BY Anthony Campisi | May 26th, 2021

Innovation during an uncertain time

Do Something Different sign The past year has been marked by rapid and forced transformation. In some ways, it may seem that education has taken 100 steps forward as opposed to the typical slow-moving approach to change that is a hallmark of the industry. Admissions and marketing staff have cut through the red tape of bureaucracy to find innovative ways of recruiting students and adapted at lightning speed to promote new or altered programs.

Regardless of whether your program has recently seen a slowdown or explosive growth in applicants, you may have a cautious optimism as you develop your recruiting strategy for next year. With limited resources, should you stick with what worked last year or continue to evolve your marketing?

Let’s examine a couple strategies for innovation and how you can weave them into your school’s plan.

Enhancing or improving what has worked

You may have heard the saying, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” And to some degree this is true. If something has worked in the past, repeating it just makes sense — especially when resources are limited and you need a measurable ROI. But this past year has taught many that change is constant. Even if you repeat tried-and-true methods, there’s a chance that you’ll yield different results in a different landscape. Examining your metrics and successes through the lens of the current market can help you develop a plan that’s based on consumer insights and grounded in data.

For example, last year when many people shifted to working from home, your prospects became more available online. If you increased your digital marketing and social media spend there’s a chance that you saw increased engagement. But before you lock on the same budget and tactics for the upcoming year, evaluate the percentage of your prospects that are still working virtually. The same goes for events. If you had fantastic results by shifting your events to an online format, is the appetite still there for virtual engagement, or would a hybrid approach work better?

Disrupting the status quo

While the operating models in your school are undergoing massive fundamental shifts, marketing and recruiting have a key seat at the table to drive change. No one knows your students or prospects better, so don’t be afraid to suggest things that are new and different based on what you are hearing and seeing.

Here are some tips:

Don’t rush. Use your consumer insights to inform future decisions while also staying true to your brand.
Set measurable goals. Determine if your activities aim to generate awareness, increase engagement or drive applications.
Maintain your tracking dashboard. Use your benchmark data and remain agile so you can adjust and optimize plans as needed.
Find ways to be a leader. Adopting a trend is one thing, but creating a trend is another.
Do the unexpected. Find ways to create buzz.
Stay relevant. Develop experiences that resonate with your audience, meet their needs and answer their questions.

The pandemic has accelerated your need to re-examine resource allocation, find new ways of communicating and remain agile while adapting to the current market situation. It has provided many with the needed push to make change happen. Armed with this new confidence, you can take a more structured approach to improving your existing strategies and creating new disruptive ones that will allow you to adjust with the market.

GPRS is your innovation partner

Working with a firm that has a deep understanding of the educational landscape can help you determine what types of innovation are right for your school. GPRS tracks industry benchmarks and has a long history of helping schools develop disruptive enrollment strategies that get results. Start the conversation today.

Metrics matter when you’re making decisions

Is every dollar in your marketing and recruitment budget allocated? During a time when resources are limited – time, money and people – it’s important to focus your efforts on clear measurable strategies and tactics that will give you a solid return on your investment. This doesn’t mean that you can’t try new things; on the contrary, carefully planned innovation may give you that much needed enrollment boost you’re seeking. Just be sure that you’ve outlined a clear path for setting and measuring your success so you can continue to make informed decisions about the future.
Let’s take a look at why metrics matter and how you can use them to optimize your enrollment campaigns.

Identifying metrics

The most common key metrics to gauge marketing campaigns in higher education are leads in the top of the funnel that yield seated students. But there are many other areas in between that you can track that give you a good read on how your campaigns and recruiting strategies are performing.

Digital advertising lead generation: In this arena, you’ll want to keep a close eye on cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL), and cost per acquisition (CPA). These show how much you spent to get someone to click, convert into a lead and then turn into a seated student.

Engagement: Tracking the ways that leads are engaging with you and then attributing it to a conversion can give your team key insights. For example, you can track interactions on social media that turn into requests for information. You can also find out what is resonating the most with your audience. Executive students may be more likely to engage with admissions staff through a personal conversations while MBA students may prefer connecting via email or social. Other audiences may gravitate toward texting.

Event attendance: Although events may continue to look different in the near future, you can keep track of the types of events you’re hosting, and which ones yield real conversations and applications. This can help you determine how to spend your time and marketing dollars to promote the events. For example, an online preview day may take tons of time and effort to yield a couple applications vs. an interactive webinar that yields 15 applications.

Tracking your metrics

While your CRM can do a great job of tracking interactions once they’ve entered the system, you’ll also want a dashboard that can keep tabs on how your leads found you and how your advertising is performing against your planned budget. Some key metrics to include are:

Inquiries and enrollments based on marketing campaign, channel and message

Trends based on seasonality, geography and audience segment

Leads broken out by program

When you have this data, you can pivot your plan in real-time to increase or decrease your spend in certain areas and ramp up or pull back based on interactions. It is recommended that you use a firm that is skilled in tracking ROI and building dashboards so that you can focus your time and effort on marketing and recruiting.

Evaluating your data and planning for the future

What you do with your data is more important than how you collect it. When you can attribute your key metrics back to leads and seated students, you can identify what worked and what didn’t. And when you have benchmarks that you can track year over year, it allows your team to develop strategies, make important decisions and allocate resources for your next round of recruiting.

GPRS is an extension of your team

If you’re looking for an agency that is well-versed in digital campaign optimizations, GPRS is your partner. Our proprietary campaign optimization system, GP Insights^TM, shows your real-time campaign data and can even display industry benchmarks showing how your peers and competition are trending. Give us a call and we’ll be happy to give you a demo.

Month: May 2021

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts