You are reading an excerpt from our e-book "88 Ways to Recruit International Students" (Click here to read the entire book)
At our core we at Intead are a technology company dedicated to helping universities harness digital solutions for their recruitment and retention needs. Let’s be honest here, we love technology. We have been digital marketers for well over a decade now. And we’d love to encourage our readers (and clients) to better utilize options available today. Digital media offers powerful tools for optimizing your marketing over time based on trackable user behavior. Digital marketers can test and modify their messages to appeal to the right student and their parents. Tracking web traffic from the first unrecognized visit by a prospective student to the final step of enrollment can lead to cost reductions, efficiency gains and result in yield improvements.
#51. Digital marketing
It’s a truism that digital marketing is critical for today’s student recruitment. We are marketing to the digital native generation that has grown up with continous internet access and increasingly complete mobile web-based access. This generation is always connected, information on demand is taken for granted, and quick response time in the desired communication channel is expected.
Think With Google: A research resource for greater understanding of how prospective students search for schools online: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights/li brary/studies/engaging-the-edusearcher/
We are going to focus on the operational aspects of reaching international markets. Our experience has been that universities do not differentiate sufficiently between their domestic and international digital marketing.
We think about digital marketing very broadly. Our thinking includes the various channels, media, and techniques you can use to broadcast your message.
Channels for reaching your target audience include websites, social media, and YouTube. Media available to you include videos, articlesand blogs. Techniques for facilitating your visibility online include search engine optimization, paid search, and email marketing. Our later sections detail these and other methods available to you to move your marketing strategies to the next level.
Furthermore, our focus on international recruitment requires paying attention to non-US digital markets. Our discussion in this chapter addresses not only the importance of using multiple languages, but also different search engines, social networks, video platforms and mobile destination patterns, all specific to the region targeted.
The following definition of digital marketing helps clarify the broad range of approaches we need to add to our toolboxes.
Digital marketing is where marketing meets the internet and other forms of new media, such as cell phones and even video games. Digital marketing covers a wide range of activities such as:
Social network marketing: utilize websites like Facebook to spread the word about their products, or learn more about the needs, wants and interests of their customers
Search engine optimization: optimize a website so it ranks high in search engine results Open source innovation: collaborate with customers or independent product designers to create new products
Viral marketing: videos, etc., that are so much fun people want to see them and share them with their friends using social media platforms
Experiment based market research: learn about consumer behavior by conducting controlled experiments on line, such as testing two versions of a product description on a website to see which results in more sales
Web analytics: analyze data collected through websites in order to set prices, create better ads, make decisions about product distribution, and improve product design
Reputation management: track what people are saying about a brand online, and help companies manage their brand image
Source: University of Michigan
http://cob.umd.umich.edu/693401/41
#52. Developing your international web presence
We suggest two types of dedicated destinations:
Many, if not most universities, create special pages for international students – a great start. Again, the principle should be less is more. Provide simple, clear language; use pictures and graphs. We cannot emphasize this sufficiently: US university websites are at best challenging to navigate since they service many constituencies. Non-native English speakers struggle with the complexity of finding information. If you remember the i-graduate chart from the introduction, your website is of great importance. Now put yourself in the position of a student, or let alone parent, with limited English skills to navigate your website. It’s a challenge.
Language diversification on your website can only strengthen your accessibility to international students. Regardless of a student’s TOEFL score, unless he/she has previously lived in an English-speaking environment, the new language on a university website will be overwhelming.
Our university websites serve many constituencies among university stakeholders. So for a non-native speaker the wealth of material can be intimidating, making a search for specific information challenging.
We are great supporters of microsites in different languages. Why?
You can tailor the information to the international student.
You can direct international students to the targeted information.
Local languages will make the content much more accessible to the prospective student and their parents. (It is critical to reach parents effectively.)
You can integrate specific request buttons, sign up boxes.
Social media connections can be localized (see section 53).
Sharing of specific pages in various languages is much easier.
Local search engines will pick up the url.
