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Clients with limited budgets often ask me, “Which programs should we focus our enrollment marketing efforts on?” The answer, I tell them, lies in the four Ps. People are at the core of any successful graduate and adult program. Engaged students require an engaged faculty. All successful programs have dynamic faculty and always have a program champion. The best program champions carry the torch on all academic and enrollment marketing efforts. Products are the items that satisfy a student’s needs or wants. You must determine how your product – your degree offerings, for example – is unique to the market and who is most likely to want what you’re offering. A great example of this is one of our clients, Concordia University in Irvine, CA, which was the first to market eight years ago with a master’s degree in Coaching and Athletic Administration. Today the program enrolls over 500 students online across the nation. Performance is based on the outcomes … Continue reading
Posted in: Enrollment Marketing, Recruiting adult students, Recruiting graduate students
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Every day I visit the websites of potential clients who are looking for help with enrollment problems. We all know that the website is your best recruiting tool. It’s an essential part of your institution’s enrollment strategy, for attracting and the recruiting of prospective students. In almost every case, I’m amazed to find problems that most schools would never allow with the coveted print collateral. So I wonder: what makes it ok on your website? Have a look at some of these examples. (And sorry, WVSU, but you are a great example of what not to do. Call me! We’ll talk it over.) 1. Mislabeling or not labeling page or section titles Come on ….Would you ever let this happen to your view book? Page titles are one of the most powerful on-site search engine ranking factors and a guide to students that are navigating your website. A common mistake is having duplicate page titles. This makes it difficult for … Continue reading
Posted in: Enrollment Marketing
We’ve received many calls this year from colleges and universities looking for help in enrollment marketing efforts for traditional undergraduate students. The things that worked in the past just aren’t working. When I ask them about their current enrollment marketing efforts, I often hear the same things. Many institutions continue to use search services like College Board, ACT, NRCCUA and CBSS to market to potential students for their outbound efforts through mail and email. Others pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies like RuffaloCody and Royall & Company who apply sophisticated predictive modeling to efforts for which they will charge ten of thousands of dollars. So I ask… Why continue to funds these efforts at the same level with decreasing results? The answer is always the same: “We’ve done it this way for years and it has been our highest yielding effort.” My response is always the same… “It was your highest yielding effort!” So what has changed in … Continue reading
Despite all the cultural and technology changes in the past ten years, today’s enrollment marketing professionals are still largely relegated to email blasts, while the one-to-one interactions are the domain of their colleagues in recruitment. It is now time for marketing and recruitment teams that previously worked in silo — with separate revenue goals and success metrics assigned to each — to be much more closely aligned. And delivering on that promise means coordinating the technologies used by each department. Marketing teams used to be responsible for creating leads, which would then be passed along to the recruitment team for follow up. But advances in online analytics and other tools now allow marketing professionals to gain far greater insights into what prospects are doing online. Combining web analytics with landing pages, email and link tracking tools and other tools that aggregate social media activity has clarified the pattern of individual online activity. In other words, marketing professionals can clearly define … Continue reading
We know that colleges and universities today are scrambling to adjust to shifting demographics, shrinking budgets, skyrocketing pressure, and other changes on all fronts. We expect (rightly) that college presidents will be educators, diplomats, fundraisers and visionaries. Too often, organizing and managing personnel slips a little bit farther down the list. Too often, today’s presidents use outdated models of organizational management, where huge amounts responsibility fall to academic with little experience or training in the areas they oversee. Also troubling: many models overlook the most important part of any organization, the people. You may find the chief HR professional buried under a CFO or (even more frightening) under a Provost. We all think we could do better, right? I’ve certainly got some ideas of my own, and I bet you do as well. If I was president, here’s who would be sitting at my senior staff table, and why. VP of Academic Affairs or Provost At its very foundation, a … Continue reading
Posted in: Enrollment Marketing, Higher Ed Marketing