10 Stages of Higher Education Marketing

Higher education recruitment marketing is one of the most challenging yet rewarding niches in the marketing realm. Small budgets, bureaucracy, COVID-19, and a changing education climate make it hard for education marketers to be ahead of the curve. With education marketing, schools and programs are not just selling a course or knowledge but a potential life. Higher education is the first stepping stone into adulthood for many students and paves the way for the rest of their lives.

Marketing within higher education includes universities, colleges, trade schools, online training, specialized schools like coding boot camps, and more. This guide aims to give you an understanding of the processes and steps that happen in higher education marketing. While I believe this guide is highly informative, it will not dive deep into any one subject but give you an understanding of the needs of each stage. This guide will help you:

·??????Understand the stages of education marketing

·??????What is an education marketing strategy

·??????Build a marketing plan

I have broken down these ten steps into four stages: research cycle, pre-recruitment, class in-session, and post-graduation. Within these, I have created marketing roadblocks that you may encounter along the way (hopefully less after this read).??

??????????????????????????????????????????Education Marketing Funnel

Research Cycle

1. Marketing Research

Pre Recruitment Cycle

3. Awareness

4. Research and Knowledge

5. Action and considerations

6. Preparation

7. Selection

School Experience Cycle

8. Experience

9. Satisfaction

Post Graduation????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

10. Loyalty & Advocacy

1.Your pre-recruitment cycle

The pre-recruitment stage is to find out whom you are marketing towards. We tend to get excited and open up our target market because we feel we are eliminating people and profits that we can acquire, and while that could be true, most likely, you will spend more time and money to acquire them. If you're the middle of the pack business school, maybe spending all your time and effort to make your school seems like Harvard and trying to get those sure-fire Harvard applicants might not be the best strategy. First, you're not just going against Harvard and their vast wealth and brand power, but you're going against every other school doing the same (and they probably have big budgets too). You can reach for the stars, so to speak, but still keep it simple and know your prospective students.

Audience Research

Research and Target Market

The most overlooked and the least prepared step in the whole game of recruitment marketing is where marketers tend to fail. Great actors will not just act the role they star in; they become the character in and out. You may think you know your consumer, but in fact, do you know your consumer? Before you figure who and what your market is, you MUST do as much research as possible (it will save you time and money in the long run).?

Pain Points

Student pain points refer to your prospective students' problems and how your products or services resolve those problems. If your marketing does not consider the pain points your prospective students encounter, your marketing will be misunderstood – or worse, ignored.

It would help if you did not think of student pain points as negative but rather why your programs exist. Once you start looking at your programs from prospective students' views, everything you do, including marketing, will be more targeted and effective.

Student Goals

Understanding what your students want to achieve will help you formulate your understanding of better communication. While the student's task is to graduate, their goal is to get a well-paying and rewarding career.

Student Marketing Personas

Marketing personas or buyer personas are an excellent tool for organizing your target market and knowing whom you are marketing to.??The buyer personas are defined?as:

Research-based archetypal (modelled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behaviour, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions

Your school has a wealth of knowledge, including recruiters, careers, HR, and more, who can help you develop your marketing personas.??Buffer has a great article?on how to formulate and create your marketing personas, and I highly suggest to you it out. Below is an excellent example of when a completed and visual marketing persona looks like.

https://blog.alexa.com/10-buyer-persona-examples-help-create/

Why your brand is best

The first thing you need to do is put on your acting hat and become the student you want to market to. Don't just think about your target audience as a general male or female, 18-24, likes social media and has some disposable income; you need to build personas that will form the foundation of your target audience. With this, you will serve your potential customer better and relevant ads while spending less.?

Student age: Depending on your school's program, age may or may not be essential yet an excellent factor to consider.

Location:?Knowing where your customers are and where you want to expand. Using data analytics and social media tools, email inquiries, and many more will help you understand your demand locations.

Interests:?Know what your audience likes and where to find them. Yes, they will have all different interests, but together, your audience wants your program or something like it and how you can find them in a familiar place. Interest could be segmented in programmatic advertising or people who like a specific business.

Recruitment stage:?What stages of your prospective students are a major determining factor in how you market yourself.

Spending Power: Education is funny about the power of expenditures with scholarships, parents, and loans to create a complicated area to understand what and who your prospective students are. If you're a $150,000 MBA program, we can eliminate many that cannot merely afford the program. However, many programs are affordable, thus not allowing marketing to utilize and understand this area very well.

