More than the open day – 5 ways to think about your marketing for the coming academic year
Marketing for Further Education is not an easy job and the last thing you want to be is stuck in a rut and just repeating the same things every year.
The difficulty with marketing for FE is…
I am sure you filled the rest of that sentence in yourself as soon as you read it. Although, because we deal with a lot of education environments, I am also quite sure there were a lot of different endings. A rural college with disparate learner groups will face a very different challenge to an inner city one dealing with competition from other colleges. Similarly, the demographics for one catchment area can be wildly different from another. There is no one size fits all solution.
FE marketing is not an easy thing to pin down. Yes, you have some great support materials to hand, prospectuses, open days and so on, but also that can mean you feel trapped into falling into the same patterns year after year. One thing we have found talking to colleges is that sometimes if you look at things from a particular perspective, or focus down on one aspect of tour marketing, you can find yourself generating some great ideas within your existing framework.
1. Do you need to say more about the small things?
There is a problem that all education providers face in that there is only a limited number of courses. That can lead to prospective learners basically getting the same details about similar courses repeatedly from several different sources. While this is out of necessity because they need the information, it doesn’t exactly generate additional interest in your marketing. One approach may be to look to add information about the little things that make a difference to college life. Let me give you an example. I once saw a college with a ‘wok bar’ in the refectory area. It was packed every day with lines of learners wanting a fresh cooked meal made to their own tastes. Leaners (and the staff) clearly loved it yet it wasn’t mentioned in any promotional materials. If you have a particular feature, even a seemingly small one, that you know the learners enjoy about college life, could you make more of it in your actual course marketing?
2. Get new data and see it as a story not just contacts
When we supply contact data for F.E. marketing we are really careful to check that the information we supply is right for the client. Because we have provided up to the minute, checked and cleaned data it can tell you a lot more than you would initially think. Rather than just store the information take a few minutes to go through it. Does anything stand out that could affect your marketing approach?
3. Can you ask the current learners for insight on their choices?
You would be surprised how often asking the current cohort why they chose their courses, or your college, will produce a surprise USP or other benefit you may have missed. Another good source of information is the reviews you get on google and other sources. It’s often worth looking at what is complemented and complained about. We have also seen some great campaigns based on the ideas the students themselves came up with… after all, they know the target audience best.
4. Can the ‘boots on the ground’ tell you anything?
By which I meant the people at the front of the classroom. Sometimes those closest the student experience are the people who teach them. They overhear what the learners like and dislike so their input could be really valuable.
5. Can you target more?
Marketing always works best when it is focused. We have seen colleges get great results by starting from the position that the same information doesn’t work for everyone. The bottom line is that a 16 year old learner has very different priorities, and will respond better to totally different content, than their parents. Again here, you need to make sure you are considering your marketing data and making sure it is up to date so that you can target effectively to complete the circle.
An extra thought on marketing in FE…
Is it time to experiment a little more? Colleges need to rely on two distinct areas of fixed data. One of these is the previously recorded internal statistics about things such as course popularity, student numbers, retention rates and so on. All of which are very informative but also historical and based in numbers that don’t always tell the full story. As every marketing professional knows, people don’t always do what you expect, and you can’t always get a full picture of why something did or didn’t work. Where time, budget and circumstances allow, why not try something different? The history of successful marketing campaigns is filled with examples of someone doing the unexpected and getting great results.
The second information area is contact data, and this is definitely not somewhere you should rely on old information. As we mentioned earlier, we are always keen to define the needs of a college so that we can really help them to market their courses to the right target audience with current, checked, and accurate data lists.
Call us and let’s chat about how we can help you reach out to the right people for the coming academic year.
