Small marketing teams within a college face daily challenges about where to spend their time. In this dynamic world, direction changes and leadership requests regularly shift priorities. Most small marketing teams focus on the critical role of marketing communications, helping to build a brand for the institution and showcasing to prospective students what makes them stand out to attract the right people.
In addition to marketing communications, enrollment marketing strategies can round out the branding efforts by helping bring more people to admissions teams and guiding them through to an enrolled student. Let's explore the role of enrollment marketing and how small marketing teams can incorporate it into their busy schedules.
Why do colleges need enrollment marketing?
For students, the path to selecting a college to go to can be a long one, typically two+ years. Throughout that time, they go through different steps:
Exploring whether or not they want to go to a college and what they want to study.
Coming up with a list of colleges to look into.
Researching the colleges.
Visiting and talking with people at the colleges.
Going through the application process for multiple colleges.
Getting accepted or denied.
Evaluating the colleges they were accepted to again.
Making a final decision and choosing a college to attend.
Enrollment marketing is the process of marketing to prospective students throughout their entire journey. It involves using data to help marketing guide prospective students. By working holistically to reach people throughout the enrollment funnel, brand marketing efforts connect to enrollment goals and revenue for the institution.
Enrollment marketing strategy examples
Developing a strategy to connect your marketing ideas will help your small team focus on achieving your goals. You can pool resources and make a bigger impact when your marketing activities are connected and planned around one strategic area. Here are some examples:
1. Use storytelling to connect with prospective students throughout the enrollment funnel.
With this strategy, you would leverage the content you're creating in brand awareness efforts to generate new inquiries and nurture existing ones. For example:
Highlight student stories in paid social media ads.
Include quotes from students on landing pages.
Create nurture email campaigns that include perspectives from the community, including students, staff, and alumni.
Invite prospective students to campus or virtual events, like speakers or student gatherings.
Work with admissions to incorporate stories of students into their info session presentations.
2. Provide a superior user experience to prospective students throughout the enrollment funnel.
With this strategy, you would identify ways to be as helpful and streamlined as possible at every step of the journey, working collaboratively with campus teams like admissions and student services. For example:
Make key information, such as the cost, time to complete, and courses, easy to find on the website.
Include an accessible way to ask questions via an online chat that connects to a live person.
Ensure the application is easy to use and that you ask only the questions you need to at this point so you don't create unnecessary roadblocks.
Include checklists during your nurture email campaign, like the steps needed for financial aid.
You can tackle one marketing strategy at a time to keep your small marketing team focused. Next, we'll dive into how to get started in creating an enrollment marketing plan.
How to create enrollment marketing strategies
An enrollment marketing plan connects brand marketing efforts with enrollment goals. It is backed by data and is continually reviewed and optimized. Implementing enrollment marketing involves three main steps.
Set-Up Data in Your CRM
The first step in creating enrollment marketing strategies is to ensure you can see how prospective students progress along the enrollment funnel. This is done through a CRM system. Salesforce, Slate, and Ellucian are some popular CRMs in higher ed. The marketing team should have full access to the data, whether it's through accessing the CRM directly or by syncing the data with a marketing platform like Hubspot.
Depending on the system you use, you may need to work with IT to create additional marketing fields in the CRM. You want to be able to see a field indicating what stage of the enrollment funnel the person is in and fields showing what marketing activities they engaged with and in what order.
Review the Funnel
After you have this data, the next step is to pull the data and look at your enrollment funnel. Break down each step of the funnel and see how the enrollment goal is impacted if you make small changes. Then, brainstorm what you can improve at each step and group them into strategies.
Look at how many prospective students you have at each step. What is the conversion rate between each? Identify what adjustments could be made to help you reach enrollment goals.
It's common to believe that marketing needs to focus on bringing in new inquiries to help enrollment. But that's a big investment of budget and resources. For a small marketing team, there may be other areas you can make an impact. For example, do you see a lot of people starting the application but not finishing it? Maybe there are steps you can take to help that process by making the application shorter and more user-friendly, providing a checklist before they start the application with what they will need, or a helpful chatbot to answer questions.
Prioritize Your Ideas
Prioritize your tactics based on what will make the biggest impact with the time and skills you have on your team. You can put each idea on post-it notes or in a spreadsheet and see what can be combined into one strategy. Then give each strategy and tactic a value to help you decide the order you work on each initiative.
Enrollment Marketing for Your Higher Ed Institution
Incorporating enrollment marketing strategies into the already demanding schedules of small marketing teams may seem daunting, but it is both achievable and crucial for the success of your institution. By connecting tactical ideas into strategies and prioritizing efforts, small marketing teams can use enrollment marketing to create a seamless journey for prospective students from initial interest to enrollment.
