Driving Marketing and Recruitment Improvement

We were honored to speak regularly at many of the regional business school dean conferences, sharing our thoughts about market trends. As part of these presentations, we surveyed the deans in advance to gain their perspectives. Through our surveys, we discovered many interesting areas of disagreement, but one topic where there was great alignment was their dissatisfaction with the data and budgets surrounding their marketing and conversion efforts. As seen below, there is a lot of room for growth when it comes to marketing budget allocation and the tracking of important marketing metrics, like marketing cost per student enrollment.

The dissatisfaction with marketing budgets in the first pie chart is unsurprising. After all, who doesn’t want more budget? From our perspective, however, the lack of clarity and satisfaction in the other two pie charts is what inhibits that blue section from growing in the first pie chart. It is difficult to ask for more budget when the funds already in market cannot explicitly tell a story of success. The most immediate implication of these budget shortcomings is the need to be more efficient with limited resources, which can be difficult with limited capacity and expertise in house.

At the same time, the common disconnect between admissions and marketing departments at business schools only exacerbates these marketing problems. Without seamless collaboration, determining what attribution models make most sense for a specific school’s programs is next to impossible. When we asked deans how satisfied they felt with their conversion process, we were not surprised to see that they feel least satisfied with lead generation (as seen below), but their lead nurturing and matriculation processes were not far behind. Surely, these conversion processes are almost always difficult for a busy dean to focus on, but these conversion processes are also often disconnected from the very marketing that brought the leads in the door in the first place.

At Eduvantis, we believe in breaking down these silos, giving deans and other decision-makers confidence in these important functions. This can take many forms: from us being the agency of record for your digital marketing, working collaboratively with your recruitment team; to using data-based lead nurturing best practices to improve your recruitment team; to being your one-stop accountability partner for making it all work effectively and seamlessly to bring in your next class. If you believe there are opportunities for improvement in your marketing and/or recruitment performance, drop us a line. Let’s talk about the many ways we can bring our expertise, data, and methods to your institution.