When it comes to allocating marketing dollars for student recruitment, university leaders face numerous questions:
- What strategies can help us stand out in a crowded and competitive market?
- How can we stretch our marketing budget to achieve the best possible results?
- How do we leverage technology to make informed marketing decisions?
To answer these questions, you need to set clear recruitment goals, develop a flexible marketing plan that drives sustainable results, and assess your existing resources and strengths to identify gaps. By employing innovative digital marketing tactics and implementing the right technology, you can reach your marketing and enrollment goals efficiently and cost-effectively.
Unpacking Higher Education Marketing: Trends and Challenges
Higher education marketing is changing. Prospective students are behaving more like consumers in how and where they search for programs, expecting the same level of sophistication, personalization, and engagement from universities that they experience in other purchasing decisions.
University administrators face significant marketing challenges to adapt to these trends, including:
- Defining and communicating the institution's unique value proposition: Standing out in a competitive market.
- Integrating tech and data: Uniting marketing and admissions technology and data ensure streamlined operations, effective data management, and accurate performance measurement.
- Developing an interconnected strategy: Aligning marketing and admissions to ensure cohesive messaging and efforts.
- Maximize ROI from available budget: Allocating budget to where it’s generating results.
Despite these challenges, even universities with tight marketing budgets can compete effectively. Omnichannel digital marketing strategies level the playing field, allowing colleges and universities of all sizes to create compelling, data-driven campaigns that resonate with today’s discerning students. With careful planning and the right tools, higher education administrators can achieve significant impact within budget.
Driving Efficiency in Your University Marketing Budget
In order to develop a comprehensive enrollment strategy, it is important to follow a structured approach and consider various factors to ensure its success. This involves establishing enrollment goals, reviewing historical conversion rates, building a multi-channel plan, and integrating data across technologies and funnel stages. Each of these steps is vital to accurately forecast enrollments, improve targeting, and optimize marketing spend for better results.
- Establish enrollment goals that align with your program, school, or university’s overall objectives.
- Review historical conversion rates throughout the funnel to determine volume needs at the top of the funnel.
- Review historical performance to build a multi-channel plan and channel-level goals.
- Integrate data across technologies and funnel stages to enable accurate enrollment forecasts, improve targeting, and shift dollars to channels or campaigns yielding the best results.
With realistic marketing goals, a strategic budget allocation, and a technology stack that enables data-driven efforts, you’re ready to launch and optimize cost-effective marketing campaigns built for sustainable ROI.
Maximizing University Marketing ROI
It’s imperative that you measure ROI in order to ensure your marketing efforts are sustainable. The beauty of online marketing versus traditional efforts is that nearly every touchpoint is trackable. Digital marketing analytics empowers you to know exactly how many people saw your advertisement (impressions), how many clicked, and the actions they took thereafter, such as providing their contact information or applying. This granular data enables marketers to optimize every aspect of the enrollment journey, including user-flow, content and creatives, and quickly implement changes to improve results.
In addition to tracking initial engagement metrics, it is also important to measure down-funnel performance to accurately measure marketing ROI. Down-funnel metrics include actions such as form submissions, applications completed, and enrollments. By tracking these metrics, you can determine which marketing channels and campaigns are driving the highest quality leads and producing the most successful outcomes.
Understanding down-funnel performance allows you to allocate your marketing budget effectively and make data-driven decisions. For example, if you find that a specific campaign is generating a high number of form submissions but very few enrollments, you can investigate further to identify any potential barriers in the enrollment process. This knowledge can help you optimize your marketing strategies and allocate resources to the channels and tactics that deliver the best return on investment.
Advocating for Marketing Budget
Securing adequate marketing budgets requires effective advocacy. This involves demonstrating the value and impact of marketing investments through data-driven insights and clear ROI metrics. Administrators should present compelling cases that link marketing efforts to tangible outcomes, such as increased enrollment, improved student retention, and enhanced institutional reputation. Engaging key stakeholders, including faculty and board members, in understanding the strategic importance of marketing can also garner broader support for budget approvals.
Accurate forecasting is critical to advocating for marketing budget. Everspring’s Enrollment Marketing Platform enables universities to predict the outcome of marketing funds spent and measure activity to adjust spend based on enrollment projections.
Strategic Marketing Budgeting and ROI Maximization
To thrive in today's competitive educational landscape, higher education leadership must adopt strategic budgeting, focus on maximizing ROI, and employ cost-effective marketing strategies. By understanding financial constraints, setting clear goals, leveraging integrated technology and data, and optimizing throughout the funnel, universities can achieve substantial results even with limited budgets. Effective advocacy for marketing budgets and using data-driven insights are crucial.
Everspring’s Enrollment Marketing Platform centralizes data from across marketing channels, martech tools, and admissions touchpoints so universities can cut unnecessary spending and focus on attracting prospective students most likely to enroll. Send a message to Everspring’s experts to learn more.