This requires digging into the data; specifically, analyzing these six crucial sets of data.
No. 1 – Historical Enrollment Data: Analyzing past enrollment figures can provide insights into trends, patterns, and seasonality, helping to set realistic recruitment targets.
No. 2 – Demographic and Geographic Information: Understanding the demographics and geographic locations of prospective students can aid in targeting the right audience and tailoring marketing efforts accordingly.
No. 3 – Digital Marketing Metrics: Tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per conversion can offer valuable insights into the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns and the additional investment required for institutions seeking to grow inquiry pools.
No. 4 – Social Media Analytics: Data from social media platforms can help in understanding audience behavior, preferences, and the impact of social media marketing efforts.
No. 5 – Lead Generation and Conversion Data: Evaluating the quality of leads generated and the conversion rates at various stages of the enrollment process can guide the setting of realistic recruitment goals.
No. 6 – Cost per Enrollment: Calculating the cost incurred per enrolled student can aid in budget allocation and setting cost-effective recruitment targets.
Grounding Marketing Goals in the Funnel
All too often, recruitment marketing teams are tasked with a goal to generate more – more inquiries, more applications, more deposits, more enrollments – without visibility into what more really means.
Building a model using historical average conversion rates can help you turn “more” into a quantifiable goal that helps you determine where and how you should invest in additional marketing tactics or spend.
With a measurable plan in place, you can map key marketing metrics to checkpoints in the enrollment cycle. Through regular monitoring of marketing dashboards, both enrollment and marketing teams can get better visibility into recruitment marketing performance and see earlier indicators of opportunities to pivot or optimize campaigns.
Turning Insights Into Action
At Capture Higher Ed, we build custom recruitment marketing strategies for partners and develops, deploys, manages, and optimizes campaigns based on real-time analytics – all powered by our Behavioral Intelligence Platform.
Our cross-functional team of enrollment strategists, marketers, creatives, and data scientists continually monitor campaigns to optimize performance and provide long-term strategic recommendations. With dashboards for campaign metrics, funnel metrics, and ROI reporting, partners have complete visibility of marketing’s impact in the funnel.
By Christopher Harris, Ed.D., Senior Enrollment Strategist, Capture Higher Ed
