While recruitment marketing and enrollment management have seen a digital transformation in recent years, that doesn’t mean you completely throw away the effective offline marketing strategies you’ve leaned on in the past. But there are plenty of opportunities to strengthen and enhance them using technology.
Promote and Drive Engagement Around
On-Campus Events and Open Houses
Getting prospective students on your campus for tours, open houses, and other events will always be a recruitment marketing priority. Use your digital channels to promote these events and offer plenty of opportunity sign up by:
- Serving website visitors dynamic content promoting events. This could be a toaster, an ad that rises from the bottom of web page (like toast), or a popover ad, which dynamically displays over a webpage. Toasters and popovers can be a graphic, a form, or a short piece of content or media that promotes the event and triggers a signup.
- Using digital display marketing to message prospective students about campus events wherever they go on the internet.
- Connecting with your prospective students on social media platforms using highly targeted social media ads that increase awareness around your events.
- Retargeting prospective students and providing them with information about your events beyond their initial engagement with your website, email, and digital channels. You can segment populations and retarget visitors according to interest in specific events they read about on your website and the interactions they had on your social channels.
- Grabbing the attention of your prospective students and informing them about on-campus through video and animated ads. (95% of people ages 18-29 in the U.S. use and engage with video content daily.)
- Reaching out to top prospects by phone/text and email based upon their behavioral scores?
Implement a “Smart”
Direct Mail Campaign
Direct mail is by no means dead. It is just more strategic. Using recruitment marketing technology and predictive models, you can target top prospective students — a smaller, more engaged list — with personalized print pieces that promote your institution’s brand, echo your message, and maximize engagement.
When driven by data, 90% of Direct Mail is viewed or opened
on the day it is received.
Let Predictive Models
Be Your Travel Agent
While travel took a hiatus during the pandemic, most colleges and universities have renewed the recruitment practice. But it’s time to be smarter and more strategic with the practice. You want to go beyond existing feeder schools and add new high schools and territories to your travel itinerary.
This is where technology like the new TRAVEL feature in Capture’s application modeling can come in. It allows your counselors to find new feeder schools and fertile new regions to visit while optimizing your travel budget. The tool allows you to:
- Identify high schools where your counselor presence will have the greatest impact on generating applications, especially high schools your counselors haven’t visited before.
- Optimize travel decisions between otherwise comparable high schools.
- Prevent wasteful travel by targeting the best counties and going to multiple schools in a single trip.
- Make the most of your limited student representative travel budget.
- Utilize a customized, ranked list of all currently operating public, private, and charter high schools.
- Use a weighted, ranked prediction of the likelihood a county in which a high school resides will produce applicants for your institution.
TRAVEL uses hundreds of neighborhood level factors to identify the geographic areas around high schools that are most likely to produce additional applications for your institution. What emerges is a ranked list of public, private and charter high schools across the U.S. that can help optimize the travel of your counselors and representatives. If your counselors are assigned counties as their recruiting territories, you can also get a ranked list of counties to target and plan travel to multiple schools in that county.
High schools with better rankings are predicted to produce more applicants for your school on average, taking the travel distance to each high school into consideration.
Travel season isn’t going away; it’s just being reinvented. And that goes for the rest of your traditional offline strategies. It’s time to find ways to make them more effective using technology.
By Kevin Hyde, Senior Content Manager, Capture Higher Ed
