This week we want to compare your university education to roasting a chicken. No, really.

We want you to consider a lesson learned in the grocery industry about marketing. What in the world would your international student recruiting plans have to do with roast chicken you ask? Perhaps not quite as much of a stretch as you might think.

Here at Intead, we are always looking at what industry does, how it markets, what it tracks. And we apply those lessons to academia. It keeps us on our toes.

Bottom Line: Supermarkets learned a while back that advertising focused on cooked meals attracts customers better than showing raw ingredients. For university enrollment, focusing on jobs and outcomes is critical in today’s academic marketing. The message resonates with students and parents alike. So you might want to rethink all those images of happy students on the quad, or engaged in classrooms. The ascending career needs to be present, and perhaps even dominant, in your advertising.

We will be discussing these approaches to academic marketing at the upcoming AIRC and ICEF conferences in December. Are you going? We’d love to meet you face-to-face instead of keyboard to screen! There are still a few slots left for our 3rd annual ICEF Pre-conference Global Marketing Seminar for Education Institutions.

More on using outcomes in your marketing below.

Recruiting agents are increasingly used by our university clients these days. There is far more ease in the move in this direction since NACAC removed a significant barrier. As institutions consider the options, it is important to understand how to use agents well. It would be nice if someone were to write a book about that, don’t you think?

Turns out there is a lovely online resource, an e-book that your peers have widely contributed to, reviewed and accepted as a valuable source. You can download it for free right HERE.

As fortune would have it, this e-book was written and produced by Intead (heard of those guys?) and more than 2,000 downloads later, the e-book continues to find its way into the hands of admissions teams researching best practices.

Bottom Line: Agents are a reliable way to outsource your sales processes to distant lands ONLY IF you put real budget dollars behind making those sales representatives well-versed in your university’s selling points. Sales reps can’t sell a product they don’t know well. Meet us at the AIRC and ICEF conferences coming up in December and we can teach you a whole lot more. Our ICEF Pre-conference Global Marketing Workshop for Education Institutions is filling up.

Now for some perspective on what agents do and how to figure out if they are doing it well for you.

Welcome back to our Recruiting Intelligence Blog. With this blog, we hope to peak your curiosity.

Our team has been hard at work over the summer reviewing data and conducting research. Stay tuned each week and we will share our best work with you.

And as you plan your international student recruiting activities, consider that Intead will be presenting on topics of Global Marketing at 3 upcoming conferences:

• NAFSA Region XI, Farmington, CT, Oct 20-22
• AIRC Annual Conference, Hollywood, FL, Dec 2-5
• ICEF North America Workshop, Miami Beach, FL, Dec 7-9 (with our highly-rated global marketing seminar)

Today, we are talking about the motivations to seek education. What makes people curious?

Being Asked to Innovate? Please Fail.

Innovation is a term thrown around a lot. I'm not sure everyone truly understands what it means and what is involved. Kind of like the misunderstanding around the term “entrepreneurial."

Typically, when these terms are used by senior administrators, the conversation includes the concept of “doing more with less” and “finding a new way.” Have these conversations happened in your office? You might want to share this post...

Recruiting tours, fairs and the associated travel expenses are some of the biggest line items in an institution's recruiting budget. Given the investment of time and money to achieve student recruiting goals through travel, we hear the same great questions every year related to this topic. How do you know if you're getting the most bang for your buck in terms of recruitment travel? This is article is part one of two on this subject.

What does storytelling have to do with overseas student marketing? How can improved storytelling help institutional marketing teams to improve their international student recruitment strategies? Paul Jensen, Weber Shandwick's President of Corporate Practice in North America brought these topics to life.

Mobile might be the single most important word in technology, digital marketing, and overseas student recruitment. What you don't know about mobile CAN hurt you.

Seth Godin coined the phrase "interruption marketing" many years ago to describe the way traditional marketers interrupt the consumer to draw attention for their products and services. His message was that consumers will find more and more ways to avoid interruptions. He was right.   At the 2014 INTEAD Global Marketing Workshop for Academic Leaders in New York City, Hubspot's Matt Fradette showed the process and the successes of moving from interruption marketing to contextually relevant inbound marketing for universities.

Chinese students submit their SAT scores to twice as many colleges than international students from other countries. What does that mean for your yield enrollment marketing and your yield projections? College Board and IIE presented new data at the Intead Global Marketing Workshop held at the SUNY Global Center in NYC last week. You can view the whole presentation here.