Joel Cox is co-founder and vice president of strategy and innovation at Strategus.
The pandemic, economic closures and the “new normal” of social estrangement have compressed decades of replacement in a matter of months. This surprise in the formula has accelerated the marketing of schools towards inevitable disruptions and the academy itself to uncharted territory.
Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business, points out that no industry has raised costs faster and supported them longer than higher education. With school schedules shortened, students sent home to be informed online and parents wonder what they are paying for, income source patterns have changed. Galloway believes that a long-awaited review is underway and that this educational network may be forced to make one of the largest logo adjustments in history.
Higher ed’s best hope may hinge on how institutions reposition their brands and re-imagine their marketing from the ground up.
Recruitment Re-Imagined
For centuries, the vast majority of market awareness for the school sector has been held at the base level, where a public call for university education is created through networks of alumni, family relic circles, sports affiliations and relations between the city and the university. With limited delight in classic television advertising, let alone in today’s omnichannel and multi-peripheral environment, school markets have little strain to adjust hiring strategies. And throughout the pandemic came nevertheless to end the format of vintage television advertising, highlighting the student delight, resplendent with a background of autumn colors and aimed at fans of school sports already faithful.
To recruit new students, it’s time for this traditional, image-based advertising to give way to more effective strategies, pricing propositions, and more compelling feature/benefit themes. Students want new reasons to register beyond a charming campus, a football team, or their parents leaving.
The new popular marketing product of the latest is a broader and more complex advertising mix. The “next normal” of television-quality advertising would likely come with automated programmatic campaigns, real-time auction generation, and dynamic, artistic and applicable messages. Directing knowledge to the virtual exhaustion of millions of others and their devices can help schools identify the right audience with the right messages on multiple TVs and tablets connected to the Internet, all transmitted via cable and transmission (CTV/OTT).
With CTV/OTT programmatic advertising, educational establishments can begin to execute systems similar to those that the fastest goods and corporations have already incorporated into the most productive practices: timely and nuanced messages adapted to the affinities and professional talents of each student and the parents themselves. . Schools can convey those messages based on what those prospective buyers are looking for, when and where they are, and what is applicable to them based on their browsing behavior and expected buyer behavior. This is beginning to expand advertising methods beyond the prestige quo, where audiences were all accumulated in one position and at the same time to watch the same show (usually classic network television on Saturday afternoons in the old paradigm of university marketing).
For starters, schools can’t sell solely over cable and network TV anymore. People continue to cut the cable cord, and the big network upfront ad buys that were canceled in the first quarter of 2020 almost certainly translate into further atomization of advertising dollars into the long tail of thousands of video-on-demand streaming options. Nor can colleges count on spray-and-pray advertising across only traditional content formats (sports, billboards, radio) with no way to measure ROI. They can instead identify and serve customized messages to, for example, prospective engineering students who may display entirely different media consumption habits than, say, prospective arts and sciences students, who have completely different behaviors and motivations than the family influencers who write the checks.
As thousands of schools prepare to fight for enrollment like never before, classified ads want to optimize with data-driven targeting and conversion activity wants to be traceable.
Refined messaging
They can no longer rely solely on the noble messages of brand advertising, schools will have to leave this area of convenience and expand the messages that reach the minds of parents concerned about where their money is going. Parents want confidence that the pleasure of learning is shifting course toward a sensible combination of online and on-campus pleasure for their children. Students want to see that they will get an education, get the credits they want, and they won’t lose what appears to be a diminishing opportunity for social engagement, emerging those career ties to their lives, and discovering what they want to do with the rest. of their lives.
New reporting, targeting and attribution technologies can be informed through the knowledge that each university already has about its former enrollees and profiles of “ideal students”, and appropriate messages can be developed and implemented with subtle similarity models. It’s a way to tame new consumers based on audience and online browsing behavior that fits the characteristics of the already understood, original or “basic” audience. International academics, where coins are made through the flow of coins to obtain full tuition fees and relief in scholarship spending, should also be taken into account in hyper-targeting.
The pandemic is not over and the new general has not yet been resolved. While the most productive investment before the crisis made by the University of Alabama was hiring coach Nick Saban, what if there was no football next season? What if there were a lot less people in the stands? What if networks can’t benefit from the same audience and ad agreements? What if sponsors need to cut their budgets or reconsider their own messages and guidance priorities? At the very least, schools were in a position to be disrupted, and now that it’s happening, they can’t wait and see how it’s going before moving on to the next steps in their marketing evolution.
Professor Galloway believes that higher education, asleep on its laurels and remote as the advertising generation and virtual media passed it, possibly would have had this to come. More optimistically, however, I believe that adjustments were not only inevitable but also mandatory in the long run. The pandemic the accelerator that triggered a new era in marketing of what has been and remains one of the most valuable products on the planet: education.
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