Education operates on a steady and usually strict timeline due to the application, enrollment, and start date cycles. Education works with defined periods of promotions, and specific conversion and enrollment goals for each period: on campus events, start dates for your programs, application deadlines, open house events, etc.
As such, the marketing channels schools use should be dynamic and fluid; able to adapt and be changed quickly as your needs change based on where you are in the academic and marketing year calendars. Of course each channel needs to also reach the right people who have the best change of becoming a new student.
Targeting the right people is very important. Why would you want to spend marketing money to reach 80 percent of the population when only 3-7 percent are the ones who constitute the group who are making or influencing the decision to attend a school. The technology exists to target the right people with great accuracy, so that’s what you ought to do to get the best ROI for your marketing dollar.
Build your marketing plan along side and in sync with your academic calendar. Take into account the time it takes for the entire enrollment process: inquiry to application to fully enrolled student. Your marketing and academic calendars should overlay and make sense in respect to one another.
Examine your calendars and select the most effective marketing channels for each function. Don’t place ads in local papers for the sole reason that it’s what you’ve always done. For some goals that works, and for others it doesn’t Be specific.
