Understanding your student consumers enables targeted marketing the most cost effective and efficient approach to marketing today. The targeted market approach is the critical approach to optimizing marketing strategies. Surveys augment effectiveness by pinpointing the best potential consumers and targeting that audience to increase matriculation.
Knowing Your Market Makes Capture More Effective
To keep your higher education capture robust and healthy requires knowing who your best consumers are and how to attract more of them. Identifying the characteristics of your current audience through detailed surveys, facilitates understanding of current matriculates. This knowledge, when used wisely, allows efficient use of capital resources through focused marketing campaigns. Knowing what the decision drivers for that facilitated choosing your institution over similar institutions regionally and around the country, lets you know what you are doing well and where to opportunities exist to expand capture of matriculants. To keep your higher education capture robust and healthy requires that you know who your best consumers are and how to attract more of them. Identifying the characteristics of your current audience through detailed surveys, facilitates understanding of current matriculates. This knowledge, when used wisely, allows efficient use of capital resources through focused marketing campaigns. Knowing what the decision drivers for that facilitated choosing your institution over similar institutions regionally and around the country, lets you know what you are doing well and where to opportunities exist to expand capture of matriculants.
It is not unusual for institutions to intuitively disregard the need to research their student population, especially a when they think they already know their audience and decision drivers. Seeing and speaking to the student audience creates a sense of familiarity that transcends to an anecdotal knowledge of the market’s composition. Let’s face it, it may be time consuming, and leadership may be reluctant to utilize capital resources to determine facts and data points they think they already know. This is where many professional service providers get into difficulty.
Today’s precision marketing tools require in-depth understanding of the common denominators of your potential and/or current audience – data. These include group characteristics, likes, wants, and needs, which effectively puts service providers in the “driver’s seat” toward a happy and loyal audience of consumers. These characteristics include geographic and demographic profiles like gender, age, finances, and lifestyle preferences. This approach is called target market segmentation. Once you identify key factors of your consumer base, you can create and reap the benefits of effective marketing campaigns. Surveys identify the most likely consumers, allowing expedited growth through target marketing. Conversely, survey results will reveal the barriers to potential matriculates that may often times be addressed with tweaks to policies and procedures or require major initiatives over time. In either case knowledge is power and will always benefit the growth and well-being of the institution.
Target Marketing
While it is not mandatory to target market, mass marketing (widely used prior to the era of technology) has fallen out of favor in recent decades. Institutions concerned with budgets have moved aggressively in the last decade away from wasting resources on campaigns where there is little interest to potential or current higher education consumers, or to consumers who have already made decisions and are mentally and emotionally commented to attending a particular institution and/or residing at a particular location to more efficient target marketing. Detailed surveys create a guidebook for decision makers for list purchases, advertising campaigns, advertising mediums, marketing materials development, are some of the benefits realized.
Target marketing is today’s technology driven technique utilized globally to maximize outcomes. Technology is data driven. Surveying creates data by identifying the most and least likely potential matriculants for your campus. The most successful institutions take the time to learn about their consumer’s basic characteristics. Getting to know your unique market amplifies capture opportunities through focused or targeting marketing efforts.
Today’s market is fast changing, more diverse, and more competitive than ever, requiring savvy effective approaches to drive outcomes.
Demographic and Geographic Profiles
Students’ geographic origins impact need and preferences in subtle ways that could offer an opportunity to capture more residents. Students populations can be segmented based on their geographic origin. The demographic and geographic origins of the student consumer provide insights into population segments. One example is the needs of international students as compared to the needs of the local population of students.
A study of international students from China revealed this group of students were less likely to live in campus housing due to the food offerings. What Americans view as healthy foods (such as brown rice), the Chinese student saw as unhealthy rice. The food overall was nothing like home, providing a huge deterrent to their participation as campus housing residents. This misalignment was brought to light as a result of market research conducted on this demographic group of students. The findings enabled changes in food services and the inclusion of choices these students found more palatable. This in turn led to increased capture of campus housing residents from this demographic group.
A different study enabled the housing director to improve occupancy by target marketing to students from areas with geographic impediments to travel (although in relatively close proximity to campus). This resulted in a 3% occupancy increase without major capital increases to the marketing budget during the spring semester of the academic year. Based on your market’s geographic profile, your institutions may be able to achieve improved outcomes.
Market surveys enables breaking down the entire market into various segments, including geographic profiles facilitating the planning of marketing strategies to maintain or increase capture rates to campus housing. Learn more about OREG and how we can partner with your institution to achieve your goals.
