Getting the marketing right: Drop your Ps and mind your Cs!

Managing and nurturing a university’s reputation takes a lot of self-inspection, prioritisation, collaboration and commitment. And, when all the soul-searching and stakeholder research is complete, you need a plan to leverage your brand value for the benefit of that university.

Within that plan, the marketing function seeks to do two things: influence people and earn income. Pretty much the same as marketing in any other sector.

When it comes to influencing students, you know that they want an education, they want to learn, they want a life experience, they want to stay close to home or go far away from home, they want “the badge”, they want a means to a career… And so it is that universities increasingly adopt the practices of commercial marketers to attract students ahead of the competition.

However, if we look at the original first four marketing “P”s, product, price, place and promotion, they aren’t always the best steer.

To start with, the “product“, in the form of academic subjects, can be difficult to differentiate, particularly at undergraduate level. Price is generally consistent for domestic undergraduate students and only begins to be a factor at graduate level or for international students. And it’s often not in the hands of the marketers to set or alter. Place is a given and can be a positive or a negative. Promotion should be where the distinction really begins but, in a world of quality universities who all expound values such as excellence, discovery, ambition and inclusion, promotion can sometimes be mired in cliches.

So the 4Ps are perhaps not the best acronym to follow for university marketers. I would instead suggest the 3 Cs – coordination, channels, and campaigns. Hear me out!

Coordination starts when the educational ambitions and research priorities set out in the university strategy guide the marketing strategy. Once the balance of domestic/regional to international, undergraduate to graduate, taught to research and merit to under-represented is agreed, the marketing strategy can take shape.

The customer journey from brand awareness to commitment needs to be mapped along a target audience engagement process, which can be tracked and measured. Too often in university settings this process is disbursed. Schools with specific subject responsibilities might not liaise with central functions, and sometimes central functions may not even share or combine their knowledge or activities.

Getting systems to speak to one another and input to a shared dashboard can be a challenge. At some point the university as a whole has to bite the bullet and recognise that engaging with target audiences is best done to a coordinated plan, regardless of reporting lines and functional responsibilities. It is a tough journey to navigate but once people get to see and use dashboards with benchmarked measurements, they don’t go back to silo planning.

Channels are the routes through which curated content is shared with target audiences. In-person channels include open days and campus visits have come a long way from the bored faculty sitting behind baize-covered tables stacked with printed prospectuses and fresh-faced teenagers with bouncing hormones more interested in eyeing up the talent across the quad. But they should be objectively assessed every few years so that they remain interesting and enticing. Fairs and in-country events and activities also need regular scrutiny as the resources – both people and costs- can rack up against challenging fee income targets.

Online channels are of course crucial. But not everyone has to do everything all of the time… Before picking the push channels for promotion, university websites must be optimised for user experience. They are the repository for course, fee, and student life information so they need to be informative, searchable, and visually attractive. The social media channels for promotion need to be well curated in terms of content and spend. Those with no audience or engagement really should be culled.

Only when all of this coordinated planning and channel curation is well underway, is it time for the third C:- campaigns. Having worked in a number of industries before coming into the higher education sector, I have seen the value of great campaigns whether they are selling goods and services or influencing public behaviour. The common components in great campaigns are that they are creative, consistent and credible. A campaign to promote a university needs to have the same components. It can be challenging to be different to every other quality university in the market, but if a campaign has these three components it will be seen as authentic and attractive to the target audience.

And there it is. The three Cs. A coordinated processes that streamline the journey for the student and maximise the effectiveness for the university marketing team, channels with appropriate content, curated to build engagement and prompt action, and campaigns to raise awareness and drive interest.