The higher education recruitment landscape has become fiercely competitive. As enrollment and marketing leaders, you know that attracting and enrolling the right students can make or break your institution’s success — but how do you measure the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing efforts and ensure that strategies are all singularly pointed toward that goal?
It all comes down to ROI.
In our series, “Decoding Recruitment Marketing ROI,” we will explore key metrics you need to track ROI, processes you need to set measurable goals and strategies you need for evaluating success.
Why does it matter? Because data-driven decision making helps recruitment marketing teams measure the quantity and quality of prospective student leads as well as identify the best strategies to nurture them through the funnel.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your recruitment marketing strategy, this series is designed to provide actionable insights that will help you make informed choices, optimize your recruitment marketing efforts, and achieve your enrollment goals.
This blog series is adapted from Capture Higher Ed’s free guide, “Decoding ROI: Evaluating Recruitment Marketing Success.” Download the full guide here.
Closing the Marketing Strategy Loop
Evaluation is a crucial — but often overlooked — part of the marketing strategy and planning process, an ongoing loop of planning, executing and learning that includes …
Goals: Articulate what you want to achieve, how you will achieve it, timelines, and investments required.
Audiences: Develop target audience segments and profiles or personas to understand their needs, interests, and behaviors.
Landscape: Assess the market and conduct a competitive audit to understand trends in the recruitment marketing environment.
Messaging: Develop messaging tailored to audience segments and funnel stages in alignment with your brand story.
Channels: Focus on the most effective channels to engage and nurture prospective students.
Tactics: Develop a detailed tactical plan outlining campaigns, timelines, budgets, assignments, tools, processes, and best practices.
Measure and Optimize: Measure marketing performance on a regular, ongoing basis, using metrics to optimize and improve performance and results.
By evaluating the success of your recruitment marketing efforts, you gain insights into the effectiveness of your marketing and make data-driven decisions about optimization and inform future planning.
More importantly, evaluating recruitment marketing success allows you to measure the return on investment of your efforts, determine which tactics are working and which are not, and ultimately improve your overall enrollment outcomes.
It lets you invest in strategies that yield the greatest results, focus efforts on strategies that generate the highest quality leads and improve your chances of attracting students most likely to apply and enroll. It also allows you to continually refine your recruitment marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
With limited resources and limited time, understanding ROI is how enrollment and marketing can stay laser-focused on what works and not get bogged down in what doesn’t work.
Check back for part 2 of this blog series when we take a close look at the key metrics for measuring success.
By Kevin Hyde, Senior Marketing Content Manager, Capture Higher Ed