2. Strategy and Channels

You're probably thinking that is much research and that's right, the least sexy thing in recruitment marketing is the planning of your recruitment cycle, but by far, the most important thing you can do. Whether you are creating your campaign in-house or through your agency partner, utilizing what you learned in stage 1 will help you create your awareness or, in better terms, your advertising campaign will be helpful to reach your goals.

TOFU, MOFU, BOFU & AIDA:?You may be thinking these are ingredients for a sushi dish, but they aren't. Since we all love an easy-to-remember acronym, these four are particularly helpful when drafting out your customer stages and recognizing how the marketing funnel works.

• TOFU: Top of the funnel. The tactics you use to generate student awareness.
• MOFU: Middle of the funnel. The tactics you use to generate prospective student leads.
• BOFU: Bottom of the funnel. The tactics you use to get applications and keep students happy.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is the"why" behind your school or program's success. A marketing strategy is where you set out your goals. You will need to understand your audience and what their goals are, what your goals are, and how you can reach both of them. Put it simply, it is a broad look at the who – whom you are marketing to and the what – what you hope to gain from marketing.

Marketing Plan

The marketing plan takes the strategy you created and puts it in place. Hubspot has excellent guides to?making your marketing plan.?They say that it?contains?one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each method back to a more extensive marketing operation and business goal.

Advertising

Continuing in section 3 and using the strategy to implement the plan, your advertising channels will be critical to your success.

Lead Generation

Before you structure your marketing plan in your advertising campaign, organize your lead generation into a proper lead funnel. How will your school get, organize, manage, and contact your leads?

Lead generation is a big task and hard to set up, but worth every step once you organize the structure and setup.

?What items do you need?

· Website content management system

· Marketing Automation Software like?Hubspot, Marketo, and?Activecampaign

· CRM integration, including email and social CRM systems that interact as one.

Within your lead generation, there are two ways to attract prospective students:

Inbound Marketing: This can include blogs, social media engagement, SEO on-page optimization, eBooks, infographics, videos, webinars that lead to call-to-action, landing pages.

Demand Marketing: This included paid search (PPC), social media ads, native ads, email marketing, direct mail, print ads, media ads, trade shows, speaking engagements, personal networking, or anything you cannot do for free.

3. Awareness

This section will tell you how to reach your audience, and I am sure; you are already using most of these. The thing with awareness is that it's not how much you spend or the time it takes to release it but how your audience engages with what you tell them. Your vision is crafted; your success will determine how effectively you make them aware of your story.

Content Marketing

It's 2020, and if you are not content-focused, then you need to be. Content marketing is the perennial problem most consumers dislike about traditional marketing – interruption. Traditional ads interrupt them at a point in time when they do not care or want it. Aside from disruption, most traditional marketing channels do not give the right kind of information consumers want, thus losing the ability to catch their attention or interest to be effective. Providing excellent and relevant content resolves all these and much more, and the following will give you a more comprehensive look into the dynamic world of content marketing.

"This means that SEOs need to learn how to write or hire people who know how to write," Wright said. "Google's editorial discretion isn't perfect yet – there will still be content that ranks that shouldn't. But the day is coming when the best content will win."

Make it your goal to have the best content on the web for your topic, or at least an essential subset of your topic.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience. Here are some great?examples?to help give you a better understanding of what you can do with this form of advertising.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience. Here are some great examples to help give you a better understanding of what you can do with this form of advertising.

Programmatic

Programmatic ad buying is the use of software to buy digital advertising. Whereas the traditional method includes requests for proposals, tenders, quotes, and human negotiation, programmatic buying uses machines and algorithms to purchase display space. The Digital Marketing Institute has a great?guide on programmatic advertising. Most likely, you will have an eternal agency manage this form of advertising.

Brochure and Marketing Material

The marketing brochure is the standard in recruitment education marketing. If you don't have one, what are you doing? No, if you don't need one and you're doing good, let me know your secret. Here are some?great design ideas?to help brainstorm unique and creative ideas into your print marketing mix.

SEO & SEM

In 2020, Google will continue to look at the overall reputation and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritative, and Trustworthiness. According to?WebFX, 67% of prospective students use search engines as their first source of information for higher education institutions and 9 in 10 do not know which school they wish to attend during the initial research stages; it's more important than ever to make sure that your website looks and operates to a high standard to show up within the top search results. With 78% of applicants influenced by these results, SEO can?increase your enrollment figures?and help you get the edge above your competitors!

