How marketing automation moves higher education leads through your recruitment marketing funnel faster
The challenge of moving leads through the marketing funnel can be daunting for any organization, even in the higher education space. Marketing automation can benefit your institution by helping to move those leads to action.
Moving leads along the path to becoming customers takes dynamic content delivered to the right people at the right time in a way they want to consume it. Here are some of the ways marketing automation can benefit lead funnels in the higher education space.
1. Segmenting your markets
Not all your recruits are in the same stage of the buyers’ journey to becoming a student. Some are just starting out and looking at different higher education institutions. Some are more serious and looking for a specific program and coursework. Others are ready to pull the trigger on school, but they need a little push.
To nurture your contacts, leads, and prospects the right means offering meaningful interactions for them at every stage of the journey, and that means you need to segment them. Consistent messaging is important throughout the funnels, but it’s created slightly differently for each stage of that journey.
Marketing automation helps you send tailored messaging to each recruit based on the stage they’re in and the concerns they (or their parents) express.
2. Communicating your value proposition
There are many ways to contact your leads and communicate your value proposition: Social media, landing pages, email marketing, and more. Marketing automation will allow your institution to direct those emails and other messages to each of your market segments with language they are ready to hear at each step through the marketing funnel.
This leads to a personalized experience for your soon-to-be student and parents while offering a consistent message that will help your leads become prospects and your prospects become customers.
3. How marketing automation helps you nurture leads
Marketing automation will help your college or university nurture leads by helping your teams understand what is working and what might be falling short at.
Automation will allow you to run A/B testing at every step in your funnel to understand which messages having the biggest impact on which steps in the process. This will allow you to make incremental changes in your messaging that will make a huge difference over time.
With marketing automation, all results and conversions are tracked for you, providing real-time data you can use to make your marketing decisions. In-depth performance reports give you all the information you and your team need to not only attract more leads but move them along and nurture them at every step of the process.
4. Personalization
While we mentioned this above, it deserves to be broken into its own talking point. Customers in any industry respond better to personalized service. That is no different for students and their parents when considering college options. Automated marketing helps your school stand out above all others by providing a personalized touch to your marketing messages. Automation gives you and your teams more information about which market segments are responding to which messaging efforts. This allows you to quickly pivot and personalize those marketing messages for others who are moving into that buying phase.
When you think about your marketing funnel, you should be thinking of marketing automation. With automated systems sending the emails and helping track conversions, interest, and even which messages are getting the results you want, your team is free to focus on the links in the marketing chain that beg for human attention.
In today’s higher education marketplace, you need every edge your institution can get to bring in the right students into your funnel and drive the highest conversion rate possible. And marketing automation is one of the most powerful tools you can get.
Building out a marketing automation platform for your recruiting department requires a solid team with a track record of success. If you have not considered marketing automation in the past, or you have considered it and decided not to move forward, contact KWALL today and let us show you where we can help.
