Tips for Enrollment Marketing from SF University

Mitch Williams: Good morning everyone. I think that everyone’s awake. Well, welcome to Strategic Factory. We are super excited to have you here today. My name is Mitch Williams, and I’m the sales trainer here. So, I work with our sales staff to help them drive value to our clients.

In just a moment, I’m gonna introduce our speaker today, Craig George. And he’s going to be doing the main event: Effective Marketing Strategies for Enrollment Growth. I would just ask if you would please hold your questions until the end. We’ll have a designated time for Q&A. Sound good? Cool. 

So who’s Craig George? Craig is our integrated marketing strategist. And what that really means is he brings the strategy to Strategic Factory. Right. So Craig has graduate studies in marketing and communications, and he also has over 20 years of experience in the marketing space across a variety of different industries. So, he’s a wealth of knowledge here for Strategic. He helps drive value to our clients and is a great fit for what we do. So, yeah, we appreciate it and looking forward to seeing what Craig has.

Craig George: All right. Good morning, everybody. Let me just, I want to do a quick survey in the room. I see a couple shirts…who is actually in post-secondary field now? University, college…One. Okay. Secondary? You guys. Primary. Anybody? Okay. And non-education field? Okay. Okay. I ask that because I consider marketing a universal language. I wrote this presentation geared more toward the higher education industry, but again, marketing is universal. These are tricks and tips can work in any industry, in any field.

So the power of brand. I wanna talk about brand for just a second. We have a, what we call in my house, when the doorbell rings and it’s somebody with the clipboard, we call it, clip boards. We know we’re not gonna answer the door because they’re selling something, right? And everybody knows that. How likely are you to buy something from a clipboard guy? Yeah, everyone comes down. No. How about after a networking event like this, or a series of networking events where you are familiar with the person, you got to know them, you recognize their face, you’ve had a few conversations. How likely are you to purchase? More likely, right?

Let’s go one step further. How many people know the brand Chewy? Chewy.com and pet food supplies online? Right. I had an experience with them recently. They try to push people to a, online recurring shipment membership. So you order dog food, you get it every three months, the dog food comes and shows up at your door. Unfortunately, you know, when you have things happen, the pet passes and you don’t need that dog food anymore, they have a drop-down, if you need to cancel that standing order. And the drop-down says, you know, pet passed. 

The next step which Chewy has done is they’ve actually hired a series of artists that are on staff. If you have a pet profile picture in your account, they will do an oil painting of your pet picture, and send it to you with a note saying, you know, “we’re really sorry.” It makes me choke up just thinking about it. But yeah, it’s, I’ve sworn to be a Chewy customer for life because of it. It was an amazing experience. And that is, that’s branding, right? You are going to be a customer for life. That’s what we want to achieve with our marketing efforts. We want our students to be our students for life, to carry the torch for our schools.

Okay. So how do we get to Chewy? The key is finding your niche. And what I like to do to find our niche is a series of what I call X-Y graphs. So in this case, if we compare, the average value of an eight package per student, versus the percentage of students receiving eight, then we have certain institutions that will give high packages, but a low number of students who receive those packages. You’ll have other institutions that the A value package is a little bit lower, but more students will get A. We might be in this area. So our goal is to find where everybody else is and go where they’re not. Right? So we carve out our own niche, figure out “Okay, there’s nobody in this space. We can control this space. We can draw students from this space.”

Now, ideally, the university has that sort of built-up over the years to deliver to this specific niche. If that isn’t the case, it’s up to us as marketers to carve out a niche for ourselves and figure out where we best fit in. You know what I tend to do is actually–in your packages, we have, sort of a little package or a little five-year niche worksheet that you can take in. Again, this is sort of industry agnostic. Again, it was written for higher-ed, but principles apply. And what I’ve given is a couple of other recommendations for other X-Y axes that we can figure out where we fit. And the idea is, you know, you find data sources that will help you figure out where all these other institutions fit. So, for example, college scorecards, college board niche, U.S. news, press reviews, these are all data sources where we can figure out where our institution compared to others. 

And once we figure out the niche, we need to figure out who fits in that niche. Who is that ideal customer profile? Who’s that ideal student? And we need to know everything about them, their likes, their needs, their pain points, their future aspirations, their financial background, and everything we can about them. And we get a lot of this information from their applications. From…we can send out surveys and I’ll show you a few examples after. We want to know everything we can about that. Then we create this general profile. And then we find, okay, “who matches this profile in our database, in our CRM.” CRM, Customer Resource Management System, is really the key to all of this. The more data we have, the more targeted we can make our messaging.

There are a couple other audiences to think about. Consider family members, parents, the influencers, the people that are helping the student make a decision. Also, consider counselors or advisors who are also going to be in that student’s ear. Those are audiences we want to build out to, want to reach out to them.

Now, once we’ve figured out our niche, we’ve figured out our target audience. Now we have to create a compelling message to reach that person. I actually want to, I would switch these two. Ideally, we’d build a consistent brand identity around that niche. So all of our marketing efforts, everything has a unique, signature look and feel to that, that’s going to appeal to that niche. So, school colors every new brand. Everybody’s carrying the brand with them. Everything that comes in the mail is that same brand, that same color. It’s that color, that brand, that image is recognized instantly by this student.

And then compelling message, of course, we need to figure out, based on those pain points, based on those demographics, based on who we’ve carved out of this niche for, how do we best reach them? Are they social media? What social media platforms do they most likely use? How do you figure out how to get our image in front of their eyeballs?

