Higher Education Marketing Tactics To Increase Enrollment

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Until about 25 years ago, higher education marketing strategies were shaped by developments in other industries. Universities, colleges, and other educational organizations provide a service, so service marketing principles are relevant. As the target of an enrollment marketing campaign, a student is a potential customer, so the successful use of tactics like B2C lead generation can be informative.

But beginning in the 1990s, researchers and marketers began to develop concepts and strategies specific to higher education marketing. This development has led to a wealth of resources dedicated to enrollment marketing. There’s even a Journal of Marketing for Higher Education.

This article will cover five tactics to help you improve your enrollment marketing efforts. Along the way, we’ll share findings from relevant studies specific to higher ed marketing. Some of the specific tactics we’ll explain include:

Relationship marketing
Audience segmentation
Inbound marketing
Social media marketing
Developing an Effective Higher Ed Marketing Strategy
General marketing best practices should inform a good strategy for marketing any product or service, and there’s a lot to learn from tactics used in the consumer industry. But higher ed marketers can now supplement the knowledge from those areas with marketing insights drawn from studies in their industry.

“An Enrollment Marketing Plan for Institutions of Higher Learning” (“An Enrollment Marketing Plan”) offers a marketing roadmap for higher education institutions. The article notes that educational institutions are beginning to adopt various marketing approaches to increase enrollment. These techniques provide a path to increasing enrollment in the face of increased competition and other challenges.

As with all marketing, higher ed marketing must research to determine the needs and attitudes of current students and develop a plan to meet those needs. Then, the institution must execute campaigns that:

Attract the right leads or, in an enrollment marketing context, students who might be a good fit for the school.
Qualify those leads to determine whether the student is a fit and open to enrollment.
Nurture qualified leads to persuade them to enroll.
The rest of this article will explain how to do that, along with marketing insights drawn from the consumer industry and the latest research on marketing in higher education.

1. Focus on Relationships
Marketers in every industry have begun to realize the importance of building long-term relationships instead of transactional relationships. For industries like retail, these relationships lead to customer loyalty and repeat purchases. But relationship marketing is particularly critical in higher education because the connection should last for years.

Relationship marketing aims to create a two-way line of communication between the institution and prospective students that provides value in the form of knowledge (e.g., information about the institution and its programs or financial aid opportunities). Relationship marketing works at institutions of any size, but it’s an invaluable tactic for smaller colleges.

Typically, the unique selling proposition of these schools is that they can provide a higher level of focused attention to each student. But, while this may be the case once a student enrolls, Marketing professor Brian A. Vander Schee, MBA, PhD, points out that, too often, it doesn’t extend to the university’s marketing efforts.

In “The small college enrollment officer: relationship marketing at work,” Vander Schee writes that relationship marketing can provide universities with a competitive advantage. That’s because it enables admission counselors to “provide accurate information and meaningful counsel to initiate an enrollment relationship with prospective students and their families.” Research shows finland telemarketing data that these relationships improve admissions yield.

To implement this approach in higher ed marketing, focus on:

Relationship benefits. The relationship should benefit the prospective student with information, reduced response time, and access to financial aid.
Seller expertise. Find ways to connect prospective students with the people who are most knowledgeable about their questions. For example, recent graduates of your institution will make good admissions counselors because they know a lot about the institution from a student’s perspective. If a student is interested in your history program, connect them with someone in the department or an alumnus of the program who can share their expertise.
Communication. Offer multiple channels of communication so that students can ask questions through their preferred medium. Then, train admissions counselors and other people who will communicate with prospective students to focus on active listening during personal interactions. They should use conversations with students as opportunities to learn more about their needs.
Interaction frequency. Create multiple opportunities for prospective students to engage with the contacts you introduce them to.
2. Identify Your Target Audiences
In higher education marketing, your target audience is likely quite diverse, including segments like:

High school students, especially seniors
Adult students interested in earning a higher education degree or certification
Undergraduate students considering graduate school
Your enrollment marketing campaigns should focus on the questions and needs of each group. And within those groups, there will be demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and geographic differences that may also require a targeted approach of their own.

“An Enrollment Marketing Plan” suggests market segmentation based on the following factors:

Age
Sex
Occupation
Income
Location
For example, if you’re targeting nontraditional students for a continuing education program, the needs of the stay-at-home parents will differ from those with part-time jobs. And each of those segments will have different needs than people with full-time jobs.

The cost of attending your institution should also factor into who you target. Allocate your resources to focus on students who are likely to enroll to avoid spending your budget on audiences who won’t deliver an ROI to offset the costs of your campaigns.

You can do that by developing student personas for each major group. These personas should include general descriptions of each groups’:

Level of education
Reasons for applying
Questions and concerns
Demographics
Research methods and decision-making process—i.e., how will they evaluate and make a final decision on a school?
If your data suggests that there are other significant groups within these major groups, you should create personas for these groups as well. For example, if you have a popular pre-med program, you probably have many undergraduate students considering your institution because they want to go to med school.

Based on these segments, adapt your messaging to address each group’s questions and concerns through the decision-making process. This information can also benefit admissions counselors and others in developing relationships with prospective students.

3. Use Audience Segmentation
The 2021 study “Unique challenges of segmentation and differentiation for higher education” found that different groups of parents, students, and others have unique priorities and that marketers should consider each a separate segment. For enrollment marketing, the primary goal is to win over the student and, in many cases, their parents.

Fortunately, the study found that parents and students value many of the same things. They have different priorities, but these differences aren’t in conflict. Students rank majors offered, faculty quality, and academic standards as the first, second, and third most important attributes. Those are the top three for parents as well but in reverse order.

But that study focused on a single geographic location. Another limitation of the study is that while it found significant subsegments within each segment, it didn’t determine what those subsegments were.

As mentioned above, educational institutions should conduct their own research to decide what segments and subsegments to focus on. Whatever decisions you make, you can accommodate differences in priorities with audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation is the process of dividing and subdividing your target market into different groups so you can target them with relevant campaigns. That way, instead of sending mass emails and generic ad campaigns, you can adapt your messaging for each persona.

That requires using the segmentation tools in your ad platforms, email marketing platform, and other marketing tools to carve your email list and ad audiences into groups based on the criteria of your personas.

One prospect can be in multiple segments. For example, if you use demographic segmentation in addition to persona-based segmentation, a prospect could be in an 18-34-year-old segment and a high school senior segment.