A good example is that many colleges or universities may have a continuing education school that has many business courses, but also, you may have a business school trying to win over the same student. Many schools cannibalize their marketing budgets because they bid for the same student.?

Mobile SEO

Back in 2016,?Google?pretty much said, "You better step up your mobile game" to meet the demand of mobile. A great article from?Moz, a great SEO platform that explains everything you need to know about Mobile optimization. If you're school or program isn't mobile-focused with your website content, you need to start the ball rolling. Your content will begin to fail you, and you will lose indexing results if you don't improve your website to mobile-first.

Social Media

In 2020, Facebook will continue to be a giant player in social media; its growth is slowing, and platforms like Tik Tok are becoming popular with teenagers. New platforms allow for new marketing opportunities for engaging with customers.

Content is not the king but a great knight to help fight your online battles of impressions. Do not push content for its sake or that your boss wants a certain amount of posts, etc. Understand when, where, how, and why your audience engages with your content and build your content strategy on social media to match your userbase.

Email

We are sure you already have an email marketing strategy in place, and there are a million articles out there that will say "write great headlines" and "write content that sells," well, yes, we know that!

In March 2019, spam messages accounted for?56% of global email traffic.?The challenge is to develop email campaigns as appealing and informative as other marketing tools that are heavily consumed in this age of social media and apps.

Digital Marketing

Once again, we can write for days on this subject, but we are not here to write in great lengths how to do your digital marketing (your in-house team or agency should know).?For example, Google recently announced during?Google Marketing Live 2019?a smarter automated bidding that uses machine learning to optimize towards selected performance targets in every auction—a feature known as "auction-time bidding."

However, Apps like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, are not restricted to personal uses any longer. And while some have limited private APIs like Whatsapp, others like Facebook are more flexible when it comes to automated bots and already have fully-fledged marketing tech available on the market.

As a marketer, you need to be looking for consolidated tools and out-of-the-box campaigns, can be deployed with a few clicks. A templated campaign can include a couple of landing pages, ready forms, data tracking, and workflow with all its messages created based on campaign goals, such as a paid ad campaign. With this capability, marketers can cut downtime, decrease cost, and focus on improving their content versus doing redundant work.

Recruitment Fairs and Events

We are sure you already have an email marketing strategy in place, and there are a million articles out there that will say "write great headlines" and "write content that sells," well, yes, we know that!

In March 2019, spam messages accounted for?56% of global email traffic.?The challenge is to develop email campaigns as appealing and informative as other marketing tools that are heavily consumed in this age of social media and apps.

International Advertising

International students play (and pay) a huge role in recruitment and education marketing. If you are trying to get students in China and your focus is on Facebook, then boy, I have some news for you.

These are some of the major players in China's social media market that does not influence Countries like Canada, the USA, Australia, and England (other than those who are from China):

1. WeChat: Not Just the Chinese Facebook?Read Now

2. Sina Weibo: Twitter of China?Read Now

3. Tencent QQ: Popular Instant Messaging App?Read Now

4. Tencent Video: The King of Online Video in China

WeChat is an?all-in-one messaging app?that provides games, online shopping, and financial services. Users can get almost everything they need within the app, leading to its classification as a "Super-App." Due to these reasons, it's risen to become the most popular social media in China.

Monthly Active Users: 1.132 Billion and 619.6 million daily users (Sep 2018)

While the other major player in international education demand in India, with

· The average person in India as a social media user spends?17 hours?on the platforms each week. People in India spend more than social media users in China and the United States.

· India's internet users are fond of social media. In 2021, it is estimated that there will be around?448 million?social network users?in India, a significant increase from 2019, where it figures at 351 million.

· Facebook is the?most popular social networking site?in the country. There are about?270 million?Facebook users in India?as of 2019, placing India as the country with the?most extensive Facebook user base?globally.?

· Not to mention, the social video app TikTok has been a massive hit in India as it has reached?1.5 billion?downloads worldwide, and India leads the chart with?466.8 million?or about 31% of all unique installs.?

The point is that your international marketing cannot be cookie-cutter across the board, and to make a successful marketing strategy; you need to know and understand each market. Apps like TikTok, WeChat, Sina Weibo, and Facebook play a huge role in their respective markets, but it's up to you to know what is best.

