Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | January 13th, 2021

New year. New strategy. Go back to the basics.

A new year often comes with a new energy, new goals and a new mindset. While many of us eagerly awaited the end of 2020 and a fresh start, we also knew that we would likely still be contending with a complex landscape (especially in education) that would require flexibility, creativity and resilience.

Although there is still much uncertainty surrounding the virus, the market and the state of the country, there is one thing that remains steady – the need to educate the next generation and create stable leaders who can address challenges like these head on.

Armed with the learnings of the past several months, your recruiting team can begin to plan for the future, however fragmented it may appear. You may be wondering how you will generate new leads and how you will seat your classes. Although so much has changed, our perspective is to go back to the basics.

What is important to your target audience?

One of the most important pieces of any strategy, after identifying your target, is to focus on what is important to them. What makes them tick? What are they looking to achieve? How do they view their career path? By doing research and creating personas for your prospects, you may find that although their values may have stayed the same, the way they pursue their goals has changed. Although you may have created personas in the past, it might be time to update them given the current state of the job market. Since your target’s career stage, ambitions and mindset on advancement may have shifted drastically in the past year, it’s important to address these alterations by shifting your communications.

How will you find your target audience?

A qualified firm can help you determine the right strategy to uncover quality leads for your school. Right now, your prospects are spending an inordinate amount of time online—couple that with a constantly shifting digital advertising landscape and it’s hard to know where to start. Choosing the right platform is key, and it helps to start here:

Talk to current students – they can give you an insight into what their like-minded counterparts are thinking and where they’re spending their time online.
Do some research into digital trends. Find out what platforms and social media are trending for students in your demographic and decide if they are right for your programs.
Always buy media through reputable sources.

How will you communicate with your leads?

At the moment, your message is competing with a constant stream of news and your prospects are being barraged with 24/7 advertising and social media. While many are still working from home, they may be burnt out by the end of the day, so making sure your message cuts through the clutter is imperative. How can you focus your communications so that your target will tune in?

Be transparent and authentic. In the age of mis-information, your prospects want to know they can trust you to have their best interests at heart.
Focus on the benefits. Alter your messaging to be direct and “cut to the chase.” Showcase the strength of your programs with specific success metrics.
Give them something to look forward to. While the market is shifting, your target can quietly be positioning themselves for career advancement and leadership to prepare for the future.

How will you nurture your leads?

Once your leads are in the funnel, the real work begins. How you walk them through the process of applying and becoming a student may take more work this year. They may need more reassurance than in years’ past. Although your CRM can do a lot of the work for you, don’t underestimate the power of personal connection during this time. Your prospects need to know you are watching out for them, you are cheering them on and that your program will offer them hope for their future career ambitions. Utilizing a nurture strategy can help you keep tabs on your prospects, track their activity within the funnel and follow up with them if they become stagnant.

If you need more ideas on generating leads, selecting the right digital advertising channels for your target and personalizing communication for your prospects, contact GPRS today. We can help you develop a plan to fit within your strategy and budget.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | October 23rd, 2019

Investing in landing pages that are user-friendly, informative and optimized

Say you’re aimlessly scrolling through social media or you’re on your favorite news site and all of a sudden, you see it – the thing you’ve been waiting for. It’s going to change your life. It’s the price you want. So really, it’s perfect. You must buy it right away. You click on the link while anxiously reaching for your credit card. The link takes you to the company’s homepage and you scroll and scroll. You may even click over to another page looking for the very product you wanted. It’s not there. At this point, you’re frustrated and less likely to buy.

Don’t let this happen to your prospective students. While this may be an over-exaggerated scenario, and it’s not likely that your prospects would be applying and ready to pay for tuition in one simple click, you certainly don’t want to lose them at this stage, or extinguish their enthusiasm for your brand. If it’s the first time they are engaging with you, you’ve done the hardest job which is to grab their attention. But the next step is to make sure the experience is consistent. When they click on your link, you want to secure their interest and action.

Ways to optimize your prospects’ experience with customized landing pages

Address directly what they have seen in your ad so the messaging is cohesive.
Keep your branding front and center, use imagery and make the landing page visually intriguing
Give them enough (less is more) details about your school to be intrigued and request more information. Think 3-5 bullets.
Provide a simple call to action, i.e. request more info, download a brochure, see a list of admissions events.
Keep the form simple with 4 fields – first name, last name, email and phone number.
Ensure the transfer of data (to your organization) is clean. Route it directly into your CRM to avoid manual labor and minimize mistakes.
Employ “thank you” pages (after an inquiry is completed) to redirect to your website.

