Sales and Marketing Health Check – How Do You Shape Up?
Claudia Reiners Commercial Strategy Manager
At Candlefox, we’re experts at helping education providers attract quality students and maximise student enrolments. Our leading education marketplace attracts over 500,000 visitors each month, so we’re experts on the Australian education industry.
When we help our partners through the full end to end student acquisition journey, we’re always keen to understand how our providers get students through the front door, what marketing tactics they use, and how their Sales teams service student enquiries.
Our previous article on Optimising Your Post Enquiry Processes detailed how to optimise your contact strategy to maximise enrolments. We’ve now put together some thoughts on what you should do to Attract students and build out your Marketing and Sales function.
Lead acquisition and student recruitment are hard, but getting it right will future-proof your business.
1) Building Your Provider Brand
As an education provider, educating students is the most important part of the student journey. It’s what education institutions do best.
That said, it’s important that prospective students understand who you are before they embark on their education, and what your institute stands for.
2) Your Online Presence
It’s not just tech savvy millennials who will expect you to have a solid online presence – in this day and age, being digital first and having an online presence is key to brand awareness.
Types of online marketing channels
3) Digital Marketing Strategy
Building a digital marketing strategy seems like a daunting prospect, but it’s important to understand what you’re setting out to achieve, what your key performance indicators are and what your cost per student acquisition is.
4) Content Marketing
We’ve written about this before, but putting to use an effective content strategy will to attract students is very important. Harnessing an effective content marketing strategy is one of the best ways for your prospective student audience to explore your brand and your course offering through their decision making journey, and shape their perception of you as a trusted educator. An effective content marketing strategy should align with your overall digital marketing strategy.
5) The Marketing Funnel
Unfamiliar with the traditional marketing funnel? Don’t let the acquisition funnel confuse you – we’ve reverted to the marketing flywheel here at Candlefox, which symbolises customer acquisition and business growth with the customer (or student) at the centre of the flywheel.
When building out a student acquisition strategy and evaluating your paid and unpaid marketing channels, just remember the following:
Attract
Getting students through your door
Enrol
Enrolling them in the right courses
Retain
Enhancing the overall student experience
6) Understanding the Student Journey
Nurture your student leads. Help prospective students understand who you are, what courses you offer and how you are going to ultimately help their career outcomes.
7) Sales – The Post Enquiry Process
We’ve covered this off before in our Optimise your Success article, but for a quick recap on optimising your team’s Contact Strategy to maximise your student enrolments:
This is by no means exhaustive, and aimed at giving your Sales and Marketing functions an idea of what needs to be done to effectively attract students and work through a successful education marketing strategy. Candlefox can assist through all stages of the student acquisition journey.
For more information on how you can use the Candlefox and the Candlefox Marketplace to attract more student enquiries and maximise student enrolments, get in touch with us today.
