The Delicate Art of Avoiding Market Saturation, Improving Lead Quality, & Empowering the Student

In corporate marketing, market saturation and consumer desensitization are pitfalls that frequently detract from a successful advertising campaign. To deal with this, savvy advertisers and marketers have come up with strategies that allow them to avoid saturation, improve brand image and increase lead quality.

Although comparatively new, the multi-billion dollar Enrollment Management industry is susceptible to the same problems as the mature corporate marketing industry. One key differentiator between the two industries does exist: schools were not built to make money, they were built to provide an academic service. Building and maintaining a reputation within the academic community is of the utmost importance; some institutions have spent decades and even centuries building and refining a brand. What’s more, in some cases, the brand—academic integrity, excellence—is more important than the profitability of an institution.

This difference makes the task of marketing on behalf of schools particularly difficult. Fortunately, sophisticated marketing methodologies exist that allow enrollment marketers to reach prospective students without sacrificing the “brand” integrity that academic institutions have spent so long building.

Avoiding Market Saturation

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing is a simple multi-step process that initiates contact with prospective students in a meticulous and quantifiable manner. Direct Response Enrollment Marketing uses two primary channels for attracting prospective students:  Online and DRTV.  The process works as follows: 

1. Marketing materials are distributed across multiple channels.
2. In response to the materials, prospective students call in or fill out a form online.
3. Prior to each call—in order to facilitate successful calls—EM software feeds student information to the contact center representative regarding the advertisement(s) that initiated the prospective students’ interest.
4. Following each inbound or outbound phone call, the Academic Advisors enter information regarding the interest level of the prospective student into the Enrollment Management Software.
5. The Enrollment Management software immediately informs media planning and buying teams which campaigns need more allocation, and which need to be cut.

In comparison with other advertising methodologies, Direct Response Enrollment Marketing  http://www.innovationads.com/pr is capable of determining which channels and portals offer the highest conversion rates, almost immediately after the campaign is launched. This adds value to the marketing process of colleges and universities in two ways:

1. Schools can cut-out inefficient marketing campaigns immediately, thus saving money for channels that generate more applications and enrollments
2. Schools avoid market saturation. Because colleges and universities know precisely which channels offer the highest rates of return, they do not have to disseminate their marketing materials across channels that may be inappropriate. Placing materials only where they are likely to be viewed by interested students reduces redundancy, and avoids desensitization.

Improving Lead Quality

Lead quality refers to the amount of revenue that a given lead can generate for an advertiser.  There is no universal method for measuring the quality of a lead, but some industry benchmarks exist that measure the likelihood that a lead will result in revenue.

In a recent study, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that using content to generate education leads—i.e. “Sign up for a free course catalogue!” makes for the highest quality lead.

In order to improve lead quality—or the amount of revenue that each lead is capable of generating—it is important to eliminate “bad leads” or leads that do not generate revenue. 

Savvy marketers have determined that leveraging rich content adds another layer of “filtering” to the education lead generation process: the more information students have before filling out a lead from, the higher the likelihood that they actually want to be contacted.

Leveraging content improves the quality of leads and increases revenue on the front end, while reducing wasted man-hours on the back end—academic advisors spend less time sorting out the good from the bad, and more time converting good leads into revenue.

Empowering the Student

Leveraging rich-content in order to initiate a response from a prospective student is a valuable means for generating revenue via high quality leads. By using content to attract students, Direct Response Enrollment Marketers http://www.innovationads.com/pr ensure that each request for follow-up information is genuine. "Empowering the student" refers to the fact that in Direct Response Enrollment Marketing, prospective students initiate contact with universities, rather than the reverse. It is up to the student whether or not to fill out a form or make a phone call.  This adds value to schools in two ways:

1. Time is not spent cold-calling or advertising to students that are not interested
2. Lead conversion rates increase because students are making decisions based on facts, images(campus tours) and other types of content

 Generating education leads using free information—course catalogues, articles, advice—allows marketers to eliminate the possibility of a “miss-match”, or unsolicited contact.

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing

Follow-up

nterested students react to content by initiating a phone call, or filling out an online form. These forms and phone calls are received by academic advising centers, which are staffed with Enrollment Specialists. The Enrollment Specialists answer questions that each student asks, while helping them to apply or enroll.

By managing both the distribution of media and the follow marketing process, Direct Response Enrollment Marketers are able to track the efficacy of each individual marketing campaign, and piece of creative. They are also able to guarantee the quality of leads, by charging their clients on a per-application basis. Therefore, the risk of buying bad leads is removed.

Further, because channels and materials that do not yield results can immediately be eliminated, Direct Response Enrollment Marketing allows schools to leverage enormous economies of scale to reach prospective students, in a refined and meticulous manner—thereby eliminating the possibility of over-saturating the market.

Summary

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing http://www.innovationads.com/pr reduces advertising clutter, empowers students by giving them more information, improves the integrity of the academic lead generation industry and generates more applications for colleges and universities.

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing increases enrollments for schools by: leveraging rich content to attract prospective students; allowing multiple distribution channels to offer the benefit of measurable results; and enabling academic advisors to help students to apply or enroll.