What are the best marketing strategies for 2022? I am going to share thoughts about some of these questions today.
We at China Admissions focus on international student recruitment who are looking to study in China. I am sharing more about some of the things I have learnt.
Background:
There are various models of international marketing and different universities use different ways to attract students. In some ways we have an advantage because we are an online platform that works with many different universities, so we can see lots of different strategies and what works and what doesn’t work. We are also a company which means we can try out lots of different strategies to see what works and what doesn’t work. I’m continually learning from other industries that are more advanced such as e-commerce and trying new things. We’ve made mistakes, we’ve discovered some new strategies that work and many that don’t.
With the rise of the digital economy, social media, and COVID it has caused huge changes to the student recruitment model. I am sharing some toolkits for how to navigate the changing landscape.
I find student recruitment fascinating, it involves many different perspectives. It is both a science and an art. There is room for creativity, it needs a deep understanding of people – the students and what they need, and it also needs an understanding of systems – technology – processes, and finance. In this article I am sharing more about the systems and a suggested model and framework for universities to navigate this landscape successfully.
Should I be sharing our marketing secrets and all that I know? I think this can be valuable to help more people understand student recruitment and how it works. It can save time and energy and help students. Also it is important to note that there is no final destination. This field is constantly developing and so it is important to keep learning and growing and trying new things.
Creating a Vision
Firstly I think its really important to create a vision of what it is that you want clearly. What are you trying to achieve? Being clear on this is the first and most important step. It can also be one of the hardest steps and take a great deal of time. Once you have a clear vision then you can share that with all the different staff members and stakeholders. This is something to think about that we can come back to later.
The Student Recruitment Funnel
Most people are familiar with the classic student recruitment funnel. It’s important to think of this in the overall strategy. There are various different stages of the student recruitment process, and at each stage of the funnel some students will drop off. In the end you will get your enrolled students.
It’s important to monitor the student recruitment funnel on a weekly basis using metrics and understand each step of the funnel and continually monitor and improve it. Which is the part of the funnel that is most important? If everything is working well, then you just need to get more students in the top of the funnel, but if there are some stages that aren’t working well then you need to fix that first before spending time on getting more students in otherwise you will waste resources and it will be like putting water in a leaky bucket.
The thing about this funnel is that it is never perfect, it can always be improved, there are always new things you can do at each step of the funnel. New technologies, new strategies you can learn. There is no end point. That is why tracking the metrics is so important so that you can monitor and try different things and keep improving the system.
What metrics should you track?
It is a good idea to track the following metrics:
– Volume of website traffic
– Inquiries / Registrations
– Applications
– Acceptances
– Enrolments
Here is a sample spreadsheet you can use. It is good to keep it simple, but you might want to add some other things there based on your specific case and what you’d like to track. It is a good idea to have one person responsible for each stage, so they are reporting that metric. Sharing this weekly with everyone is a great practice to track it over time.
3 Departments
It is a good idea to split the whole student recruitment into 3 different departments or people.
1) Marketing, 2) Student recruitment, and 3) Admissions. It is possible to have multiple people doing the same stage, but it’s not that efficient because they’re quite unique processes. Doing multiple parts can work if you are small, but if you are doing multiple parts you need to make sure to clearly divide your time otherwise parts will get neglected. However it is really important that each department has a good understanding of the whole system and can work closely together.
1) Marketing
Marketing is all about prospects and inquiries – the first two stages. How do you get people to know about you? How many people will visit your website each week? and how many of them will take action. In this stage you need to know the channels for student recruitment, where students are coming from.
Marketing has the following parts:
– Discovery Platforms
– Social Media
– Email newsletter
– Content
– Events
– Website
I will go into each part.
Tracking Marketing
The first stage of the marketing funnel is that students start to become interested or research your university and programs. Some universities say that they only want to pay for enrolled students, but that’s not how student recruitment works.
Inquiries
How much would you pay to get 5 new inquiries from students? You can’t spend money in marketing without knowing the conversion rate, cost per acquisition and value of a student. Some universities say that they only want to pay for enrolled students, but that’s not how student recruitment works.
Some other areas I will discuss are:
– The cycles
– Know your students – the personas
– How do you measure it?
– Cost per acquisition
– Lifetime value
– Content strategies
– Tools to use…
– Omin channels
– Mailing list…
