When thinking, developing and applying strategies for student recruitment, it may be that your institution already has its attention focused on its leads. However, its efforts are already directed towards lead qualification in education?
Suspects become leads and leads become prospects or almost so. In fact, it is the qualified leads that advance to the next stage. In other words, these are the ones that result in new enrollments for the institution.
In today's post, we will explain this difference better. And, more than that, we'll tell you what to do to qualify your leads and really win more students.
What you will see in today's post:
How to take this qualification to attract students
Continue reading to find out more!
What are leads in education
For educational institutions, leads are students who can be considered your potential students.
It is interesting to understand that suspects are students in general who could be interested in the institution. Which places lead as those who, in fact, have already expressed some interest through visits to the website or blog, interactions and other forms of contact.
One of the main objectives with the adoption of student recruitment is to attract attention and engage in order to transform these leads into prospects. Or in students ready to enroll and become students at the institution.
The point is that, for a lead to become a prospect, it must first become a qualified lead. And, as we will see below, there is a path to be taken to make this happen.
Lead vs. qualified lead
The difference between a lead and a qualified lead is their position in the purchasing journey.
This means that this is a student who has found out about the course of interest, the educational institution and clarified their doubts regarding prices, financing and other relevant issues.
With this information, your lead already knows exactly what they want: the course they want, in which period.
And what is needed, therefore, for this student to become an enrolled student is an incentive from the institution to make their decision. This is the qualified lead in education.
SEE TOO:
Lead qualification in education: how to do it?
Marketing 5.0: get closer to your potential customers;
What is a diagnostic evaluation in marketing strategy?
How to take this qualification to attract students
As you know, the process of lead capture This occurs through the adoption of strategic educational marketing measures. To do so, as we tell you in this e-book, you need to know How to unify outbound and inbound marketing in your actions.
After implementing tactics to attract students, the institution needs to continue attracting the student's attention and guide them forward on their purchasing journey. And that means producing quality content, with information relevant to this lead.
It happens like this: a student finds the institution's blog on the internet and becomes interested in what he reads. In one of the posts, he responds to a call (the famous CTA call to action) to subscribe to the newsletter and receive new content by email.
The newsletter gives the educational institution permission to contact the student and extend their relationship, also giving them the opportunity to send strategic materials to get to know them better.
In addition to the student's interest in the topics sent to them, their interest in downloading rich materials (such as e-books about the course or forms of financing, for example), indicate their interests and position in the journey. The same goes for any exchanges of messages or conversations via email.
The idea is for the institution to send information that matches the student's profile and responds to what they are looking for. The objective is to help you know exactly what you want and prepare you to complete this stage by enrolling.
Qualified leads, marketing and sales
To better understand how this works, it's good to know the relationship between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.
This is because, as you may have already understood, it is marketing strategies that help to make the qualification of leads in education so that they are ready to receive an enrollment offer.
In this sense, the lead capture and its qualification depend on the production of relevant content and its proper dissemination. But the educational institution cannot fail to verify the effectiveness of these actions.
It is not uncommon for institutions to notice that a high volume of interested students does not match the number of students enrolled. And this tends to happen due to the lack of alignment between marketing and sales.
Sometimes the work of student recruitment of marketing outlines a student profile that ends up differing from the profile of those who, in fact, become students. And you can see this when analyzing and comparing the profile of students who reach the institution's sales team.
It's not just marketing that contributes to sales. In the opposite direction, it is based on information about those enrolled that marketing directs its content and actions. Therefore, it focuses on qualifying leads that have the best chances of becoming students.
Why invest in lead qualification
The entire process of student recruitment is based, among other issues, on the collection and analysis of relevant information about the institution's leads. The objective is to know how to qualify and increase the number of enrollments.
To this end, it is common for educational institutions to choose to rely on tools that optimize this collection, such as the CRM we present in the post Marketing automation: 5 tools that will impact your results.
However, without investing in lead qualification in education, the institution will gather information from students who do not have many chances of becoming students. Consequently, your strategies will be well planned, but will not lead to the expected results.
Furthermore, without proper qualification, the volume of leads that progress through the purchasing journey decreases, meaning that few reach contact with the sales team. A situation that, in turn, makes success in student recruitment be limited.
Did you like the post? Read too Prospect x lead: what’s the difference!
Portugal