Do you know who makes up your student body? I mean REALLY understand their lifestyle, what they consume (watch and read), and why they picked your institution? Did you know that prospective students are more interested in the makeup of the student body (culture) when making a college decision, than in your offerings? Early on, students create a short list of schools based upon geography, offerings, and extracurricular activities, however, a school’s culture and learning environment are the most important factors in making a final decision.
In order to understand the makeup of your student body, we recommend appending lifestyle segmentation data to your student list to understand the lifestyle clusters of your student body To do this, you would simply need use an analysis tool that uses a prospective student's address (zip code and/or zip+4) with a key field so you can append the information back to your core list. In other words, you do not need to provide names of your students (no privacy issues), rather, just the addresses and way to link the socio-economic cluster assignment for each back to your database. With this information, we will return back to you a report showing who your students are, what they consume (radio, TV, print), and their socio-economic status.
Step 2 - Know Why Students Choose You
Once you have established the key socio-graphic and demographic criteria (clusters) of your current student body related to a given program, the next step is providing a clear understanding of why your college or university was selected. Analyze primary groups of like-minded “clusters” and identify the key apprehensions and triggers that turned the final decision in your favor. With this information, you can purchase lists of prospective students fitting the same profiles (predictive analytics), and develop personalized marketing materials that touch on points that are proven to be important. This is the approach companies like Sears®, Verizon® and other well known b-to-c companies take to eliminate marketing waste and maximize the chance for a program’s success. Additionally, the approach provides you with a much deeper level of understanding of your marketing activities to enable more accurate predictive analytics.
Step 3: Build the Link between You and Your Prospects - Social Media is King
With the information from your lifestyle segmentation analysis and research in hand, you can provide connections between prospective students and current students through cost effective social media programs and mentor groups. Prospective students will be able to virtually connect with like-minded ambassadors of your school who we know engage in activities and having a similar socioeconomic/ethnic background as your prospective student.
Step 4: Leverage Your Resources!
Baseline, Automate, Capture, Profile, and Adapt. There are powerful marketing tools now available to save money by automating your existing marketing tasks while providing enhanced transparency into your prospecting process to maximize “yields” and return on marketing investment (ROMI). Here are a few examples of how many schools are streamling marketing tasks using automation to achieve marketing BPO.
· Web-to-Print and Print on Demand – is your internal graphics department struggling to keep up with internal custom requests? If so, you can set up self-service variable templates of common jobs (postcards, posters, formal invites, etc.) that will allow each school or program to drop in personalized information and imagery (that you provide, OR that the end-user can upload) in order to free you from daily request, while assuring your everyone “stays in brand.”
· Automated Lead Management Systems – Using ECM software (like Eloqua, Marketo, Portrait, and others), your should establish standard outreach programs for one or multiple customer “types.” These tools anable you to standardize and optimize outreach procedure including email templates, response forms, voice and rich media, and other integrated marketing activities. Not only will this take fulfilling individual request off your shoulders, the solution will automatically develop a complete prospect profile based with 100% managerial transparency into your prospecting process in order to predict response levels.
The largest benefit to automating your lead management activities is that you can re-use your marketing materials, easily test new offers, and continually improve your ROMI (return on marketing investment). Over time, lead management automation provides a true strategic advantage because success is achieved though micro (week to week), rather then macro (year to year) testing and improvements. The fact is that over 81% of top performing companies use some kind of lead automation solution (Aberdeen Study of Top Performing Companies, 2008). It’s not surprising, because those companies who have transparency into their lead management process quickly build knowledge which is immediately applied to enhance success.
For a complete with over 120 hours or the most recent research pertaining to the state of Higher Eduction, industry trends, marketing best practices, lifestyle cluster analysis tools, social media marketing management information, automated marketing set-up documentation, 2009 articles and much more, please email me, and I'll send you my "Excellence for Higher Education Marketing" toolkit. email jward@nugraphics.com for the kit (be sure to include your address!).
