How many cooks are in your international-marketing-kitchen? Many universities work with a dizzying array of partners in their efforts to reach international prospects—an endless stream of specialized contractors all working in separate silos and in different regions.
We’ve seen universities that have hired many vendors under separate contracts:
Does international student recruitment have to be this distracting and exhausting ?
Read on for our advice on streamlining and helping you get back to your real job...
The short answer: No!
International student recruiting IS complicated and time consuming, no doubt. But it can be done efficiently and with fewer distractions.
In fact, we’re willing to bet that you’ll have both more success and fewer headaches if you just take the time to streamline your marketing relationships – especially if you can put them under a single "umbrella."
We genuinely want you to succeed, because that's how we stay in business.
But let's be clear, even if you don’t hire us to be your full-service marketing agency, we really encourage you to find some partner who can check off more than one of your marketing needs. It simply makes more sense. You have more valuable recruitment activities to manage than keeping track of all those vendors we listed above.
Think about big global retail brands (you know their names) that streamline their marketing efforts under one Global Marketing Officer who ensures that:
You want to channel that same efficiency in your own global branding and recruitment efforts. Hiring partners who can handle more than one of your needs has four main benefits:
1. Centralized responsibility for delivering results across the board
A single point of contact with trusted, full-service agency centralizes the responsibility to deliver results for the many marketing and recruitment activities your institution undertakes. Think about your week and how much you have to manage. Think about having a trusted, experienced partner to take full responsibility for managing many or all of those global partners.
You're seeing what we see, right?
2. Cementing your relationships
Business relationships are like any relationship: they take time to develop. You can’t form a meaningful partnership with a contractor you work with for a few weeks, have a couple of conference calls with, and send on their way once their deliverable has been received. The end deliverable may be perfectly fine—but it’s going to be more of a hassle to get there than if you were working with a trusted, vetted partner you know well over the long-term.
Long-term, multi-job partnerships are great from an agency’s perspective, obviously: our job is easier and more fun when we already are up and running with our partners. But it also makes sense from a client’s perspective:
Every time you hire a new partner, you are committing to investing time in ramping up their familiarity with you and your needs. Multiply that time commitment by multiple partners, and you’re looking at a significant management load. Consistent partners are simply less work and produce more consistent results.
3. Simplifying your accounting
The fewer partners you need to hire, the cleaner your budget. The folks in accounts payable will thank you. And you've delegated a whole mess of project management oversight to your umbrella agency. Phew!
4. Maximizing success with a holistic view of all marketing activities
A full-service partner understands the interplay of different types of recruitment efforts and is informed by a diverse body of work – both other projects they have completed for you, and other projects unrelated to you.
To give you an example from our own agency’s work: Intead has partnered with FPPEDUMedia on several Know your Neighborhood reports over the years. We survey millions of international students around the world about different topics of interest to international recruitment professionals. We then write up our findings in a big ol’ report.
No one pays us to do this, but we do it anyway—for a few reasons.
That means that even though our clients have not commissioned large-scale data analyses of international students, they still benefit from our research. Take this tidbit from our Winter 2016 Know Your Neighborhood report, for instance. Vietnamese students were more than twice as likely than students from any of the other 13 countries surveyed to include "alumni with jobs in my field" as one of the first three things they look for when selecting a university. You can bet that this information is on our minds when we’re strategizing with clients on a Vietnamese recruitment approach.
Multi-disciplinary agencies will have a more rounded, better-informed, holistic approach to your global efforts. It would be impossible for them not to. Your institution benefits from the customized approach to each region and culture and the connections that can happen between these markets when appropriate.
Streamline your way to success
So your assignment for the week is to make a list of all of the partners involved in your international recruitment efforts. How many of those partnerships do you consider reliable and robust? Can you remember the name of your contact person at each of them?
The BIG question: Could you do better work with a smaller number of quality, multi-service partners?