good chance many are going directly to spam. 76% of students say they prefer to hear from colleges and universities via email over direct mail, but email deliverability can make it hard to reach students. Even though students have opted-in to receive email via the College Board doesn’t mean your emails won’t go to spam.
Using a tool to throttle outbound emails is one way to improve deliverability when sending bulk email. Also, doing everything you can to optimize email engagement will make sure your sender reputation stays high and your emails continue to be delivered.
A few ways you can optimize your engagement include:
A/B testing messaging/subject lines – A/B testing is the only way to isolate message content from other variables like list quality or send time. Try to regularly split test your subject lines and content to see what performs best.
Personalizing content – Sending personalized, segmented relevant emails is one of the best ways you can increase your engagement and improve overall deliverability. – We’ll touch more on this later.
Optimizing your timing with AI – There are machine learning tools that can be used to identify the best time to email each person who’s interacted with your email newsletter in the past. Sending an email with personalized delivery times can increase engagement by between 15-30%. These Machine learning tools can help you identify which prospective students on your list are losing interest and are unlikely to engage with your messages. This way you can save your sender reputation by only emailing those people who are likely to engage.
Build a Digital-Friendly Brand
Branding has always been an important part of higher education marketing, but many colleges and universities in Ghana are now finding they need to update their branding to work on digital devices. For example, Imperial College Business School was able to drive up student applications using a new visual identity taking a “digital-first” approach.
Woodbury University increased page visitors by 4000% with a combination of a new brand platform, coordinated social media campaign, and highly targeted marketing. Their campaign showed that the muted colors they had been using did not perform well with millennials.
From MarketingSherpa: “We have design professionals on our faculty who are … very, very opinionated,” Gibbons said. An example of this, she said, was how the architecture team liked muted colors. “But digital natives, the young ones under 21 and the young Millennials were by and large always responding to these very bright, multi-color setups.”
Finally, remember that to stand up over time, a higher education brand has to be associated with consistent quality education and alumni success. Showcase the quality of your university using statements backed with data and facts. Numbers showing a high number of applications, quality of professors, placement of graduates – all help to build a strong brand.
Live Streaming
Another emerging digital marketing strategy for higher education is the use of live streams. Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Video Chat for Snapchat, and Periscope for Twitter are the big players in this arena.
A few ways you could use live streaming include live stream Q&A sessions, live streaming events like sports, and even live-streaming classes. Live streams are viewed as “more authentic” by many millennials and can be a great way to build relationships with potential students.
Personalize communication
Online education provider Stafford Global was able to increase web leads by 50% using HubSpot. By personalizing and optimizing their communication strategy using workflows, they were able to shorten their conversion time by 58%.
From Stafford: “For example, prospects from the US and Canada prefer to get text messages and emails before we contact them by phone. However, prospects from the Middle East and Africa would rather receive a phone call first. With Workflows, we can make sure that everyone gets their optimal experience.”
Creating detailed email workflows based on your different types of student personas is another way you can use marketing automation. People seek higher education for different reasons. Some are coming straight from high school while others are changing careers.
Consider segmenting your audience to better address their individual needs. Parthenon Group breaks university students into six segments:
- Aspiring academics – “traditional students” mostly 18-to-24-year-olds with impressive academic profiles.
- Coming of age – these are mostly in the same age group but they are yet to decide on what to focus on.
- Career starters – still in the same age group but these are more career-oriented and are using college as a springboard for their future careers.
- Career accelerators – these prospects are older, already working but looking to advance in their field of work. They are most likely to avail of online courses among all segments.
- Industry switchers – probably in the same age group as career accelerators but are looking to switch fields possibly due to lack of opportunities and growth in the present one.
- Academic wanderers – these are those getting into college later in life, who don’t have a specific path in mind but do believe that a degree will open up doors for them. Most likely to be unemployed and have lower income.
By understanding what types of students your university is attracting, you can better target your marketing to address their concerns.
Track the right KPI’s
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. – Peter Drucker
While increased enrollment is your ultimate goal, if that’s all you measure, you won’t be able to see results fast enough to make adjustments. An effective college recruiting strategy should include tracking the following KPI’s:
Call-to-action conversion rates – Are visitors responding to your website? Filling out forms? Registering for events?
Traffic sources – Where are your website visitors coming from? Organic search? Email outreach? Social Trafic? Paid Search?
Social media engagement – Is your social media strategy working? Is your following not only growing but engaging?
Cost of Acquisition/Cost per applicant – The median cost for recruiting an undergrad student at a private four-year college was $2,232 in 2016. How much are you spending on each channel and how many students did each campaign influence?
Personalized mobile-friendly website
More than ever, a university’s website is its primarily calling card. Most students start their search for schools online and your website is probably the first time they will come in contact with your brand.
Be data-driven in your approach as you design your website and make sure you have people on your team that are familiar with effective UX design. Now is not the time to be cheap. With the pivotal role u
university websites play in student research, you’ll want to make sure your website is effective and optimized for conversions.
It’s well known that millennials like their phones, but did you know that 1 out of 5 millennials use, ONLY mobile devices to access the Internet? Having a non-responsive or non-mobile-friendly website is not an option in 2019. Make sure your website performs well on both desktop, mobile, and tablets.
Build your content with your persona’s in mind and consider using web personalization. Web personalize will allow you to optimize conversions for students who have expressed an interest in particular programs at your school by featuring content from those programs.
Chatbots for higher education marketing
60% of students expect a response from a college representative within the same day after filling out a form. To make sure students are responded to quickly, some universities are using webchat. By implementing chat, or “conversation marketing” college representatives can reply to questions immediately.
Chat platforms like Drift allow you to respond to student inquiries instantly by automating the first steps in a conversation before escalating the conversation to a real person. Drift found your chance of contact decreases 10x after just five minutes without a response, so automating responses is critical if you aren’t going to have people standing by for live chat all the time.
When implemented effectively, this “fast lane” can dramatically speed up conversations with students.
Implementing your new higher education marketing strategy
Marketing shouldn’t just be executing the same strategy year after year, but actively coordinating with the rest of the school administration to plan and execute a marketing strategy that fits the university’s goals as a whole. It’s up to you to define what success looks like for your team. It’s time to make a plan, and put these 10 new strategies for higher education marketing to work. We at PARAGON leverages Digital Marketing for Higher Education Marketing for schools in Ghana and Africa.
We understand how to market a school or how to promote a school. If you need a marketing company that knows how to develop a marketing plan for a school and recruits more students, then talk to us. We drive more prospective students to your school website, engage them and convert them to students
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