Why invest in a landing page?

While you have spent a lot of time building and optimizing your school’s website and it may be seen as the primary source of information for your prospects, it’s not always the right place for them to land after they’ve seen one of your ads. Custom landing pages can offer your future students a simple solution for the specific information they seek. If they’ve clicked on an ad, they’re willing to go a step further than just browsing your website. And if they’ve never seen your website or they’re not aware of your program, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information. Using a gateway landing page can make all the difference for that first connection, and give your prospects confidence to keep exploring further through the information request phase.

Not to mention, a landing page that routes to your CRM that is properly coded can help you determine how well your advertising is working, response rates and ROI. And with a sophisticated Prospective Student Data Platform, you may even be able to track your ads and landing page activity back to seated students.
If you’re looking for ways to build your next campaign and structure your landing pages to collect information that can also integrate into your CRM, contact GPRS today.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | October 9th, 2019

Embracing the digital video advertising trend for your school

You don’t have to be a marketing pro to notice that video ads are taking the digital advertising world by storm. It is likely that 50% of your social media feed is populated with videos or that a friend or colleague has recently shared a video with you on their phone or computer screen. Although video advertising can work for any company in any industry, it’s becoming imperative in the higher ed world because of the personal scale connection required for large buying decisions like a degree.

Here are 4 reasons to embrace the video advertising trend:

Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter
Connecting visually can form stronger relationships
Social media is dominated by video, especially Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook
Customers expect it and your competition is doing it

What are video ads and how do they differ from the videos you have on your YouTube channel?

Video ads are shorter and more succinct than the traditional 3-5 minute video you have on your website or YouTube channel that tell about your program, the benefits of your school or highlight a professor or student testimonial. Don’t misinterpret – those videos still have a place and purpose. But for marketing strategies, advertisers are starting to opt for 30 second video ads (like a traditional commercial) or 10-15 second micro-videos that can be produced in a series. Although you may have many points to make, you can do this over time with varied versions of video ads pieced together to form a journey for your prospective students.

Secrets to successful digital video advertising

Although you may be ready to jump on the video ad bandwagon, you can’t just do it haphazardly. Consumers are smarter than you think and they can recognize quality in an instant. Additionally, they can make snap decisions on your brand so you want each interaction to be a quality experience. Here are some keys to creating good video advertising:

Mix and match lengths; vary with 10-30 second videos
Keep the message simple – you don’t have to say everything, just say something that spurs their interest
Make sure it can make an emotional connection without using sound since many people browse on silent mode

How to integrate video into your marketing strategy

When you’re developing your marketing strategy, it’s critical to examine your target market, pick the right channels and develop messaging that supports your programs key features and benefits. Make sure that your messaging is conducive to video, distill your information into key points and even use existing video footage pieced together to showcase your school in a way that maintains your brand.

If you’re looking for ways to integrate video advertising into your school’s marketing strategy, contact GPRS today.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | September 26th, 2019

Industry Benchmark Data: How do you compare to the competition?

In higher ed marketing, a competitive analysis can help you gain insight into program trends, offerings and innovations. You can even determine how your competitors are creating their messaging to prospects and channels they are using. But if you’re not in their market it may be harder to gather intel. If you’re like many schools, you may have missing pieces of the puzzle like how peer schools are marketing and on what channels. You may even be wondering what they’re spending, how many leads they’re getting and where their students are coming from (hopefully it’s not your backyard). Wouldn’t it be great to have a marketing partner that has all of these answers, and more?

Filling in the gaps with industry benchmark data

When you’re developing your marketing strategy, it’s critical to examine your target market, pick the right channels and develop messaging that supports your programs key features and benefits. But if you’re going to compete in a national (or global) market, being armed with additional information on how your competition thinks can only serve to enhance your strategy.

