Full Service Marketing for Higher Education, Health Care & B2B Marketing
Full Service Marketing for Higher Education, Health Care & B2B Marketing
Annesha Sengupta
October 1, 2024
At this year’s National Council for Marketing and Public Relations District 3 conference, there were a lot of gems of insights shared among attendees–almost too many to keep track of!
Among the incredible presentations was Enrollment Results-Driven Marketing: Pro Tips to Increase Your Results with Your Current Budget by Tasha Hussain Black, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Marketing and Communications at Owens Community College and Lisa Starkey-Wood Account Executive at Stamats. Bringing over 40 years of experience to the table, Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood offered straightforward advice on how to work hand-in-hand with other departments on campus and maximize your existing budgets to achieve meaningful results.
In higher education, teams often operate in siloes. Admissions works independently from marketing, which works separately from student life and academics. But when these departments synchronize and work together, marketing strategies become stronger. Unified efforts can lead to innovative solutions and greater impact overall.
So, without further ado, let’s dig in.
One of the most common opportunities for budget optimization is to treat each month’s allocated ad spend like a unique budget. We know all months of the enrollment cycle are not created equal—splitting ad spend evenly across 12 months of the year means that excess budget is wasted in months that don’t need the extra boost.
Instead, plan increases in your ad spend around the most important dates in the enrollment cycle, such as application deadlines, registration deadlines, or the start of classes. Strategic timing delivers your messaging to prospective students when they’re most engaged and likely to interact. If the start of your fall semester overlaps with your winter nursing application deadline, increase your ad spend in the months leading up to those dates to increase conversions and see results.
Using this strategy, Owens Community College increased their conversions by 135% with a 53% decrease in cost per lead within two months of launching their campaigns with Stamats—without any increase in their ad spend budget. Aligning your ad spend strategy with prospective student behaviors in addition to daily campaign optimizations leads to meaningful results.
Related Reading: Strategic Planning Checklist: Tips for Higher Ed Marketing Teams
Deadlines spur people to action. Dates turn the dream of getting a degree from a notion to a real goal with steps. Let’s say classes start in January. A good time to push the deadline, according to Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood, is starting in November, giving people time to apply and arrange their lives to fit classes into the mix. This timeline aligns with when Owens tends to see application numbers increase before the start of each semester.
Ads aren’t the only place to push deadlines. Campaign landing pages should also emphasize application timelines and align with the copy in the ads. Owens Community College uses a countdown banner on their campaign landing page starting 45 days prior to the deadline. This way, prospective students can visualize exactly how much time they have left to enroll in this cycle and see a consistent message on their journey from the ad to the campaign landing page.
Something as simple as promoting your upcoming deadlines can help push your campaign to the next level. Using this method to promote their January deadline, Owens Community College achieved a 57% increase in conversions and a 40% increase in click-through rate. This was a remarkable success, especially considering the increased competition for ad space around the holidays.
Related Reading: How to Increase Application Yield
Ad copy can get stale, fast. Don’t you get annoyed when you’re served the same ad over and over? Your prospective students feel the same way.
One way to keep ad copy fresh is to incorporate campus events and photos into your overall strategy. Showcasing events gives prospective students a better understanding of the energy on campus. It can also convince more students to visit campus–and it’s a well-known fact that students who visit campus have a higher yield rate.
Results of Owens Community College’s 2023 open house campaign speak to the effectiveness of this strategy: 50% increase in prospective student event attendance and 49 applications attributed to open house attendees. According to Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood, one of the most frequent questions prospective students ask is what campus like will be like—there’s no better way to show them.
Related Reading: 3 Ways Stamats Specialists Leverage Personal Higher Ed Marketing Experience for Clients
Timing is half the battle, according to Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood. If there is a time-sensitive campaign for visiting students to enroll to take classes over the summer, it may not make sense to run those ads throughout the year. Prospective students likely are not thinking about what they will be doing during the summer until February or March. You don’t want them to see your ad in December, think “Cool,” and then forget about it.
To give students the information they want when during the right time in their decision process, Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood worked together to create a campaign with ads and landing pages specific to visiting students, with content that went beyond generic “enroll here” messaging. They launched the campaign three months before the deadline when students would be thinking about their summer plans. This strategy led to a 13% increase in the visiting student summer program
Making sure ad and campaign landing page copy contain messaging related to what students are interested in is very important in driving conversions. This strategy helps improve campaign performance and gives prospective students the information they are craving. To promote the Owens Community College pipefitting and plumbing program, Stamats swapped generic manufacturing ad language with verbiage tailored to the specific program. This change led to a 150% increase in conversions and $6 decrease in cost per conversion in just one month.
Another similarly tailored campaign for adult learners, with photos, headline, and content specific to them, led to 178 conversions in just one month.
Hussain Black and Starkey-Wood left the audience with a quote from marketing specialist Jake Victor. “When your marketing is done right, your audience won’t see it as an interruption. They’re glad it came on their feed.”
With these strategies combined, Owens Community College increased their new student enrollment by nearly 18% from 2023 to 2024. We’d love to help you develop a strategy that will increase your enrollment numbers with your current marketing budget. Schedule a consultation with Lisa Starkey-Wood to start your strategy today.
