Knowing your persona well makes a huge difference when creating marketing strategies. Personalized and directed actions cause more efficient results.However, how can you know it’s really working? In addition to the indicators we already use in Marketing Automation (sharing number, number of people who subscribed to the newsletter, email opening rate, etc.), there is another thing that should be monitored to understand the behavior of your current and future students: the buyer’s journey.
Do you want to understand what it is and how this monitoring can be don’t? Keep reading!
What is the buying journey?
Buying journey is the route students take from the first moment they hear about your brand (in that content strategy or sponsored campaign your team makes) to the purchase moment - or the enrollment.
So, when we know the buying journey that your students really take to get enrolled, your team has baselines to work on. That way, tracking the whole process is essential.
After all, there is a substantial difference between working on an expectancy of a journey (a route your team created wondering how students behave) and a real journey (a route based on the real data of every person that enrolls in your EI).
What are the buyer’s journey stages?
Even being dynamic and understanding that each student doesn’t has the same route to reach the enrollment, the buyer’s journey is divided in four stages:
- Learning and Discovery: the students still have doubts about which course they will take, they don’t know which EI they will choose and evey have no idea if it’s a good thing to invest in it.
- Problem Awareness: the students start realizing the significance of a bachelor and are trying to decide which one they will take.
- Solution Consideration: students have already searching enough to start thinking about what’s the best alternative (which course and which EI)
- Purchase Decision: they make their decision based on everything they have considered and, then, enroll.
What’s the connection between the buying journey and the purchase funnel?
The buying journey is deeply connected to the well-known purchase funnel. While the journey helps us to understand where the students are in their route to the enrollment, the funnel guides us in what must be done in each journey stage.
- The top of the funnel (ToFu) is related to the learning and discovery stage.
- The middle of the funnel (MiFu) is related to problem awareness and solution consideration.
- The bottom of the funnel (BoFu) is where the students make their purchase decision.
But why is there this connection?
Well, the purchase funnel guides our actions to each stage the students are in. The way you use Content Marketing, for example, is based on this definition.
However, we must agree that the funnel is linear and implies that every student will take the top, the middle and the bottom. In reality it looks very different and having a dynamic track to understand is essential.
There are students, for example, that will watch a webinar and then will reach the bottom of the funnel directly. Others will watch the same webinar, then will start searching about your EI, reaching the beginning of the journey (ToFu).
Knowing the journey and using the funnel as guidance, your team has some light about the must-be-done actions.
What are the main features of the students’ buying journey?
Each Education Institution will have a different relation with their leads (interested people) and it will lead to a different route in the buying journey. That’s why it’s difficult to define the main general features.
What’s possible to say is that every student - to enroll in your EI - must know your brand, which course they will take and what are the benefits of this qualification. However, the sequence that this will happen or how they are going to keep in touch with your contents and website is something that it’s only possible to know after an analysis of your current students’ buying journey.
That’s why, it’s important to keep the Educational Marketing work in every stage of the purchase funnel and, as the journey of a certain student is getting clear, your team can work to render them a lead or to render a lead into an enrollment.
How does Mkt4Edu track your students’ journey?
Even if we talk about the significance of understanding and tracking the students’ journey, how can it be done? Well, Mkt4Edu strategy is dynamic tracking.
Using several resources, as cookies, R., Java, AI Watson e Hubspot, Mkt4Edu is able to understand and track the contact of every student with the brand, for the first website visit to the enrollment.
When we make this “exercise” , we note that some students make their first contact up to three years before the enrollment (this term can be longer or shorter in your EI). Others can subscribe to receive information in the first contact, some visit the EI’s website and apply to the examination and so on.
Each micro-journey can be monitored closely with the dynamic tracking. This information collection offers a great background of the purchase decision of your team and also helps the service team, once they can identify opportunities based on the typical behavior of the already-enrolled people.
In other words, Marketing campaigns become more dynamic and personalized and the service members invest time in those who have a greater conversion rate, who generate lower average-cost-per-acquisition of every enrollment.
Is your EI using tracking to create opportunities? If the answer is ‘no’, you need to read our post about the 6 Insight Analytics strategies in the buying journey.
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