This blog focuses on the alignment of your marketing resources in light of your current recruitment channels and the desired mix of student enrollment channels in the future. We will focus on the alignment of the geographic, as well as, the marketing channel mix for this analysis. For the purpose of this article and analysis, we are going to exclude other important enrollment criteria such as the ability to pay, English capabilities and academic level and preparedness.
- Audit your external brand perception, visibility and content
We suggest that you analyze your target recruitment by country to understand your current status within the market environment. Students and parents are anonymous "shoppers" on your website. Despite many other influencing factors such as peer groups, rankings, agents, etc, your web and social media presence -- both controlled by you and other information available about you -- is an important influencer for prospective students.
- Review your internal brand perception
Assuming you already have international students on campus, the internal brand perception refers to your existing student pool or alumni. Focus groups, surveys and other research using on and offline methods will be important sources of information to inform your strategy and execution on what is relevant for students in the selection process. Marketing, admissions, student services and academic programming will benefit from these insights. Once you have a large enough student population, long-term studies, such as those provided by i-graduate will provide valuable trend data and benchmarking.
- Clarify and align your current with your desired recruiting mix and marketing channels
We feel strongly that your organization has to align your marketing investments with the desired and achievable enrollment plan and the chosen strategies. What do I mean by this? If you decide to travel or limit your travel and rely on commission-based recruiters, your marketing and marketing related technology need to support that strategy. I will give a few examples.
We developed a small questionnaire for admissions officers to provide us with directional guidance for their marketing support programs. Feel free to download the "Strategy Questionnaire" and use it for your activities.
Here is our simplified schema on how we think for this continuous improvement process - Research - Define Activity - Implement - Analyze- Optimize -and start over with the process. It's a little bit like Groundhog Day; you will repeat the same processes over and over, but I hope with improving outcomes, yields, and efficiency. For example, recruiting fairs could be a persistent element of your recruiting program, but you need to measure the impact. Attending the recruiting events can be the easy part. The more labor intensive parts are the pre-trip preparation and certainly the post-trip follow up.
Intead Research and Implementation Process
The implementation phase illustrated above will look different for each admissions office depending on your institution's profile, goals, scale and resources.
For example, if you focus on agents as your main recruitment channel. You may focus on developing an agent marketing and support program including a digital agent portal. This information portal will contain all marketing documentation and other relevant information to make it easy for agents to explain, market and recruit for your programs. You may say, "But we have have a website that contains everything one needs to know." The answer is that your website contains a great deal more than the recruitment agents need to know. You can "package" your information in an easier format, including local language material, and other tips to make your program easy to market.
You are creating a specialized marketing effort to your agent network to market your programs to prospective students and parents.
You need to focus on the entire experience for the prospective international student. Unfortunately, these students cannot come to your campus so we need to find ways to bring our campus experience, student community and richness of our academic programs to them.