In addition to the standard competitive analysis areas, when comparing your marketing with your peers, here are the main categories that are important to benchmark:

Leads – how many leads were obtained and how may turned into prospects and seated students
Cost per click – what is the typical cost per click and cost per seated student by channel, area of the country, program
Seasonality – what seasons are key recruiting periods? You may know your school’s seasonality based on recruiting events or past data, but there could be times of the year you are missing.
Geographic Interaction – where are prospects coming from that are attracted to your type of program, where is your competition pulling from, and what radius should you target for the highest possible interactions?
ROI – how much is your competition spending and where, what channels are working the best and how many seated students are they obtaining directly from their marketing spend?
Messaging – what types of messages resonate the best in your geographic location and for your specific type of program?

How do you obtain this industry benchmark data?

Although we’d like to tell you that “there’s an app for that,” that’s unfortunately not the case. But partnering with GPRS will give you access to our proprietary platform, GP Insights^TM, that we’ve developed after years of collecting aggregate industry data. We are tracking real-time market data and can give you the type of insights you’re seeking to deepen your marketing strategy. With a subscription to the GP Insights platform, predictive analytics in the higher ed space is no longer the future, it’s available today.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can fill in the gaps of your competitive analysis, contact GPRS today.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | September 12th, 2019

The Power of Personas: Why do personas matter for higher ed?

If you’ve ever advertised or sold a product or program, you’re familiar with how important your target audience is to your marketing strategy. Personas are target audiences on steroids, a kind of hyper-targeting to help you dig even deeper and uncover the key motivations behind buying behavior. If you’ve heard the buzz about personas and are interested in how to create and use them to enrich your marketing, and communicate more clearly with your prospects, find out more below.

What is a persona?

A marketing persona is a partially fictional sketch of a key “type” of ideal customer. After creating it and re-reading it back, it will sound like you are talking about a friend or family member because it will include very personal and specific details on the person’s background, mindset and motivations. It will be based on market research and real industry data, but goes deeper than a traditional target market assessment that only includes demographic information. It might visually look like a resume, or a social media profile page with a name—and many times a photo or quote from the person.

Example Student Persona

Sarah Johnson, age 38, married with 2 children, lives in Chicago

Background

Full-time HR director at a retail company, on the path to become CHRO in 5 years, mom with demanding dance and soccer schedules, has undergrad in political science and secretly wonders if an MBA would help her advance in her career.

Motivations

Leading and mentoring a team, being at all of her kids sporting events, traveling to her weekend lake home more often.

Goals

Balancing time with her family and a blossoming career that could land her in the c-suite in her early 40s.

Fears

That her non-traditional degree is limiting her earning power but that she will miss her family’s important events if she decides to pursue a degree.

Online habits

Sarah is busy. She can typically be found browsing Facebook or Instagram at 10pm after her family has gone to bed and she’s replied to a few pressing work emails. She uses the Gmail platform and shops on Amazon because she doesn’t have time to run her errands during the day.

Quote

I’d love to get an MBA so I can gain a seat at the executive table, but it’s also important for me to balance my time so I can be there for my family.

How do you build one?

Although you can see samples of fields in the included example, it’s important to tailor your persona to what you want to know. Since there can be many different types of people even within the same market segment, you’ll want to cover your bases with 2-3 per demographic group with male/female counterparts, and areas to address all of the decision points for someone considering your brand. Using general market research, past data from your organization, google analytics, personal interviews and industry benchmark data can all help you build the type of persona you’ll need to enrich your content strategy.

How can personas enrich your marketing strategy?

When you do a deep dive into what your audience is thinking, it helps you address the barriers to their decision making process. For example, if they’re worried about balancing time you can present the benefits of your flexible online and weekend programs. If ROI is the question, make sure you provide factoids on how long it might take to recoup the investment. Developing personas can also help your internal marketing and admissions teams collaborate to prioritize your messaging, media strategy and tactics.

Why do personas matter more in higher ed?

In marketing, anytime you are asking someone to spend money the connection to values, motivations and mindset are critical. But for your prospective students, investing in a degree and educational experience carries a larger price tag and much higher emotional commitment than a cup of coffee, a couch or a lawnmower. Digging deep into goals, fears, frustrations and media habits will not only help you develop your messaging more clearly but also prioritize your channels and strategy for connecting.

For schools looking to build personas to enhance your targeted marketing strategy, GPRS offers custom solutions. With deep insight into the mindset of degree-seeking students at all levels, we can help you pinpoint your audiences and reap the benefits of hyper-targeted communications. Contact GPRS today to learn more.