Education institutions need to now make their future students connection better and smarter.

“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great” as the famous American business magnate J.D Rockerfeller once said.

The message is straight forward but it is not about giving up the good at the cost of pursuing something greater or better. It is about being respectful and mindful of what has worked well for you and then leveraging it as a base to pursue better practices for better outcome. Continuous improvement should be continuous as some would say.

It sounds fair and would get our nod but, to what extent have we been actually putting this into practice for our business sustainability? The fast growing international multicultural future students mass is now breaking all geographical barriers to pursue borderless skills and career focused higher education but has our engagement methodology with this new generation become any better? This new gen is our skills, talent, revenue and a cornerstone of our future sustainability. It's time to think hard about how we could deploy a better engagement strategy in this space.

The global circumstances around us in the last couple of years have certainly given us an invaluable nudge to wake up, accept the reality, pivot quickly and smartly out of our good old comfortable mindset and adapt to the new world order to remain competitive and relevant. New trends and insights have already started emerging. We can already see the growing influence of the new digital forces and the digitally literate borderless global society. Our digital fa?ade and communication have become more important. ?

Amidst this changing landscape and growing global competitive pressures, the sector which has been witnessing major transformation and shift in tide is the education sector, especially the international higher education sector. To power through this headwind, Australia has identified its international education as a flagship sector in various economic strategies. Internationalisation, underpinned by a quality student experience has now become a very distinct strategic objective for our educational institutions to help build their global student market share.?

But how strong is our appetite to adopt new practices to make our strengths even stronger? Are we still leveraging the same old practice to achieve a different or better results? What are we now doing differently as an institutional international team to directly engage with our global future students network and more importantly, how are we establishing a meaningful and smart 1:1 connection remotely with each aspiring digitally savvier future student who is yet to decide on the institution and the country of choice?

With the rapidly growing influence of generative AI, data analytics, power BI on our businesses along with higher digital literacy and mobility with our younger generation, what are we now doing differently to demonstrate the digital supremacy and the right image and perception of our institutional brand? When the demand for accurate and relevant information is now critical for a deeper engagement with the future students, irrespective of where they are based, how do we plan to adapt our communication strategy to make our brand engagement strategically stand out from the crowd? Would the recalibration of the brand logo alone help?

It is now time for us to appreciate that we are at a stage where the previous generic and personalised 1:1 engagement is giving way to a deeper and smarter ‘Hyper-Personalised’ approach to create an impact. The role of hyper-personalisation in our digital communication and engagement strategy has become highly critical. Hyper-personalisation is the use of real time data, machine learning, predictive analytics to get an accurate information of our future students to design a relevant targeted content of value for a meaningful remote targeted engagement. This needs to be done across various media channels to not only make our brand stand out but also to make our recipient future students feel more emotionally engaged and valued.

According to research conducted?by customer engagement platform Twilio, 62% of consumers say they expect personalization, and a brand will lose their loyalty without it. Boston Consulting Group in one of their articles dated July 2023 reported that hyper-personalised outreach and engagement produced by generative AI will offer innovative, low-cost methods for institutions to achieve enrolment goals.

So, with these insights on hand, do the institutions have the tools or the platform to create an agile, meaningful, and smarter hyper personalised digital engagement of the global student community? Do our institutions have a live visibility and measurement of the effectiveness of their marketing activities which could help modify their engagement spontaneously across the global regional markets? Are our education institutions willing to see what new solutions and services are now available in this space?

Answers to all these questions are available for you at your doorstep. Should you wish to know more about how we have helped similar higher education institutions adopt this new capability to empower their existing processes and attain better conversion, please reach out to us for a chat.

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