Part 2 of 12: What I wish I knew as a new marketer

In part 1 we talked about strategy: Rethinking Your Idea of Strategy

For this blog to make sense I will use a robust definition of integrated marketing (IM) that includes the 4Ps or the 4Cs.* IMC, on the other hand, focuses largely (solely?) on the communication or promotional dimension of marketing.

With this in mind, to realize the full value and power of integrated marketing you must remember to integrate your marketing efforts in three ways.

Beginning Integration

First, your marketing must integrate with your strategic plan. There is a big danger when marketing is divorced from the larger institutional strategy or when marketing is considered an afterthought by your strategic planning team. Strategic integration means that your marketing team shares the same institutional vision as your planning team.

Second, your marketing must be integrated throughout the organization. This means that the marketing efforts of the admission office link with the marketing efforts of advancement, academic, and athletics.

Third, your marketing must integrate with your messaging. In other words, what you say is consistent with what you do. The result is message symphony rather than cacophony, buzz rather than simply more noise.

When it comes to integration your messages must also be consistent across different media platforms. What you say on your website must be consistent with what you say on social, campus visits, and transit ads.

Impact of Integrated Marketing

While integrated marketing takes more effort and requires both coordination and anticipation, the positive impact is enormous.

Integrated marketing will save you time. You will achieve more results faster. The synergy you create will increase the impact of your overall marketing efforts.

Integration will save you money. There be less waste not only in your budget, but in your planning efforts.

Fourth, the impact of integrated marketing is easier to measure.

And finally, integrated marketing means that you will have fewer public miscues.

I’ve learned from experience that integrated marketing is almost never driven from the bottom. It takes a visionary or two on the senior team to not only understand what integrated marketing can offer the institution, but to make it happen.

If you’d like to discuss this definition of strategy, or need help with the foundational research, please drop me a line at: [email protected]

Read Part 3: Six Critical Alignments to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

*Long ago I realized that a robust integrated marketing plan is largely the same thing as an institutional strategic plan.

While this enrollment decline presents significant challenges, we believe it also provides a catalyst and opportunity to aggressively retool your go-to-market efforts.

Strategies to Build Enrollment

I’ve outlined seven strategies that will have an almost immediate impact on enrollment. The first involves data analysis. The remaining six focus on messaging.

1. Analyze Enrollment Data

Analyze enrollment data to determine which student category(ies) suffered the most significant drop and which segments might have held steady (or even grown) during this overall decline. Segment your messaging to more accurately focus on those student groups which show the greatest promise.

2. Promote Online Learning

Carefully consider how you promote online learning. Many adult students, particularly those who have been out of school for a number of years, or are in the trades, have no experience with online learning and are likely wary of how it works and of their ability to learn in such a setting. Messages from students with similar backgrounds who have successfully navigated online learning go a long way in easing potential trepidation.

3. Consider Displaced Workers

Develop a marketing strategy that addresses displaced workers. This strategy should emphasize how quickly a student can earn a license, certification, or even a degree.

Many displaced adults have chosen to wait out the pandemic and might be reluctant to invest time in going back to school as the vaccine slowly gains traction. Messaging should emphasize the resources you currently have in place to help this audience.

4. Follow Employment Trends

While the economy has suffered during the pandemic, some sectors are booming. Look at local and regional employment trends and see who is hiring and then develop and communicate partnerships with those organizations. The key message, of course, is jobs.

5. Dual-Enrollment Emphasis

Emphasize dual enrollment. While most community colleges have dual enrollment programs, many high school students are unclear about their benefits, how they work, and who pays. As you think about your messaging, stress the benefits, including safety, of earning college credit while still living at home. And if your school district covers the cost for students, emphasize this information as well.

6. Welcome Transfer Students

As four-year institution enrollments decline, build a messaging strategy that welcomes four-year students to your campus. This reverse transfer messaging must, of course, be preceded by programs that welcome and serve the needs of these students.

7. Showcase Veteran Resources

Chances are you have programs for veterans. But considering the competition for marketing resources on most campuses, there is every likelihood that you have not marketed your programs as aggressively as you might.

We recommend increasing the marketing investment directed at veterans for a number of reasons. First, the drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan is nearly complete. This means that more vets have recently returned from service and are contemplating their next steps.

Consider, too, that during 2015-16 (the last time data was available), less than half of all veterans use any of their education benefits.1 According to Statistica.com, through 2017, 72% of male veterans and 62% of female veterans either have no college experience or have some college experience but no degree.

As you consider these changes in your go-to-market strategies, Stamats has demonstrated expertise in four critical areas:

• Data analysis
• Audience and message segmentation
• Evaluation of existing recruiting communication including web, social media, and digital campaigns
• Development of a comprehensive recruitment communication sequence

Interested in reversing enrollment declines? Stamats can help you implement seven proven strategies that will help you do just that. Interested? Please contact Becky Morehouse.

Read next: Rethinking Your Idea of Strategy

This series will draw on what I have learned from working with hundreds of colleges during my 30 years as a marketing consultant.

I want to begin this series with the idea of strategy.

The literature often defines strategy as a plan of action or policy designed to achieve an overall aim.

This definition of strategy falls short for two big reasons.

First, it is additive. It is often translated as “we need to do more things.” As a result, many schools are operating well beyond their resource base. They have too many programs, too many services, and are trying to meet the needs of too many different kinds of students.

Second, this definition does not reflect either competitors or target audiences. It is much too self-, or institutional-, centric and is largely oblivious to the machinations of the marketplace.

With these two basic flaws in mind, let’s look at a better definition of strategy.

For our purposes, strategy is differentiating yourself from your competitors in ways that your most important target audiences value. In other words, it’s about compelling differentiation. Or as brand strategists like to say, your unique selling proposition.1

Let’s break that down into two big components.