VR and AR

AR and VR can be a great way to have experiential marketing campaigns and create a significant interaction with your brand.?VR recruitment?will help open up your brand's recruitment process because of how complex and competitive the contemporary job landscape has become; recruiters need new tools to give them an edge. Cutting-edge technologies like AR and VR can make a real difference - streamline systems, build engagement, and selection smarter, simpler, and faster.

At the Ted Rogers School of Management, I created a more powerful brand image for Ryerson University and the Ted Rogers School of Management. The pain point that kept coming up was that our brand power was inadequate internationally and overseas at recruitment fairs. The program was great, but our competition was schools like Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, UofT, and many other top universities. We created a VR recruitment app and 3 VR videos to help give international students a better perspective of how our university felt like and experiencing the?City of Toronto?in 360 VR. We also created 2?VR videos of alumni?that interacted with the VR system to give prospective students an amazing alumni experience; no other university was offering. These video's provided us with a buzz at university fairs and provided extended awareness and student interaction.

Influencer

Successful and innovative alumni are a great way to utilize influencer marketing, and in fact, education was one of the first adapters in influencer marketing. While Kanye West will undoubtedly get your program noticed, prospective students want to see results and what better than people who have come, seen and conquered from your programs.?

Undergraduate funnel

The most for any large education organization is to create effective communication for their undergrads to stay within the school for continuing education or graduate programs.

Waze

Another great way to attract local attention is by using your school's areas as an excellent geolocation tool and or using key business areas to draw attention to your education brand.

4. Prospective Students Research and Knowledge Stage

This stage is more of understanding what stage 2 affects how prospective students will (or will not) engage with your brand. This stage is how your content marketing involves your brand's interaction.

These are the key areas that look while they work on the research to see which program is right for them.?

Google Search:?Your search strategy will tell a lot about your program and understand where your rank starts.

Social Media:?Schools and programs make a mistake in social media channels and make them both for the students and recruitment marketing.?While this could be accomplished, it is improbable that you effectively serve both your demands. With stories and instant videos becoming more critical, schools can use accounts to meet the needs of current students engaged with your brand and use standard posts for recruitment marketing, thus not cannibalizing both markets.?

Education Rankings:?Rankings are essential to some students and not so much to others. Your school program will know how to import the ranking are and how you can reach them.

LinkedIn:?This is an Astrix to the social media research part above: Prospective students will go to your LinkedIn page. How you manage and organize your LinkedIn alumni section is vital to allow prospective students to look over your alumni.??The alumni selection?tool is an excellent source for these students.

Blogs:?Blogs are a great source of information from past and present students toward prospective students. Your task is to identify if any of your current students or alumni have recent blogs. Now blogs don't need to focus directly on the school, and they need to have a tie-in to your program.

Reddit:?Reddit is a vast source for questions students want to ask, not your school directly. Having alumni on these channels will effectively mislead questions and misleading information and opinions that can hurt your brand's image.

· Lack of school presence; that is an issue when people are not talking about your school. The secondary thing is word of mouth, regardless of how good your program is.

· Perception is a significant issue for education, and the right amount is not always correct. Utilizing your alumni (See stage 9) will help enhance your school's brand and help it when others (grads from other schools) will speak down about your program.

5. Actions and Considerations

This section is how you can influence prospective students during their consideration stage of recruitment. This stage is far down the marketing funnel and a place where you "seal the deal." All your work pushing down perspective students

In-Person visits:?From international to domestic students, people like to scope their possible school of choice, and how you layout your marketing in-house during visits can give a great first impression.

Recruiter emails:??Personalization emails are excellent in marketing but having your recruiters use platforms like Salesforce

Attend-a-class:

Experiencing your school, program, instructors, and class is valuable to the student marketing experience. Ensure your classrooms are appropriately set to us and have influential speakers, notable alumni, Q & A, and other available options.?

(Marketing Roadblocks)

· The student is not qualified. Create content that helps students understand how to improve their chances for future applications

· Cost factors play a considerable part in a student's application process, and how you can open pathways for funding will help.

· Too much effort to apply is another issue many programs have. We are in an age where we interact with things fast and move on. If your prospective students interact with content that is usually less than a minute on average, and you create a strenuous application process, that could be an application issue. This is not to say specialty programs shouldn't have specific information, but tailor that to your prospective audience and not the other way around.

6. Preparation

This section is less on the marketer and more on the organizational level, but as a marketer, you need to know and take part in all the steps to create a better foundation for your organization.

Tests and exams

Schools that offer prep and test work internally will automatically get more students in the door (not necessarily application). The more you have students acclimatize to your school, campus, and area, the more you make them feel at home and, through that, more chances at applications.?