And how do we do that? Okay. So of course there’s leveraging digital. So SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content marketing, social media engagement. And then I might spend a lot of time on this last one, personalizing the admissions process. This is an example. So actually, we’re fortunate. My son, just graduated as a senior from high school and is in the college admissions process right now. So I’ve been sort of gathering all this stuff. And I wish actually that I had known about this presentation sooner because all of the margins of that came in the mail. We just sort of tossed it. And if we kept it, I would have some great examples for you that went along with this. So Tampa has done a fantastic job from the marketing perspective. They really dug into their CRM. They knew a lot about my son Matthew. 

You can see there, here’s an example of an email that I got: “Dear Craig” during Matthew’s college search. They personalized the email. We actually received a nicely bound, probably 30-page book about the university. That was what we call variable printed; it was customized for Matthew. So, you open up the first page. It’s “Congratulations, Matthew. We’d love to have you as a student here.” It delved into his background, his aspirations, his major choices.

The next few pages were, “Here’s your financial summary. Here’s the merit of what we’d love to give you. Here are the grants you’re up for. Here’s what your tuition would be.” And then they go through multiple pages. “Matthew, we understand your interest in this type of career. Here’s how we can help you reach that career.” His name was throughout the entire book. There was a lot of effort that went into this.

This was sort of an example of a survey that Tampa had sent out, asking various questions. They used the survey data to fill that CRM and then customize that book for Matthew.

Here’s an example of what not to do. Another college he was looking at, and you can see it’s “Hello. No mention of me. No mention of Matthew, no personalization. No customization. Everybody got the same exact email.

So I wanted to touch a little bit more on this with direct mail pieces. The other thing we can do is–you’re going to get a lot of applications, a lot of outreach that you need to do. Not everybody is worthy of your marketing dollars. So there are some students that have applied that probably aren’t going to fit that niche. Maybe they just get a postcard. Here’s an example. I’ll pass these around so you can see them. But it’s not personalized. It’s just sort of everybody got the same postcard, a very inexpensive postcard.

Here are some examples of what I call high-effort but generic. So these are some really nicely produced pieces, but they are not personalized. The school in question spent a lot of money to produce these pieces. But I feel like they’re missing the mark because they didn’t personalize it.

Our CEO’s daughter is actually in the college as a student. She’s been grabbing all these for us. And you can see there are some of these that she never even opened because there’s no call-to-action, no personalization, no reason to open these things. So there’s a lot of money wasted and missed the mark.

Here’s the next step. A very nice piece that is, you know, you’ll feel it. It’s embossed. It has a die-cut of the logo on the front. An envelope, a personalized piece–inside, well crafted. So this sort of stuff brings the bar a little bit higher.

These, so, sort of a neat thing. You can see that they’re digging into their CRM a little bit more. So again, our CEO’s daughter received a sort of generic postcard. Okay, fine. But then they followed up with…so at some point in her application, she declared that she’s of Jewish faith. And so they sent the postcard that is specific towards Jewish students attending university. As you can see, they’re really digging in and trying to personalize and customize.

So here’s another example. And I want to point, again, this is sort of a series from LSU, sort of general to specific to her major interests. But I also wanted to point out, so you see, that we have the high-cost ones that are kind of in the bags. They’re sealed. They’re protected in the mail system. You see that? You can see when it goes through all the rollers in the US post office system, these postcards get marred up. Now, remember, this is your brand showing up in the mailbox. So this is what your student is seeing. Not the best. Look, they come in a nice bag where it’s protected. Or an envelope, that shows you’re putting a little more effort into it. Keeps your brand clean, your image clean, and it does a better job of sending the right message to your potential students.

So, just a couple of additional outreach. Of course, there’s, you know, customized email. Again, I want to touch on social media and web events. So this sort of came out with Covid. So everything was online. There’s a great opportunity for, with social media, for live events, so that students can take virtual tours. They can speak to students, speak to alumni, and learn about the school. Just having that live person, and customize again for that individual student or that demographic, that niche student. And then, of course, we’ve been talking about personalized communications.

The last thing I wanna talk about is sort of a broader scope, a community around a school. So, alumni networks, parents, partners, donors, and the actual physical community around the school. These are all great ways to embrace that students and alumni networks can reach out to students. “Hey, I love going to school because of this. I understand you’re a student. This major, that was my major. I love the program here,” that kind of thing.

I want to give an example. A friend of mine went to George Washington University. He played D1 basketball. And all the D1 athletes at George Washington, they get assigned what they call a mentor family, an alumni or a local community member. It was close to the school. They would sort of host each of these students and act as sort of a guide or mentor, just somebody in the community that they can, you know, an ear to listen to, a hand to help out, just make sure they’re comfortable at their time at GW. That program is what made my friend decide to go to GW. He is still there. He graduated with me 20 years ago. He still is in contact with his mentor family. They’re close family friends now. And that relationship still brings him back to GW and part of…he wants to be a member…So it’s this evolving revolution that keeps going around and coming around. I go like this, my arms are encircling the prospective students, bringing them in. Right?

So just to wrap up quickly, we got a strong brand identity. Discover your niche. Figure out who’s the student who best fits that niche. Use dynamic approaches, variable. We want to customize to reach that person. And then a strong community to embrace that client, that student.

And I think with that. Just a quick few things that, you know, just like you saw in the tour. So, you know, a lot of what we do here at Strategic Factory: printing, email marketing, direct mail, promotional products, apparel, branding, signage. And then we actually also have a full digital agency or marketing agency here at Strategic Factory. So basically, if you can put your logo on it, ee can help with that.

With that, all of your questions.