Marketing Automation and Higher Education

As an educational institution, the marketing challenges you face are unique. Understanding the personal and professional goals of each student and linking those to your institution’s strengths is your goal.  

Creating a unique student experience is the only way to differentiate your institution from others. From the minute an individual visits your website, she  tells you things about herself, her  interests, and her  aspirations. Is most of the time spent looking at one or two academic departments? Is the first visit to the tuition and fees page? Or maybe the focus is on a specific sport. Identifying the activity on your site and creating  a personalized response specific to one student's  interests increases the chances that she will follow-up to learn more about the opportunities you offer.

Given the increased competition for students,  every admissions office can benefit from  analyzing and using available but unused data to attract the most appropriate enrollees.  Marketing automation software allows admissions  to identify and cultivate the best set of potential students. It is possible to identify a particular student's interests or concerns and respond to that specific area.  As a result, an admission's office will have a much stronger profile of each applicant and know how to engage the potential student as they move through the admissions process.

In conclusion, there are two clear benefits:
1) Most importantly, a more complete and accurate profile of an applicant that can be used to encourage their interest in the institution
2) A clearer profile can be developed without additional staffing that would drain admissions department budgets.

In a later blog, we'll talk about other examples where automation can be used to track an applicant's specific interests.