The internet and Marketing on digital channels have brought companies a great opportunity to improve their communication with their audience and, consequently, their sales: all this through access to an immense amount of data relating to their audience. If previously executive decisions and marketing strategies were based on intuition and unfounded opinions, guesswork has no place and it is possible to analyze the behavior of customers and potential customers to plan and execute actions more assertively.
Consuming resources from your budget with Marketing and not knowing exactly what return this investment brought to your educational institution is a reality of the past. Currently, it is possible to monitor your investments and, based on the profile and behavior data of users who were impacted by your actions, your team can continually improve communication strategies and improve their performance, bringing more revenue to your institution (whether through fundraising leads and closing more enrollments or retaining your students).
Using data is nothing new for those who work in Marketing. Good professionals have been working based on market research for a long time. However, in many cases, carrying out this research required a high investment, and they did not always provide such specific data for decision-making.
Currently, with Marketing Digital, data can be accessed without the institution having to spend a lot of financial resources. Additionally, there is the advantage that they are much more accurate.
If you have a website, for example, you can install the Google Analytics, monitor visits and understand the public profile (average age, gender, location), browsing behavior (whether people access the page via computer or cell phone, which browser they use, what times are most accessed, whether they access a single or are there recurring visits, which pages are most viewed), the channels from which the accesses originate (organic, paid media, social networks, etc.), among other information.
For educational marketing strategies, The collection and analysis of this and other data related to the interaction of students and potential students is fundamental to achieving the objective that any manager has: doing more with less (or doing more without necessarily increasing the budget).
This way of planning, executing and tracking actions based on data is also called data driven marketing. And if your educational institution still doesn't do data-driven Marketing, it's time to rethink your investments in the area, you could be losing customers and spending wasted time.
Check out these additional resources:
- The Power of Growth Hacking and Web Analytics in Education;
- Data science in marketing strategy: reasons to use it!
- Data Analysis: really know your customer and make less mistakes.
Marketing for educational institutions: how data can help
With a data-driven Marketing strategy, your institution will gain agility and efficiency in decision-making, reduce costs and be able to better adapt to student demands and market changes. It is also possible to predict trends. In the education segment, a change that we can already mention is the growth of Distance Learning (Online).
Having an organized data structure that allows managers to analyze the behavior of their leads and students is a competitive advantage. In Marketing strategies, this information from data interpretation can be used to:
(1) improve your segmentation of paid media campaigns (Facebook, Google) or publications on social networks, so that you can impact people with the greatest potential to enroll based on the profile of your students, seeking a similar audience and not investing time and money showing ads to those who are not part of your target;
(2) create personalized messages based on the profile and behavior information of your visitors and leads, and thus increase your conversion into registrations;
(3) create more relevant content based on the interest shown by your audience based on the interactions of users on your website, considering the most accessed pages and the most searched terms on Google about your business, for example.
According to Gartner, a leading market research and consultancy company, data analysis is at the forefront of the priority list of top Marketing leaders. And the big challenge for these professionals is to combine the interpretation of quantitative and qualitative metrics to better understand customers.
After all, it's not enough to have access to a huge amount of data without knowing what to do with it. You need to have a strategic look to assess which information really matters and has a positive impact on your sales, bringing more enrollments to the institution.
How to do marketing with little money?
In addition to greater access to data, Digital Marketing has brought small and medium-sized companies the possibility of carrying out actions without having a very large budget. There are tools free (like Google Analytics) and other paid, but low-cost. Investments in advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing) are smaller compared to traditional media such as television.
To start Digital Marketing actions, it is interesting to use marketing automation software, such as HubSpot (which has a free version and paid options). This type of program records the interaction history of your institution's leads and students with your website (pages the lead accessed, materials they downloaded, emails they opened and clicked on, etc.).
This way, the work of data analysis is made easier, since much of the information you will evaluate and interpret will be gathered in a single place.
It is also important to have a specialized team that knows best market practices and knows how to bring results to your institution. 4RevOps is focused on education and HubSpot's only Diamond partner in Brazil. We exceed expectations in generating results with inbound marketing, capturing more leads and reducing costs in the Educational Marketing we carry out for our clients.
Do you want to increase the number of enrollments at your institution at an affordable cost? Schedule a conversation with us.
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