Reimagining Community College Recruitment

Unlike four-year colleges and universities, technical and community college recruitment strategies often do not involve working with their prospective students until those students apply. Most of their inquiries come through applications.

But that’s changing.

One of Capture’s community college partners is using marketing automation and a multi-channel approach facilitated by the Behavioral Intelligence Platform to reinvent community college recruiting. The results have been identifying and converting more students earlier in the enrollment funnel while reducing the institution’s marketing spend per student.

Organic Leads

During a recent campaign, progressive identification (PID) forms were served to prospective students visiting the college’s website. These are pop-up forms that ask students for more information about themselves. Of the 137 forms that were completed by online visitors to the site, 127 were filled out by students the college did not know about. That means 93 percent were organic leads.

Why is this significant?

By serving the PID forms — and filtering out anyone who might visit the school’s website from on-campus — the community college was able to identify and make contact with prospective students before they applied, starting the conversation and answering questions about what they were looking for much earlier.

ENGAGE and Digital Advertising

In this case, the Capture partner deployed ENGAGE, Capture’s marketing automation software specifically designed for college recruitment. The software allows the community college to use personalized, dynamic content — toasters (ads that rise up like toast on a web page), image swaps, popovers or triggered emails — to communicate directly with their known prospective students while they are actively searching their website. They also used Capture’s Digital Advertising, enrollment’s only digital offering fusing behavioral intelligence and predictive analytics.

With ENGAGE and Digital Advertising, technical and community college recruitment can change the way they engage potential students, offering them the information when they need it most — before they fill out their application. It saves time and resources for everyone involved.

By Kevin Hyde, Senior Content Manager, Capture