Recruiting Intelligence

It’s a sad day when a good idea dies on the cutting room floor simply because the team didn’t quite know how to pull it off or have the time to implement it. Because who has time to bother learning something new? (Runner-up award for worst higher ed institution tagline!)

Truth is, getting started is more than half the battle, which is why over the past 12+ months we ran the popular “Getting Started With” series. Taken together, these posts become your team’s Social Media Marketing 101 for student recruiting tools.

Today, we offer you a compilation of this newbie knowledge all in one place. Read on to learn how to get started with TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, text message marketing, and more. This is one post you’ll definitely want to share with the members of your team who actually get your stuff done.

As AIEA 2023 wraps up this week, we are looking ahead at our next chance to chat about internationalization with .Edu trustees and presidents in San Diego at the AGB conference in April. Honored to be presenting alongside Brad Farnsworth from Fox Hollow Advisory (former ACE VP) and Dr. Gretchen Bataille from GMB Consulting (former president of the U of North Texas among other amazing higher ed roles). We will be talking all about insights university leaders need to guide internationalization efforts.Reach out if you or others from your team will be there.

Read on for links to our full "Getting Started With..." series — highly sharable with the internal team you rely on to move all the recruitment levers just so. Go forth and produce great marketing things!!!

Surveys from Mongoose (a popular SMS provider) tell us that a full 80% of students want to receive text messages from academic institutions. The caveat: they only want messages that matter. No fluff. We get it. We bet you do, too. And, the return on well-executed texts is more than worth the careful content planning effort.

SMS marketing is proving to be a direct, cost-effective way to recruit and retain students. If your institution hasn’t explored SMS marketing, now is the best time to start. It’s a little like the question, “When is the best time to start exercising?” The answer is always, now!

For those of you in the know, Slate added text messaging in early 2020 as one of their marketing features. There’s a reason for that. Important to note that the feature will not allow you to send messages through WhatsApp at this point.

Read on for the answers to Why do it? How to get started? And, what are the best practices for effective execution? The short answer: spot on content drives results.

We've been reflecting on all we learned at NACAC 2017 and everyone we met in the Exhibitor Hall. It seems that things keep circling back to a marketing strategy that appeals to us—and one that is still developing and is prompting puzzled looks from some of our clients and connections. "How do we incorporate and manage SMS texting in our student recruiting strategy?"

As an initial primer, below we review some of the challenges and rewards of SMS marketing, and we evaluate just a few of the many partners available to help your institution use emerging and trending SMS tools. Trust us, the SMS space is growing.

But this post is just the beginning. Like so many of the emerging technology tools over the past decade, we can't stop there. We'll be publishing an SMS marketing guide and review of vendors in the SMS marketing platform space. You, as our loyal blog subscribers, will be the first to get it! Bonus, right?

Before we give you some initial SMS perspective so you can start doing a great job with this important marketing option, we invite you to meet us at any of our upcoming conference presentations. We will be presenting global digital marketing insights in Princeton, NJ at NAFSA Region X, October 23-25. We will be in Weston, FL at the 9th Annual AIRC Conference, December 6-9 and in Miami Beach, FL at the ICEF Workshop, December 11-13. Reach out to us for a cup of coffee and a conversation! We always love to connect.

Read on for some help developing your SMS student marketing plan.