How to Beat These Benchmarks

If you work in enrollment marketing in any capacity, you already know that recruiting students isn’t easy. The rate of change of best practices that work in today’s hyper-connected media world is extremely high. Don’t try to conquer all of these tactics without first developing a strategic plan!

Where Should You Start?

We’ve learned a lot about how to approach making improvements to enrollment marketing and student recruitment plans over the past 20+ years of partnering with schools of all sizes. Here are some pro tips for where to get started and what to avoid as you work to optimize your enrollment marketing strategies and tactics.

First, figure out your current baselines.

Don’t dive into any specific marketing tactic and start making changes before you first establish your current baselines. If you don’t know your current metrics, you can’t measure the impact of whatever changes you're going to make.

Establish measurable goals for each marketing tactic.

What do you want to achieve and how would you define “success” for any tactic you intend to improve? For instance, if you’re looking to improve your event marketing efforts, how many more registrants and attendees are you shooting for? If it's an email you want to optimize, what sort of click rate do you want to hit?

Focus your energy on holistic marketing campaigns...don’t just tweak individual assets.

It’s really tempting to tweak emails, edit landing pages, adjust ad copy...and think that’s going to make a big difference. It’s better to spend your energy on one comprehensive marketing campaign rather than dozens of individual marketing assets and content pieces. You’ll see a bigger impact from your efforts!

Balance your enrollment marketing strategy with both short-term and long-term tactics.

Don’t spend all of your time and resources on any one channel or type of marketing. It’s important to balance your portfolio and make sure you have both short-term marketing tactics (like digital ads) as well as long-term marketing plans (like SEO and content marketing).

Get Outside Help from Professionals

Even if you were to follow all of the strategic insights and smart marketing guidance included in this report, you will quickly realize that today’s marketing ecosystem is more complex than ever. You’re going to need help from specialists who know how to customize the channels, tactics, and strategies in ways that are uniquely valuable to your institution.

And that’s why we’re here - to help your school develop smarter enrollment marketing strategies, and to help you execute better-performing marketing campaigns that align with your school’s unique goals.