IGNITING STUDENT RECRUITMENT AND ENGAGEMENT WITH DIGITAL MARKETING

WHITEPAPER

With new types of

students to appeal

to, higher education

institutions need to

keep up.

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Student demographics are changing. The drive to recruit and retain students is of utmost importance. And what has historically been considered “non-traditional” is now becoming the new normal for the student population. Faced with this rapid evolution, higher education and training institutions need to make changes in order to thrive.

Nowadays part-time, older, and working students take up more seats in a typical student classroom than in the past. What has been typically considered non- traditional will become standard operating procedure.

Higher education and training institutions need to find new ways to engage with this new type of student, and will face competition as they do. With the proliferation of online and distance learning and increased competition from local and international institutions, higher education/training is quickly becoming a commodity market. In this new market, universities and polytechnics aren’t just competing with other similar institutions either, but also with all types of higher education institutions, from research institutes to Private Training Establishments and community education organisations.

The result of all of these changes is an industry that’s going through a rapid transformation, with forces such as financing and funding, tuition costs, government policies, and technological developments defining the new reality of the higher education/training landscape. And, with all of these challenges impacting enrolment, new underlying forces are too large to be avoided. Institutions will need to quickly adopt new marketing, recruitment and engagement practices in order to succeed.

Keeping in mind the individual needs and decision criteria of each student, higher education and training institutions will have to consider modern communication tools to keep up. Those tools can allow them to reach their audiences in new ways: across multiple channels, with targeted messages to help improve student recruitment, engagement and retention overall.

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THE SHIFT IN MARKETING MEDIUMS

Today, despite the widespread adoption of digital media, educational institutions have been cautious to embrace digital marketing techniques. While many institutions are optimising their websites and increasingly making more use of social media channels to interact with current and prospective students, most are still slow to adapt to the new channels and rules of student engagement.

Institutions need to advance their communication efforts to the next level, to increase enrolment efficiency and use it as the first step in student life cycle management. But first, in order to achieve their goals, higher education marketers need to develop a cohesive marketing strategy. Once that’s achieved, proper budget allocations should be made to allow for the best execution of the strategy in place.

In developing their recruitment strategy, higher education marketers should now be asking themselves the following questions:

WHO? Defining their target audience is the first step toward shaping an institution’s recruitment strategy. When developing that audience, higher education marketers need to consider both personal and behavioural criteria, including demographics, location, individual needs, programs, and application stage. Once developed, that audience breakdown can be used as a framework for defining an effective and targeted content strategy.

WHAT? Institutions need a content strategy that’s cohesive. With thousands of students enrolled into many distinct undergraduate and graduate programs, higher education marketers have to develop unique messages and engaging content for each audience segment. The content of their message should be further tailored to the stage each individual is at and focus on moving them to the next step in their journey.

WHERE? Once higher education marketers know their target audience and are able to map their content to effectively influence it, they need to consider the right channels to reach out to that intended audience.

A New Recruitment and

Engagement Philosophy

for Higher Education

CASE IN POINT: ONLINE EDUCATION PROVIDER

USES ANALYTICS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THEIR AUDIENCE

A leading online education provider needed to get to know

their target market better, in order to grow their audience and

improve their marketing endeavours—all while decreasing their cost

per acquisition (CPA). To do so, they brought on Oracle Marketing Cloud,

providing more enquiry form submissions on their website and affiliated

sites to effectively implement a comprehensive analytics tool. The result was

improved insight into their audience, allowing them to drive prospective students to

their online properties and retarget users who came to the pre- enquiry page. They

were also able to grow their reachable and targetable audiences by identifying

the attributes of converters and non-converters, and informing data-driven

retargeting and prospecting efforts to drive more qualified traffic to their

site. Finally, by using Oracle Marketing Cloud as their primary retargeting

tool to increase conversion rates, the group could influence purchase

decisions to drive orders and ensure media buys were driven by

audience insights. The new data available to them improved

media buying decisions and helped identify the impact

of cross-channel marketing, to implement the most

effective buying model for each vendor.

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BUILD A SINGLE VIEW OF YOUR AUDIENCEIt’s no secret that higher education and training institutions are spending a significant portion

of their recruitment budgets on digital advertising. With the widespread adoption of digital

channels, digital—if it does not already—will soon constitute the largest portion of marketing

budgets. But with the increased pressure to prioritise and justify how institutions spend their

budgets, higher education marketers need to improve display advertising effectiveness. In order

to do that, they have to determine who their audience is, how they engage with the world, and

where they get their information. Higher education marketers can leverage data management

solutions to aggregate a variety of data sources to create a single view of their audience. Doing

so allows them to save on advertising by targeting an audience that fits their specific criteria, and

improve conversion by dynamically personalising the message to each individual’s needs.

MAKE CONTENT MARKETING SCALEWhether it’s for web, social, or outreach communications, higher education marketers are tasked

with providing a large list of content. Adding to that complexity, they must also manage multiple

websites and other communication properties, all of which consume content. Also, educational

institutions have a relatively large contact and contributor base. This is where the power of

content marketing solutions comes into place, to streamline content creation by enabling

marketers to align, plan, and deliver persona-based content. Using marketing solutions,

marketers can create an effective and scalable content marketing strategy, while centralising all

content marketing efforts.

