Today we’re taking you behind the scenes of some of our most valuable Intead Plus tools.
Our Digital Marketing Worksheets.
Yep, you read that correctly. Good, old-fashioned pen-to-paper worksheets. Although if you decide to fill them out on your computer, we promise we won’t tell. After all, learning is moving online these days, haven’t ya heard?
Looking to engage a new market? Develop a new content strategy and dissemination plan? Get your new hires thinking through the international student recruitment process?
Last Chance: For our colleagues leading private high schools we are offering a free webinar today at 3pm (Eastern) with TABS (The Association of Boarding Schools) all about how student recruiting must be reimagined given the loss of recruitment travel. Register Here.
It’s all about the framework.
The Intead Digital Marketing Worksheets will guide you every step of the way forward — and ask the difficult questions. These are the worksheets we take folks through when we run our full-day global marketing workshops at AIRC and our International Student Recruitment Bootcamps. So, really helpful during those new recruitment season kickoff meetings.
All of the worksheets mentioned in today’s post are available to Intead Plus members and are tried and tested. Intead Plus members receive full access to an extensive (and exclusive) library of marketing intelligence materials (including our seminal eBook, 88 Ways to Recruit International Students, now an industry standard in its second edition), podcasts, webinars, and more, with new market research being released each year.
Read on for a sneak peek at these valuable resources to kickstart your global approach and your digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re just in the early stages of a new initiative or in the process of developing a digital campaign this content is going to be helpful. And if you want these tools at your fingertips 24/7, you know what to do.
Our Digital Marketing Worksheets are all about planning for your future student recruitment efforts - could be next fall or far beyond. For the very near term (spring and fall 2021), we have been talking about the global partnerships that help you adjust quickly to changing travel opportunities. We are working with CIEE on this initiative and the advantages are clear. The details are HERE.
Here’s how our worksheets take your team through the international student recruitment planning process.
Selecting Your Audience
Identifying a new target market is not a strategic decision that should be taken lightly.
If you’re considering new international markets, our Country Comparison Cheat Sheet is a good place to start (top desired programs and growing industries and career opportunities at a glance for 16 top sending countries.)
Move on to our Country Selection Worksheet to dive deeper into your top three choices (there’s only so many markets you’ll want to invest in at once). We’re always happy to help our clients through new market selection, but having all of your institution’s strengths in these potential new markets laid out — faculty and partner connections, programs of value, current market/country-specific enrollment and inquiry stats — can help fast-track larger market research and messaging conversations. You know, the fun stuff.
In light of the pandemic, you might want some outside counsel. We're here to chat all things domestic, too. Our team is incredibly adept at targeting niche audiences anywhere in the world including folks who live just across town, in the adjacent counties or over the state line.
Evaluating Your Partners
All the more relevant in a COVID-era world? Your relationship with your agent networks. And in case you missed it: here’s our recent post on the latest student recruitment agent stats and what they mean for your recruitment strategy.
The short of it?
With more confusion, risk, and many agents desperately seeking business, “buyer beware” in the market is now more important than ever. With international recruitment travel currently off the table, building solid relationships with a global network of trusted partners is critical to your success.
Consider our Agent Evaluation Worksheet your first step in evaluating potential new agent relationships or taking a (non-literal) temperature check of your existing partners when it comes to key areas such as student access, reputation, in-country support and lead management, and cost. And be sure to register for the AIRC 2020 Conference starting Nov. 30. We'll be sharing digital campaign benchmarks from multiple campaigns.
Another valuable resource downloaded more times than we can count (we kid, of course, we count every single one of them): Our Agent Management Handbook available to Intead Plus members.
Developing Your Messaging and Dissemination Channels
Already selected those target markets? It’s time to get to work. We’re talking persona and messaging development with the help of four key worksheets: Persona Development, Digital Media Planning, Content Development, and Content Dissemination.
If you’re not an Intead Plus member yet, think about how these four phases of strategic planning can inform your process, worksheets or no. These tools are meaty, and provide the very necessary framework for ideating, planning, and, most importantly, executing effective digital campaigns. They’ll walk you through everything and ask all the right questions from assessing the effectiveness of your current marketing collateral to identifying key messaging themes for student, parent, and agent audiences and outlining project leads and budgets for individual campaigns.
Audience selection, agent evaluation, persona and messaging development — phew, you’ve got a lot a lot of work to do! Have a suggestion for a worksheet that we haven’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments.
Our team is always working on new content to share to help you be more dangerous at your job. Let us know what you’d like to see from us, and we’ll make it happen.
We’re here to support your important work every step of the way — one worksheet, phone call, or campaign at a time.
