Challenges Faced by Universities to Enroll Prospective Students

Understanding Educational Consumer

For any university, marketing approaches create values among a university's stakeholders. These stakeholders are prospective students, current students, alumni, employers of graduates, and financial supporters.

Today, as competition among universities has increased and as resources constraints have become more intense, addressing specific student and/or stakeholder needs has become even more important.

Attracting and retaining students requires developing and offering a unique value proposition; the only way one can know what constitutes a different value equation is to know and understand the market as individuals. Well-defined marketing segmentation structures ate important to well-executed direct marketing programs.

Developing Best Practices

Highly customized and personalized marketing offers can best be tailored to the particular needs and preferences of selected student prospects by using multiple marketing channels of distribution that support direct contact with students. The new era of direct multi-channel marketing requires creating multiple touch points with each student prospect.

Gaining access to and securing response from existing and prospective students via online and offline channels are rapidly becoming the norm for successful student marketing within the market context of higher education.

Today, the Internet enables prospects to self-educate by gathering information on schools anonymously.  And if the school doesn't include in the prospect's short list during the early part of the decision process, then most likely it's very difficult for the school to be considered when it comes time to make an enrollment decision.

That means it's up to the marketing department to keep relevant messages in front of prospects. A large part of this task includes content marketing and lead nurturing early in the decision cycle.

Defining Values

Attracting and retaining students requires developing and offering a unique value proposition; USP is s something that distinguishes your product/service from others in the same sector. It helps to build the foundations of the advertising message. Your proposition has to attract new students, as well as prospective students.