Evolution of marketing strategies for education institutes in the times of Ed tech

Authored by Priyanka Bharadwaj, Director of Operations and Branding, ITM Group of Institutions 

Understanding the term ‘Education’ to the term ‘Marketing’ generates a specialized domain by applying methodology and strategies. Education holds cultural, complex and social roles. Educational marketing represents a part of the services marketing.

Everyone knows that Social networks have transformed their marketing techniques and their popularity continues to grow. Today, Social media users are spending an average of 2 to 24 minutes per day on social networks and messaging apps. However, networks vary in popularity with different demographics and they're still evolving. For example, Instagram is one of the youngest social networks out there, with a majority of users under 25. That makes it the perfect social network for brands or companies that target young and hip demographics. Photos and short videos with a small amount of text do exceptionally well on Instagram, and it also integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts so you can use the same photos across multiple platforms.

The Downfall in students enrolment at universities in India and many countries world-wide are putting pressure on marketers to deliver, and in this  environment, art institutions are focusing on streamlining and improving their digital marketing strategy to make sure energy and efforts are spent well. While online education in India has a mix of dedicated online only and offline players with an online presence, B2B offerings are prevalent in higher education, where institutes are offering  courses to students through their own platforms.  The online channel is viewed as a convenient mode of supplementary education which allows students to study at home and at the same time offers a wide variety of services. Hence it is very important to promote the new courses, course details, admissions, etc. through various marketing strategies.  

 Whereas being able to centralize marketing expenditures is the key to running an efficient higher education marketing program. Without centralized reporting, it’s easy for different departments to fall into the pattern of using the same strategies year after year as they find it workable before. Using marketing automation  over traditional marketing  challenges the granular level work. Marketing automation has made it possible to track digital interactions with prospective students all the way from web-visit to enrolment.

It is also essential to stop cold emailing prospective students as there are good chances for your email to go in spam, it is thus preferable by students to hear from colleges through direct email, but sometimes the deliverability can make it hard to reach students, hence using tools like throttle, outbound, is way to improve deliverability when sending bulk email. 

Other strategies that work best are - Live streaming through social media as they are big players in the dpmain. A few ways you could use live streaming include live streaming events like sports and even live streaming classes.  It is also necessary to personalize communication by creating detailed email workflows based on the different types of persona’s which is yet another way to use marketing automation.

Marketing shouldn’t be just an execution of strategies year after year, but actively coordinating with the rest of the administration to plant and execute the marketing goals.