Common Mistakes By Higher Education Marketers

By Maneesh Upadhyaya (Business)

Are you the admissions and marketing head of a reputed college or university? Are you a professor who is also in-charge of marketing and admissions? Or are you the Dean/Director/Owner who runs marketing yourself? Read on to become aware of some of the common pitfalls and mistakes being made in the higher education marketing industry.

1. Not investing in folks who understand online marketing: Too many marketing dollars are being spent by folks who don’t really understand digital marketing and its nuances. They are too comfortable with print or working with agencies who have their own vested interests. Universities need to employ smarter digital marketers who can understand the whole gamut of online marketing – whether it be using sites like Shiksha/Google/Social media, mastering techniques like re-marketing, email marketing, content marketing, or mastering monitoring tools like google analytics. Some of our partner colleges who have embraced this early are seeing huge gains in the form of better decision making.

2. Perception rather than data led: Some of the common things I hear colleges say is: “Print ads help us reach a large audience” or “Google gives me cheap leads”. Not enough are looking at the data closely. Print ads surely have a good reach, but a large majority of the circulation and readership you pay for is irrelevant for you. Your TG is prospective students aged 16-25 years, depending on the courses you offer, but the newspaper is read by a diverse age-group. Many in the 16-25 group would also not be prospective students (think of the kirana store owner’s son who runs the shop and is 20 years old).

“But Google is cheap”! Colleges fail to see how much of their spend on Google is going on advertising on their own keywords (they would have come to you anyway), how these spends are varying with time of the year, and then doing a fair comparison with a site like Shiksha. The quality and size of the branding presence on vertical sites like Shiksha is usually better than Google Display network. Other important metric to be looked beyond lead cost is the end conversion (application, admission) rate of the leads. Here again, vertical focussed sites will always tend to score better than horizontal platforms like Google.

1. Why should I believe you? : When it comes to communication and creative development, a credible ‘reason to believe’ is often missing. For those who focus on placements, just saying “100% placements” is not good enough today. What kind of companies recruited? For what roles? Range of salaries offered? We often advise colleges to be as transparent with their placement information as possible. Giving student-wise placement details of the entire batch goes a long way in building trust amongst prospective students.
2. Fine tuning the message: Have you looked at which colleges/universities you are compared to online? Is the consideration set of students similar to the competition in your mind? Valuable data like this can help colleges get a reality check, and adopt their messaging to tilt that comparison in their favour. What kind of questions are being asked about your college online? There is a huge amount of cues you can cull out from online data, which can help your marketing & communication strategy.
3. Penny wise. Pound foolish: Lastly, the final mile is effective counselling. Many a time, leads/enquiries from online sites remain unused for lack of quality counsellors. Campaigns start in September but counsellors come on board after a month or two. Colleges are spending crores on marketing but not investing a few lakhs on well trained counsellors early enough in the season.

There are some colleges who have stayed away from the above mistakes, and are reaping the benefits with better ROI on their spend.

Are you one of them?

[First Published on October 16, 2015]