Application session

Having an in-house application session will help students get in the door and work with their recruiters.?

Info session

Info sessions are a great way to bring students into your campus (if done locally) or at a 3rd party location if away. Don't make this a laborious selling process but allow successful alumni, notable professors, and industry leaders to nudge prospective students in the right direction. Have recruiters there, but they shouldn't be the primary source of information as they can be seen as "salespeople" vs. the ladder.?

(Marketing Roadblocks)

Application limbo is a huge issue that affects many schools and programs. The unique inbound perspective connects your creation, the better your chance to reduce limbo.

7. Selection

This section is most likely the least active in education marketing but a great way to understand your pain points and if you helped answer and elevate them.

Application

Not all application processes are the same, with some being more complicated than others. Marketers and recruiters create content to help students navigate the application process. From videos to visual aides, having effective content that allows the student to apply without help from your recruiters will save time and money.

Review Offers and funding

Reviewing offers is essential to recruiters and prospective students. At this stage, the only task for marketers is to collect information about the issues with students accepting offers and the funding needs and problems. These can tie back into your pain points for the next recruitment period to better help education perspective students.

(Marketing Roadblocks)

Us vs. Them:?Sometimes,?regardless of your marketing, another program will be more suited for a student.

Lack of funding deferral:?Maybe next time, a prospective student may say.?

No Money No Honey: Having payment options, loan agreements with banks, and financial institutions that may help the student have the means to pay for the program.

8. Experience

Congrats, you got the student you wanted, and you're ready to kick back, have your coffee, and take the break you deserve.?NOT SO FAST.?The student experience is just as necessary as the other six steps you have done. Why do you ask? The student experience is a massive sell in how you market your program. How prospective students view the student experience and how well your graduates speak about your program.?

Academic vs. nonacademic

Your focus should be on both the academic (in-schools) and the nonacademic (Student activities and student life), both aspects of your student's educational journey.

Careers:?Along with student experience, jobs are an ever-so-important factor in how you market your program.

9. Satisfaction

As the rolling stones sang, "I can't get no satisfaction, I can't get no satisfaction," while a great song, not a thing you want to hear from your alumni.?The student experience plays an essential role in the overall satisfaction levels. A great education marketer will work hard in this area to understand how new graduates feel about their education and employment experience.

Getting hired

Getting a job is what it's all about, and if your students are not getting a job, Houston, we have a problem.

Alumni Survey

Sometimes things are better said on paper; how alumni surveys play an essential tool in your education marketing strategy. Survey Monkey is a great and valuable tool to reach out to your alumni, and they even provide an?alumni survey template. Survey monkey says that universities often forget alumni's influence on their behalf. Alumni can tell prospective students what their experience was like—with the power of firsthand experience—which adds credibility to the claims your organization strives to make.

• Understand the alumni experience and satisfaction with all areas of your student's education – from academic backgrounds (quality of professors and departments) to student experiences (campus life, extracurricular activities, technology resources).

(Marketing Road Blocks)

Failed

Failing sucks, and there are many reasons, but knowing as much as possible about student failure without getting into personal information can help with your future pain points.

Didn't get hired

Jobs are the most critical factor in education, and when your alumni are not getting hired, this can be a big issue for future students.

Debt and ROI

Graduating with much debt and not finding jobs that don't add up to the ROI factors can significantly impact how prospective students view your program.?

10. Loyalty and Advocacy

Loyalty and advocacy are where alumni engagement stands out, how your student experience turns into support, and how prospective students see your "end product."

Social Media

Education marketers that understand and connect with their alumni on social channels create excellent brand advocacy. Many schools and programs have an alumni coordinator or even an office that deals directly with alumni communications. The alumni team has extensive knowledge and will help your marketing knowledge and efforts to utilize your alumni network more effectively.

Employers

Knowing where your alumni work is a must, and thanks to the Linkedin alumni feature, you can see a great snapshot of your alumni ecosystem. Having a database or alumni data is key to understanding the success of your alumni and, thus, the further success of your programs.

Conclusion

Higher education marketing is not an easy niche in the marketing world. You're not just marketing a school or program; you're selling a potential life. These ten stages of higher education marketing are not the holy grail or everything under the sun but a simple guide to know what to expect and how to do it better. Education is changing rapidly, and while you are marketing to students, you must always be a marketing student; there is still something new to learn, a program to adopt, and skills to utilize in marketing.?