Is more money really the answer? – Why your marketing strategies fail.

Marketing strategies can fail for many reasons. But the most common one is the lack of understanding of the customer’s needs. Marketing strategy is the backbone of any business, that is why a good marketing strategy is what will help your institution grow and get real results. 

There are a lot of factors that you need to keep in mind before you start off on a marketing campaign. But let’s begin on why a lot of marketing strategies can fail :

∙Not having a college recruiting strategy in place: You need to understand who your customers are and how they behave. Then you can create the right strategy and content accordingly for them. Take your time to create a great college recruiting strategy

∙Not going mobile: Determining the right marketing channel for your product or service is also crucial for success. For sure the          students or your audience are using a smartphone, so, all your communication must have responsive design for this kind of devices. It is imperative for you to know what your potential customers are searching for and how do they do this search or journey to get to you. 

∙Ineffective communication strategies: Poor quality content or sending out a generic email to all candidates are wrong moves. It’s also important to use tools like keyword search and ask questions on forums to find out what people want from your institution or product. This will also have them engaged.

∙Another common mistake is not having a strong call to action (CTA): You need to make clear what the next step should be, whether it is signing up for an email list, downloading or buying something.

All these points take us to this question: Are you approaching the right target? The importance of narrowing down your target audience is that it allows you to tailor your marketing strategy and message more easily. It is also to make sure that the campaign is more likely to resonate with a specific group. If you don’t know who you’re targeting, then it becomes difficult to hone in on what they want. The more specific you can get, the better. Do not do generic campaigns that generate huge awareness that swamp your conversion teams. It is better quality over quantity.

On the other hand, new trends in the world of education are taking over. It’s important to adapt and be able to pitch your products and services accordingly. In order to stay ahead of the game, you should be paying attention to the trends in education and see how they can apply to your future students. Trends can help brands to communicate in different ways, allow businesses to break the boundaries of the market, put forward new ideas and also can bring new opportunities. So, question yourself: Are you adapting to the new trends?

We also need to understand that people in different cultures have different ways of communicating and thinking.  To create an inter-cultural messaging and young people focused messaging is the key to be more student/foreign friendly and to make sure that our messaging is clear and understandable. We need to make it real and make it about people.

Finally, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on marketing. You just need to know how to use it effectively. By following these steps, you will save money and save your teams time with quality leads that actually convert:

∙Build a local presence in country: Having a local presence can be the difference between being seen as a credible institution and being seen as an irrelevant one.

∙Go to where your students hang out: You need to be where your students are – and in many cases that means online.

∙Talk how they like to be talked to. 

∙Make them feel special and that you are genuine and real. 

People want to be treated as individuals and not as a group of people with similar interests or needs. To get the real results and convert your leads into students, more money is not really the answer. Get to know your audience and focus on building your strategy taking care of all this steps.