Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | January 31st, 2022

A content marketing strategy playbook

Content marketing. It’s the current buzz. It’s defined in many ways. It’s absolutely critical for your school. So how can you integrate content marketing into your recruiting plan? Let’s dig into defining content marketing and formulating a plan to include it in your admissions strategy.

Defining content marketing

Content marketing means many things to many organizations. If you ask any marketer on any given day, you may get a different response. That’s because the term itself is so broad. In general, start by asking these questions:

How can you optimize your current content to get as much mileage out of it as possible?
How can you proactively plan and create content that can go the distance?

Cohesive content marketing can enhance your brand and support your strategic pillars. When it’s done well, it can help build smooth customer experiences as you focus on creating, testing, editing and constantly improving digital content that spans multiple audiences and channels.

Optimizing current content

When you think of developing a content marketing strategy, start with what you have. Find out if there are ways to make your existing assets work harder for you.

For your website, this means optimizing for SEO, evaluating your customer experience and the flow of information on each page, determining if your landing pages spur action and if your content is generally organized in a way that makes sense to the reader.

For your assets, this means inserting them in multiple places for a cohesive messaging strategy. Assets could be any piece of content you’ve created that aims to resonate with a prospective student—infographics, videos, blogs, employment reports, alumni stories, news articles, viewbooks, the list goes on. It can also apply to past social posts that you can aggregate into meaningful collections. Start by grouping your assets by theme—for example, ROI, program benefits, faculty, and alumni success. Next, create a planned editorial calendar to deploy themed content by month in a coordinated effort via social, email, features on your website, and any other channels you are using.

Planning new content

As was mentioned above, an editorial calendar of the themes you’d like to promote can be extremely helpful in creating a consistent message for your prospects. Start simple by planning one theme for the next 6 months based on both your marketing strategy and the benefits of your program. After you’ve assessed what exists for each theme, you can determine where the gaps are and where you need to create something new.

Another way to plan new content is to brainstorm about the story you want to tell and decide on creating a hero piece that can be disseminated in multiple channels. Hero pieces are the kinds of content that may cost more but make a big impact. For example, a video series about distinguished alumni, a compilation piece of ROI stats, etc. When marketing and admissions are aligned on creating pieces like this, everyone benefits.

If your team needs help assessing your current content, creating a plan to get more mileage out of your assets, creating new pieces, or planning themes, contact GPRS today. We can help you develop a plan to optimize your communications based on your school’s strategy.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | January 19th, 2022

Use 2021’s trends to inform 2022’s strategies

After another uncertain year of admissions, program changes, and market ambiguity, you may be having difficulty re-establishing benchmarks, planning for the upcoming admissions cycles and even evaluating success. Although you may be ready to move forward, taking stock of recent trends can help inform your next steps.

A recent article in Forbes outlines a few of the top learnings that emerged in the education industry in 2021. We’re commenting on a few of these as it relates to higher ed admissions and marketing so as to carry the lessons of last year forward into our planning.

Pandemic life

The pandemic has continued to dominate headlines. Although this year may have given way to a bit more normalcy, there were still multiple disruptions that created uncertainty. Whether it was offering hybrid options, shifting policies on in-person learning, masking, or modifying events for students, your staff has been required to continuously shift to match the ups and downs of pandemic life.

What lessons can we take forward? Flexibility is king and communication is critical. While business schools herald change management as a key component to successful leadership, it can still be difficult to incorporate these elements into the admissions process, especially when it feels like you are chasing a moving target. But remaining aware of graduate recruiting trends, adapting quickly and communicating clearly can go a long way in validating your transparency to your current and prospective students.

Testing changes

With many schools modifying their admissions testing policies or making tests optional, the value of testing has been called into question for some prospects. If your school made decisions to suspend, amend or eliminate testing requirements based on limited accessibility, you may be facing questions today like when or how to re-instate testing, or what type of test will be your new standard.

What lessons can we take forward? Regardless of what your testing policy is or will become, be as clear as possible in all of your materials – website, digital advertising, emails, events – and make sure your updates are made in real-time to eliminate confusion. If you decide to change a rule, giving your justification for that decision can help avoid confusion. As a higher ed institution, you can feel confident in modifying your policies to fit the current business and economic environment and to ensure the best fit of students in your programs. Just be sure to clearly state your intentions and be transparent.

Enrollment changes

While a downward slide occurred in almost every area of post-secondary education, enrollment in graduate programs grew by 2.1%. In fact, GMAC states in their Application Trends Survey 2021, that, “..as candidates hedged their risks and schools introduced more flexible admissions policies, the application volumes soared in 2020. The 2021 application cycle is set in the context of this dramatic growth in applications in the preceding year.”

What lessons can we take forward? The value of an MBA and post-grad Master’s degrees persists. And during a time when professionals are rethinking their priorities and reconsidering their career paths, graduate school remains a timeless way to add evergreen skills to any professional’s resume. With the “great resignation” upon us where employees are leaving their jobs in droves, the network students can gain through post-grad programs remains extremely valuable. In your marketing and admissions materials, be sure to tout the skills earned in your MBA or master’s programs as valuable going into the next phase of life.

The past couple of years has been difficult at best. And no one knows what 2022 will hold. But with the tools of flexibility, transparency, and clear communication, your school can stabilize admissions and even increase enrollment

If you need help with a new marketing strategy, selecting the right digital advertising channels to reach your target audience and personalizing communications for your prospects, contact GPRS today.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Techteam | January 11th, 2022

The University of Pittsburgh wakes up dormant leads to boost enrollment

Challenge

Like many higher education institutions, the School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh has multiple graduate business programs. Each program has a large database of historical leads that have never turned into applicants or students. These aged records or “dormant leads” have been retained and marketed passively through ongoing CRM email campaigns. Yet, direct outreach is a challenge due to limited budgets, personnel, and the inability to make the volume of calls, per lead, necessary to actually connect with someone in this day and age.

Solution

To reactivate potential students for the Katz Graduate School of Business EMBA programs, GPRS recommended leveraging our Call Center. The contact center is state-of-the-art, and includes technology that enables real-time monitoring, as well as recording capabilities, to ensure that our team is always a consistent extension of our client’s recruiting and admissions departments.

After an in-depth analysis of the program’s dormant records, GPRS developed a comprehensive, outbound calling campaign with the goal of setting up one-to-one calls with the Program’s Director in hopes of moving the interested party further down the enrollment funnel. Additionally, the secondary goal was to update all of the contact records, and identify those who were still interested in the program and wanted more information but were not yet ready to commit to a meeting. Customized scripts were developed to accentuate the value proposition for the programs and a full range of Frequently Asked Questions were created for those who had immediate questions.

Results

Utilizing GPRS’ Contact Center Solution, the University of Pittsburgh, Katz Graduate School of Business was able to convert 22% of their dormant EMBA prospective student database into interested, and active appointments with the Program’s Director. Additionally, the EMBA program received qualitative data on each contacted lead, which enabled them to update their CRM records, as well as identifying “warm” prospects who were not yet ready to enroll, but were genuinely interested in joining a future cohort of the program.

STATE-OF-THE-ART CALL CENTER

PERCENTAGE OF DORMANT LEADS CONVERTED INTO ACTIVE APPOINTMENTS WITH EMBA PROGRAM DIRECTOR