Marketing Strategies at Educational Institutions

Marketing tactics for any industry vary, but building a marketing plan for an educational institution was far beyond different than any other. Universities’ ultimate goal is to recruit potential students in order to make money from tuition. This tuition money goes towards many aspects like faculty salaries, food, operational costs, and even budgeting toward student organizations. However, there isn’t a marketing plan just for the entire university, but each and every college, school, department, resource center and student organizations within that university. Just like parent corporations have their subsidiary brands, universities have their own departmental hierarchy that each have their own marketing strategy.

Educational marketing’s purpose is to build awareness campus-wide, increase engagement with students and professors, and support alumni and donor relations, but ultimately promote the support for its community. The target market for this “industry” aren’t consumers or clients, but primarily students. Moreover, current students, faculty and most importantly, prospective students who are going to pay tuition. The content posted online must grab the attention of students and faculty and persuade them to engage with the content.

Going back to the idea of departmental hierarchy, each college, school, department, etc. typically have the access to run their own platforms, such as social media, blogs, Youtube channels, and departmental web pages on their University’s website. The only thing they have to do is adhere to the university’s standards and guidelines regarding brand, language, content usage, and utilizing the proper domains set by the university. The department advisor, typically a professor or administrator, who takes on this communications role, or student who has been appointed by a supervisor, must then go through proper web development training to be given access to the accounts. And they must follow these established guidelines.

Aside from marketing to the students, these departments must market to higher executives. Not only does the marketing content need to speak to the students and faculty, but it should showcase the work of the department, school, or college to the chairpersons, dean and even president of the college. Just like most businesses have a CEO, founder, or president where they monitor the marketing team’s ability to market their business in the hopes of gaining revenue, universities have these higher executives keeping an eye on all of the smaller departments and their ability to engage with students and persuade prospective students to enroll in their curriculum. The increase in online marketing in academia is supposed to help increase the enrollment of each individual department, especially those that are struggling to gain new students and are deemed “a dying industry.” That’s why universities are encouraging all departments to promote their curriculum, showcase a positive campus life, spotlight students’ inventions, inform students about a variety of resources, and most importantly, illustrate how enrolling in their program will be the best decision a student could make.

This task may seem easy to some, but academic institutes don’t have a marketing budget that typical businesses put aside for. Most of these smaller departments do not have a budget to run social media campaigns or implement any type of paid advertising. So, they must put in the extra work to come up with creative ways to push organic content out to the public, which for the hundreds of departments, programs, organizations, and centers within a university, can become tiresome all trying to compete for students’ attention. Even though these departments are not getting any direct profit from posting to social media or updating its blog on the regular, those higher executives we talked about earlier will see the effort that is being put in and will have you at the top of their mind when yearly funds are being disbursed to each department. Those departments that have shined a light on themselves with all of their wonderful achievements over the academic year, typically receive more funding by the university, and who doesn’t want that? That could possibly mean higher salaries, more funds to buy equipment or supplies, possible higher paid interns, etc. This holds even more true if your marketing efforts can be correlated to an increase in enrollment of new students in your department.

Educational marketing has it’s similarities with corporate marketing, but there are many aspects that differentiate between the two. The individual departments' marketing strategies, target audience, content creation, and the university’s mission and values steer in a different direction, and for someone who chooses to work in Communications for an educational institution will see these tremendous differences.

To learn about my case study, read here. I go over my own personal experience working for a university’s communications team and how my experience taught me these valuable lessons.