Over the past weeks, I’ve made a point of having more conversations with fellow marketers, both in-person and on Teams, including with some of you. That has been inspiring.
One theme kept coming up: organisational barriers that make it harder to do your work well.
Education marketing can be a lonely. I used to think that this was mainly true for me as an independent consultant, but many of you, working as in-house marketers, marketing directors or CMOs face something very similar.
Even if you’re part of a large organisation, there are often few people around who share your role and perspective. In many of the separate conversations, I kept hearing similar themes come up.
Some examples:
Genuinely unhelpful landing pages
Your landing pages can be like the wall in the image below: people click your ads and land on a wall of text, with perhaps one “apply now” button stuck somewhere on the page. If you made the landing page more visual and added some lighter-touch calls to action, you could potentially raise conversion rate from 1% to 5% or more, and get 5x more out of your ad spend.
But the CMS won’t allow it. Or others in the organisation don’t actually want to deal with enquiries, so nothing changes.
Privacy compliance overreach
Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for respecting privacy. But many marketers are experiencing the other extreme, where privacy concerns are interpreted so broadly that they end up hampering communication with prospective students who have willingly opted in for updates.
Missing infrastructure
Setting up a CRM is costly, painful and time-consuming. But when it’s up and running, it saves tons of time and money. Also, most fancy AI tools, such as chatbots, are virtually useless if they cannot refer back to a single source of truth about the person they are talking to.
Solutions
Now, I hope that by sharing this, you feel seen. But we won’t make progress by just talking about problems. I don’t have a silver bullet, but I believe that whatever your role and level of seniority, you can make a difference.
Get out of your comfort zone
For a marketer, it can be comfortable to focus on what you can do. Write a better email, improve the images on the website, that sort of thing.
But if something outside of your formal job scope is getting in the way of success, don’t ignore it. Go grab a coffee with the privacy officer and get their point of view, for starters. That can be the starting point for a mutual understanding that unblocks your student journey.
If you’re a non-marketing leader, show some interest in what your marketers are working on. They may face barriers they haven’t told you about, which may only take a handful of conversations to resolve.
Change your language
Some of the people who hold the keys to improvement don’t understand or care about marketing. “We doubled the conversion rate” doesn’t evoke any emotion for them. But there is something they care about – whether it’s cost, academic reputation, IT security or efficiency. Find out what matters to them, and build your story around that.
This may mean building a business case to show why a certain tool will pay for itself. Or showing what recruiting 10% more international students from diverse countries could do to your QS rankings. Or do some mystery shopping as a ‘prospective student’ and share your findings.
Make someone else say it
If you tried all the above and the message isn’t getting through, get someone else to deliver it. It’s unfair, but people will often only pay attention when the same message is delivered by someone else, such as an external consultant like me.
See you in 2 weeks!
This article first appeared as a Field Note
In the Field Notes, I share one practical idea you can try on your site or in your campaigns. Every two weeks. Get it in your inbox by signing up here.
