College's Need to Shake Up How They Are Reaching Prospective Students

It’s no secret that colleges bombard potential students with an endless stream of letters, emails, and phone calls. During my senior year of high school, it seemed like I got a new brochure, email, or letter from some university every other day trying to get me to apply . In my and many of my classmates' case, this type of marketing had no effect on where we went to school. So, if mass marketing isn’t gaining universities more students, why are they still spending so much of their budget on this?

Universities are spending about 20% of their tuition revenues on admissions and recruiting efforts (Katzman, 2016). With a push for universities to lower their prices, universities must find better more cost efficient way of reaching students. Direct mail is a huge expense on a universities budget. Even though it is such a strain on marketing budgets it is what has been traditionally used and is still effective in getting a university’s name into the hands and minds of prospective students. It is an easy way to inform students of universities that are unaware of or out of their range. But when a university is sending out the same piece of direct mail to every student on their list multiple times a month, it loses its effect, especially when prospective students are receiving the same type of mail from multiple universities. If a university wants to continue to use direct mail, they need to find a way to differentiate themselves from the competition.  

While direct mail marketing is a link to the past, universities are having to find new ways to reach a population that is based on relationships. Hanover Research found that the most effective marketing is recruiting events (Hanover Research). This could be anything from recruiting at college fairs to on-campus preview events.

In order for universities to efficiently use their budget, they should send out a limited amount on direct mail so that prospective students know about the university, but should focus their attention on recruiting events.

Katzman, J. (2016). The spending war on student recruitment. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/04/18/too-much-being-spent-higher-education-marketing-assault-essay

Hanover Research. (2014). Trends in higher education marketing, recruitment, and technology. Hanover Research Institution. Retrieved from http://www.hanoverresearch.com/media/Trends-in-Higher-Education-Marketing-Recruitment-and-Technology-2.pdf

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 26, 2018 at 4:51 PM

    Reagan, I completely agree with you on the fact that Universities need to come up with more ways to market themselves than just direct mail. Direct mail is effective in its own right, but it becomes very repetitive and boring. Universities need to become more creative and start investing in more recruiting events, college fairs, or even organized field trips to let prospective students tour the school. Great Post!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Negativity

Image
Just about every company has some form of social media. It’s allowed companies to talk to their customers directly. They have taken their business to their customers and customers unashamedly share their opinions about the business with their business and friends. That means… Negative comments are going to happen; it’s inevitable. What's important is how a business responds to them. Here are some ways businesses could avoid a social media crisis according to Salesforce.com:  1. Take it out of the spot light. If at all possible, take the discussion to an appropriate forum. This isn't an attempt to delete or silence critics, it's an attempt to better help them and understand the problem.  2. Try to see it from their point of view. Don't try to come up with a list of excuses. This will only make the customer more mad, and the situation could spiral out of control. The ultimate goal should be ma
Read more

Perception is Everything

It can be difficult for business executives to fully understand the attitudes customers have towards their brand. This can lead to poor business choices, like when SeaWorld started their forum, “Ask SeaWorld”, after the Blackfish documentary was released in attempts to be transparent with the public. The public had been demanding answers from SeaWorld, and the way the company responded made way for the company to be criticized in a big way. A way that SeaWorld could have avoided the disaster of “Ask SeaWorld” is to have conducted a sentiment analysis (Reed, 2015). A sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a way to use online mentions to determine the attitudes and emotions tied to your brand or business from customers. It is useful in sensing the subtle changes in opinions towards a brand in order to improve product lines and services. Sentiment analysis are conducted by an algorithm taking into account inflections in voice, rate of speech, and responses to customer service advi
Read more

Whole Foods and a Whole Lot of Information

Image
Just about every company has some sort of social media account, blog, YouTube channel, or podcast. These different platforms allow customers to connect with a brand on a deeper level and creates a stronger brand loyalty among followers. The loyalty with in follows and the trust they have for a brand causes them to become thought leaders. So, what is thought leadership? It’s creating content over a specific topic for a specific audience. It’s not mean for small advertisements, it’ meant to answer the bigger questions that customers might have. This can be a nonprofit having a blog that highlights everything they are doing or the people they are serving, it could also be a car company having a YouTube channel showing their customers how to do things like change a tire or engine oil. One company that does this well is Whole Foods. Whole Foods is known for selling healthy foods. Because of their brand reputation, they have authority to say what is healthy and unhealthy.
Read more