Differentiation and competitors

First, is the notion of differentiating yourself from your competitors. Rather than looking and sounding more like your competitors, you must make yourself as different from your competitors as possible.

Of course, this requires that you have an absolutely rock-solid understanding of the institutions with which you truly compete.

Value to target audiences

But it’s not just about being different. It’s about being different in ways that your target audience’s value.

This can be tricky for colleges and universities. Many have long focused inwardly and great strategy demands that you shift your focus. Going forward, it’s less about you and much, much more about them.

One of the easiest ways to determine how much your audiences value you is to measure the degree to which they are willing to pay for your services. If your discount rate is 70 percent, then there is a sense that they don’t value you that much.
Research first

In order to develop a point of compelling differentiation you must first undertake competitor research to better understand their offerings and messaging.

Then you must undertake audience research to know the goals, fears, and motivations of the students and donors you wish to attract.

With these data in hand, and within the constraints of your mission, you must develop offerings and messages that your audiences perceive to be of greater value than those of your competitors.

If you’d like to discuss this definition of strategy, or need help with the foundational research, please drop me a line.

[email protected]

Read Part 2: The Critical Importance of Integration

One of the things that intrigued me was the note that private colleges are increasing their expenditures in the kinds of products that the firm that produced the report happens to sell. While this is a bit self-serving and troubling.  

What bothered me, is the fact that there was no discussion on how to  reduce  recruiting expenditures.  The report assumed that to be successful in the recruiting arena one must  be willing to  ever  increasingly up the ante.  It  is reminiscent of the US and Soviet arms race. The thinking was if we spend more than them on weapons, we will be safe. 

Rethinking That Old Shibboleth  

It is time, I believe, to consider this problem in a completely different way.  

Over the years, as I have worked with countless colleges and universities, I noticed something interesting: Those schools with strong brands actually spend less on recruiting than do their lesser-known counterparts.   

In fact, a big part of me believes that colleges that spend the most on marketing are either offering products and experiences that are exactly like their competitors, or their brand has not been differentiated from competitors in ways that prospective students and families find meaningful.  

The only alternative, then, is to spend money. Rather than creating buzz, they seem content on merely generating noise.  

Rebuilding Recruiting Brand

Based on hundreds of research studies we have completed for our clients, I also learned that well-branded colleges and universities tended to build their brands around the same single quality:   

• Being well-known for doing/being something in demand by their prospective students   

It is important to note that the one thing is not the same thing for all colleges. A faith-based school should build its brand around the one thing that matters to their prospects. The odds are high that this one thing will be different than the one thing valued by students who want to attend an R1 research university.   

The only way to identify this one thing is to ask your prospects. This involves research. And yes, with a nod toward full disclosure, Stamats sells research. But our goal is to use research to reduce recruiting expenditures rather than increase them.   

As you define this research, you must carefully consider who your prospects truly are. This calls for a big dose of honesty. Your goal is to identify those students who will persist (don’t set the bar too low). At the same time, these must be students for whom you have a legitimate shot (don’t set the bar too high).    

And remember, too, that your goal is to identify that one thing that matters most around which you can build a brand, and not a panoply of things which would only dilute your image.   

After you have used research to identify the essential brand drivers for the students you wish to pursue, you must:  

• Also use the findings to ascertain their communication needs, expectations, and channels a priori
• Commit to providing a complete brand experience (think pre-experience messaging, the experience itself, and post-experience follow-up)  
• Integrate your brand messaging across all platforms, particularly traditional and nontraditional media    
• Use mROI to enhance the brand experience and the effectiveness of your brand messaging  

If you’re interested in using research to identify your brand drivers please drop me an email. I’d be glad to show you how this type of  research can help.    

Read Next: Considering a New Academic Program? Use Our Checklist to Decide

The reason for this number is pretty clear. An increasing number of students want to plan their post-secondary career at a less expensive two-year institution to potentially transfer to a four-year college at a later date.

College interest in transfer students is growing. In fact, transfer students bolster the numbers of current and upper-class students. Data suggest that their academic performance is at least equal to, and often better than, students who enter as freshmen.

Though the transfer recruiting numbers have become a bit confused over the last nine months because of COVID-19. We can expect, college interest is likely to increase because of pent-up demand and the transfer market will reassert itself.

We also expect competition for transfer students to increase. Colleges that want to enhance their transfer recruiting strategy and add greater predictability to enrollment of this cohort should consider enhancing their efforts ahead of the demand curve.

Looking at colleges and universities with successful transfer recruiting efforts, we identified some key characteristics that typify a transfer-friendly institution:

• All communication to transfer students, including the website and social media, is focused on the specific needs and expectations of students
• Allocate non-loan financial aid dollars specifically to transfer students
• They have a highly customized campus visit program
• They have articulation agreements with regional two- and four-year institutions
• Beyond articulation agreements, these colleges have personal relationships, and partnerships, with guidance counselors and career advisors at key feeder schools
• They offer quick and accurate transcript evaluations
• They offer a generous (and timely) acceptance of credits earned at other institutions
• Create opportunities to “match” transfer prospects with current transfer students—often noted as mentors
• Have a transfer-focused orientation program
• Have a cadre of advisors that are qualified, eager, and empowered to serve transfer students
• Need proven programs in place to help transfer students persist and even graduate.
• Match inquiring and applying transfer students with faculty mentor in area of academic interest

We have a sophisticated transfer student recruiting inventory that helps pinpoint what’s working and not working in your current transfer recruiting strategy. Ready to get started? Email our digital strategy team today.

Read Next: 7 Ways to Build a Better Transfer Student Experience