Brand and Demand Marketing in Higher Education: Good Alone, Better Together

In higher education, a false dichotomy has existed between brand marketing and demand marketing. We strongly believe they need to be deployed in tandem. First a basic primer on brand and demand marketing.

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing builds long-term reputation, awareness and emotional connection to build affinity for the brand with future students, parents and influencers. It involves the continuous creation of relevant and high quality content, such as news magazines, PR2.0 assets, articles, social posts, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers and thought leadership events, and igniting that content through promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing. Carefully curated content is distributed through channels you control (your “owned” media, such as your website and social networks) and the channels you don’t control (the social media of people/organizations in your network), where our content strategists spark conversations on your behalf. Carefully curating the content you “own” enables you to “earn” influence and build reputation. Search engine rankings, AI inclusions and social connections (“likes,” “shares,” etc.) are among the most trusted endorsements available online today. Managing your content and your interactions carefully allows you to maximize your success in SEO/AIO engines and the social media. Finally, advanced analytic approaches help you understand type of content and communications your prospects value.

Brand marketing creates a hub of value and trust. As this foundation is established, the cost to build upon it naturally drops. Over time, this translates to a very strong ROI for your brand marketing efforts.

Demand Marketing (or Enrollment Marketing)

In contrast, demand marketing focuses on immediate measurable recruitment by driving maximizing number of inquiries, visits and applications irrespective of fit.

Instead of attracting right-fit prospects with inspired marketing, enrollment marketers are employing tired tactics from firms who buy names in large numbers, then throw commoditized direct mail/email at prospective students, hoping to snare a few. These outdated methods disregard the habits of savvy Gen-Z kids who are maintaining five to six email accounts to filter out email noise from colleges, and are mercilessly tossing away the similar-looking direct mail pieces.

More recently, enrollment marketers have started creating cookie-cutter, in-authentic paid advertising campaigns all directing to vacuous landing pages which scream at high pressure sales instead of old-fashioned romance.

This is the sorry state of traditional admissions funnel marketing.

Our Recipe: Brand + Demand Marketing

The key isn’t choosing one, but unifying them: strong brand builds trust, making demand efforts more effective, and demand tactics generate immediate results, creating a synergistic full-funnel approach for sustainable enrollment growth.

First, we recommend modernizing traditional admissions funnel marketing by using more advanced tactics like micro-segmentation, look-alikes, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups generating better quality, right-fit leads. The prospects need to be directed at high-fidelity, elevated, story landing pages that romance prospects into enrolling.

Next, we recommend enrollment marketers supplement with inverted funnel or brand marketing efforts.

Activating the Inverted Admissions Funnel

Inverted funnel marketing focuses on promoting the various segments of a college’s star students and alumni, which in turn attracts look-alikes, creating tribes of like-minded prospects. This increases the number of prospects who are likely to convert into applicants, engaged students, loyal alumni and lifelong donors.

Net Impact

Done right, brand marketing builds momentum slowly but snowballs into a machine for generating lion share of higher-quality, right-fit students. Over time, this enables enrollment marketers to reduce their dependency on paid advertising tactics. Together they translate into a very strong ROI for your integrated marketing efforts.

If you are seeking a transformative higher education marketing agency, college branding agency, or enrollment marketing agency, please see our work and consider partnering with us.