By Eric Greenberg, Senior Director Marketing Operations at Wharton
Surviving the next several years as a school requires investing in digital marketing beyond a basic brochure website and a couple of tweets.
The hard truth is that most schools lack the means, executive understanding, and staff to succeed in digital marketing.
For example, after twenty years of market availability, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial to understanding how prospects engage with your digital ecosystem. Yet, it's rare to find a school outside the top 5% that even uses a MAP for more than an overpriced email platform.
If you're a community college or a smaller school and you own a marketing platform from Hubspot/Adobe/Salesforce, the going salary for a digital marketer who can use those tools to get results is over $100,000. Have you budgeted that much?
If you haven't, you are probably overpaying for a platform and underpaying for staff.
As much as I am sounding the alarm for these schools, it's not hopeless.
Take action and level up your digital efforts
Here's a high-level action plan for schools that are figuring out how to level-up:
* Triple your marketing budget. I know, I know. But you can't expect different results by doing and spending the same way you always have. This is investing in survival and the future.
* Invest in staff training and hiring and understand that experienced digital marketing staff will be relatively expensive to recruit and retain.
* With in-house staff guiding/managing or in partnership with an outside agency (but never left only to an agency), develop a holistic strategy that considers SEO, email/sms nurture campaigns, general awareness ad-spend, retargeting ad-spend, and a least baseline personalization.
* The bare-minimum tools you will need are a CMS for your website (I recommend an open-source CMS like WordPress or Drupal), a Marketing Automation Platform (there are a few reasonably priced ones: HeadStart Marketing Platform is specifically configured for Higher Ed) and Google Analytics.
* Use free UTM codes to track most of your web traffic. It's only helpful to do any of the above if you have an idea of what's working. Your marketing staff should absolutely know how to use these.
* Aspirational: Track prospects all the way through enrollment so you can identify what resonates with target audiences back at the beginning of their prospect journey and use that information for your next round of applicants. This is more "level 2" and will require you to merge your GA data with your marketing automation data.
* Bonus: Experimentation at scale. Running a few different ad variations or testing different subject lines won’t cut it. We need teams in place that can build out many different landing pages and web experiences and use rigorous A/b testing to see what drives meaningful engagement and ROI.You'll never be able to optimize without testing. Thanks Marcus Dandurand for this one!
My prediction is that schools that use the next five years to invest meaningfully in SEO and digital marketing to command mindspace will survive the next ten years and beyond.
Schools that don't will wind up closing or merging in the next ten years.
School leaders, are you going to get started? Or are you willing to roll the dice?
Learn more about what’s going on in higher ed digital
One of our most read posts in 2022 was this one based on work at Cornell: How to create emails that people want.
We’ve also profiled a few higher education leaders as our experts of the month:
Kristina Larsen at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark
Finally, do get out from behind the screen and join us at the HE Connect 23 conference in Liverpool in September.