Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Abbott and Costello. And the most recent dynamic duo: teenager and internet. Since the iPhone became a regular at the family dinner table, the landscape of teenage life has changed—including how they search for, and ultimately choose, an institution of higher education.
You already know this, and so do today’s wide range of digital lead generation services. These digital services can provide a more student-driven, personal search process that suits today’s independent and tech-savvy teens—a far leap from the mass mailings (or even e-mailings) from student search service contact lists. See our recent blog-- Digital Direct Marketing to International Students: Are You on Target? Several of these services even offer international expertise. Want to know where to start? Here are some key considerations.
Move down the enrollment funnel.
Google research has shown that students start out with generic searches and over time narrow their searches to programs and then specific schools. Third-party lead generation services can help you better reach students who start out with these generic searches, such as "studying in the United States" or "MBA programs in America." It will be very difficult for your individual school to show up in these search results and receive high enough search rankings since the search engines will consider a program aggregator a more qualified search result than your individual institution— program aggregators are also smart SEO and paid search users. Remember that 95% of users never go to page two of the search results.
Your goal is to show up in the general aggregator pages so that you are found by students in their general searches. That does not mean that you have to pay every web aggregator who approaches you —many of them have general listings. If you don't know enough of these companies, we compiled a list with detailed information for you. But read on first.
Take for example, Zinch, a service of Chegg, that gathers information from interested students across many platforms (College Prowler, Princeton Review, YOUniversity, and U.S. News, to name a few) and puts them in contact with your institution. In China, Zinch publishes a website with a database of U.S. and other universities. Similarly, Peterson’s provides a page for your university, complete with key stats, photos, financial aid information, and a prominently displayed “Contact School Now” button.
Before you start using a program aggregator, understand the difference between a free listing and a paid listing, and if you choose to pay, you have to be able to track the results. If the listing provider sends you qualified prospects, you will be able to calculate an acceptable ROI in terms of your cost of enrollment. But don't buy year after year without knowing whether you obtain value from the service (that applies to both domestic and international enrollment).
Peterson's School Profile for Quinnipiac University's School of Education
Follow up contact strategy and communication is key.
Furthermore, follow-up emails, personalized marketing materials, and information are essential to make sure the refined leads generated by these prospect aggregators don’t slip through the cracks.
Combine digital with Face to Face.
Some prospect aggregators are also adding social networking elements to their pages. The jury is still out, from our perspective, whether this is the best environment for admissions to interact. If you are engaging with these tools, keep in mind whether your student interactions are one-on-one or public. The latter provides more exposure to other students, but you also have to be aware of the number of platforms you can efficiently manage (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, international social media, etc).
Zinch's admission counselor profiles can help your team to personalize contact with students. Like a (completely professional, embarassing photo-free) Facebook profile, this Zinch service puts your team in direct contact with prospective students. Counselors can answer student questions either through direct message or on the institution's page. We'd be interested to hear whether this is working for you.
What about international leads?
The international market offers many lead generating services such as, Hotcourses, IES China and US Journal. Many of them offer fully customizable digital campaigns and video promotional content in a variety of languages. Most of them offer statistics and performance data with different levels of detail. For example, US Journal, which offers 17 languages, can also provide monthly activity reports of inquiries and click-throughs of your online, multi-lingual content, to help you assess how your efforts are performing with international students.
US Journal page in Hindi
From experience, we can tell you that selecting a lead generating service is only a small part of the task. We want to emphasize the importance of follow up: once you receive the prospect inquiry, you have to interact with the student and market your institution. We frequently hear from admission officers: "XY provider didn't work, so we switched." Remember—if your yield is too low and you aren't monitoring your ROI, the next provider won't be much help either.
It does not matter whether you buy TOEFL/SAT/GRE data via Hobsons, CollegeBoard, ETS, etc. or from less known prospect providers. In the end you need to understand whether these will be qualified prospects that you can recruit. Aggregators will help you with Phase I: Attract, but the subsequent phases of recruit and enroll are up to you and whoever is working with you on these efforts.
Want to learn more? We'd like to proudly introduce a new content source for you-- Intead Index-- a set of indeces that provides you with all of the information you need to make informed decisions. We will publish the lists regularly on the blog over the next few months. We welcome your comments and additions to the lists. Feel free to use the provided link to share your feedback.
Our Intead Index on Digital Lead Generators gives you the details and pricing of over 10 lead services. Download it for free!