DELIVER CONSISTENT CROSS-CHANNEL OUTREACHModern higher education marketers know that enrolment is a journey. As such, prospective

students need to be qualified and graded based on criteria such as application stage, interest,

and engagement. It is increasingly becoming more important to interact with prospective

students with relevant and personalised communications, while continuing to gather key insights

for ongoing marketing enhancement. By leveraging the power of cross- channel marketing,

higher education marketers can execute persona-based campaigns with consistent and relevant

communications to increase student engagement throughout a student’s life cycle journey.

Strategies to Improve

Student Recruitment

USE SOCIAL MARKETING TO ENGAGE WITH STUDENTSToday, the main outreach audience of higher education marketers comes

from the millennial demographic. This audience grew up with changing

technologies such as web, mobile, and social. According to a study

performed by eMarketer, millennials have the highest penetration

of Internet usage, with 93 percent. Compared to Gen X and Baby

Boomers, millennials also use social media the most, with

84 percent of millennials interacting across social channels.

For higher education marketers, it is important to find

where their target audience spends their time online

and use those channels to their advantage. By

leveraging the power of social marketing

solutions, marketers can now listen

to conversations occurring on social

channels and choose to engage in

those conversations in a

personalised way.

CASE IN POINT: INDIANA UNIVERSITY

USES CONTENT MARKETING TO BOOST

RECRUITMENT BY MEETING STUDENTS ON SOCIAL CHANNELS

When the marketing team at Indiana University

brainstormed new ways to recruit and retain students,

they came up with an idea—let existing students do it

for them. They wanted to enable existing Indiana University

(IU) students to create content about campus life, and to spread

that content directly through social channels. To accomplish their

goal, the university needed a platform that was robust enough to

aggregate student stories, while allowing editors to monitor content before

publication too. The platform also needed to enable IU students to share

stories through their personal channels. To accomplish all of that, the school

used Oracle Marketing Cloud as a content hub to collect student-generated articles,

videos, and photos aligned with 80 categories. From 50 to 100 students contributed

at least one article per month through the easy-to-use, web-based interface, with

an editor usually spending less than an hour a day moderating and copy editing the

content, selecting the proper categories, and formatting graphic elements before

publication. Indiana University found that the expanded content led to more

engagement—in fact, within the first year 1,200 articles were submitted and

the website received 360 visitors each day. Today, Indiana University

has more than 150 active student bloggers, a group that averages

38 posts per month.

Oracle Marketing Cloud offers higher education marketers the tools they need to better meet

their unique set of challenges, as they try to improve student recruitment, increase engagement

and retention, enhance student success, and build donations. Based on leading solutions and

deep industry experience, Oracle Marketing Cloud provides modern tools that enable higher

education institutions to deliver measurable outcomes. It allows institutions to streamline their

efforts with the knowledge that they need to anticipate when, where, and how to approach their

intended audience.

Oracle

Marketing Cloud

for

Student

Engagement

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CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING empowers marketers through enhanced capabilities to

track, qualify, and measure audience activity across web, mobile, email, and other channels, in

order to improve conversion and increase engagement. By leveraging cross-channel marketing

tools, institutions can reach out to their audience with a targeted and personalised message, to

establish effective ongoing communications across all communication channels.

PUSH MARKETING allows companies to send real-time automated notifications to mobile

devices. By leveraging the power of push marketing, institutions can engage with their students

across campus with relevant mobile notifications.

SOCIAL MARKETING allows institutions to listen and engage with their audience across

social channels, helping to build a reputable brand. By harnessing the power of social marketing,

higher education institutions can monitor what their audience is saying across social platforms,

engage in conversations already taking place, and become proactive in those conversations to

improve student engagement and experience.

CONTENT MARKETING empowers marketers to align, plan, and deliver relevant, scalable

content. Marketers can educate their audience with compelling persona-based content that

increases engagement across social channels with both current and prospective students. In

addition, the built-in workflow capability of a content marketing platform will simplify the

allocation of tasks, including content creation, approval, and publishing capabilities—allowing

higher education institutions to achieve more with less.

DATA MANAGEMENT aggregates data sources—whether they’re online, mobile, or

offline—into a central location, to unlock and optimise data for use. It helps create an audience-

profile based on an audience’s online, offline, and mobile activities. By finding out more about

that audience, marketers can determine exactly what they need—and in doing so, target them in

ways they never could before, delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.

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As student demographics and demands continue to change, higher education is going through

a rapid transformation. Meanwhile, forces such as financing and funding, tuition costs,

government policies, and technological developments help define the new reality of the higher

education landscape. With evolving student needs, higher education institutions need to

address these challenges by adopting modern marketing solutions like Oracle Marketing Cloud

for student engagement, to improve student experiences and enhance marketing and

recruitment initiatives.

Conclusion

WHITEPAPER | IGNITING STUDENT RECRUITMENT AND ENGAGEMENT WITH DIGITAL MARKETING

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New Zealand | +64 21 577 889 | steve.roughan@fusion5.co.nz | www.fusion5.co.nzAustralia | +61 3 9922 5501 | ben.stewart@fusion5.com.au | www.fusion5.com.au

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CustomerExperience

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RelationshipManagement

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ABOUT FUSION5

Modern Marketers choose Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions to create ideal customers and increase revenue. Integrated information from cross-channel, content, and social marketing with data management and dozens of AppCloud apps enables these businesses to target, engage, convert, analyse, and use award-winning marketing technology and expertise to deliver personalised customer experiences.

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About Oracle Marketing Cloud

ContactSteve Roughan | Industry Director, Higher Education

Phone: +64 4 473 4552 | Mobile: +64 21 577 889 | Email: steve.roughan@fusion5.co.nz

www.fusion5.co.nz