A successful process of attracting students to Higher Education depends on different factors. One of them is the important alignment between educational marketing and the actions of the institution's sales team.
This combination is called smarketing. Do you already know how it works and how important it is to increase the number of enrollments at the educational institution?
This is precisely what we address in this post. As you read, you will better understand this strategy and discover how your institution can benefit from it.
Discover what awaits you in today's post:
Follow along!
What is smarketing
The term smarketing originates from the combination of the word sales (sale) andmarketing. In practice, the idea is to really eliminate barriers that exist between these departments of the institution and understand how to combine marketing and sales actions at colleges.
This goes in the opposite direction of the old idea that marketing and sales are rivals within an institution. Otherwise, smarketing for educational institutions represents the union of forces that aims to optimize both marketing campaigns and sales actions.
The objective is to show that it is possible (and better) to make this rivalry end. Thus, instead of having departments that compete with each other to see which is most relevant to the process and increasing enrollments, the educational institution now has a cohesive team that works together in pursuit of a common objective: achieving better results in attracting students to Higher Education.
And, for this to happen, you need to understand how marketing and sales complement each other and why invest in this change within your institution.
The importance of smarketing for institutions
If you follow our blog, you know that we have already presented different strategies for attracting and retaining students. For an educational institution, knowing how to use marketing and sales tactics is increasingly important.
This is because the market is competitive and there is less and less room for the power of competition to be underestimated, giving rise to internal disputes within the institution.
To stand out, it is not enough to develop good marketing campaigns and have an excellent sales team. You need to make sure they work together.
Otherwise, your educational institution can attract the attention of students and gain many interested parties thanks to marketing. But, even if its salespeople are effective in completing enrollments, the number of new students may remain lower than expected.
SEE TOO:
- What is CRM and how can you use it to boost your student’s capture?
- How to capture qualified leads in a digital marketing campaign?
- How to capture leads with inbound sales in the education sector.
Why smarketing as a strategy
The cause of this situation is the lack of alignment between marketing and sales at the college. In general, when analyzing and contrasting the profiles of students who respond to campaigns with those who actually enroll, there are important divergences.
And this already indicates why smarketing for educational institutions is a strategy: to make sure that marketing and sales can complement each other, avoiding failures and improving results.
The profile of students who become students, for example, must be used to make changes that ensure that the educational institution's actions focus more on this audience. In other words, what the sales team receives drives marketing decisions, while marketing success feeds the sales team.
Uniting marketing and sales in colleges
Measuring and monitoring results is crucial in different sectors of any business. The same goes for an institution and the process of attracting students to Higher Education.
As seen, a successful attraction campaign alone does not necessarily lead to increased enrollment. Just as the sales team enrolling all interested parties who contacted the educational institution does not mean achieving the ideal number of new students.
Therefore, to avoid "false successes" or to make these achievements truly relevant, you need to know how to combine marketing and sales. Here are some tips:
Promote communication between areas
It is essential that the college's marketing and sales departments are open to communicating on a daily basis.
Sometimes, the interaction of one of the teams with students (or the students' response to campaigns and actions) indicates problems or opportunities that can be solved or taken advantage of by the other team.
Therefore, the exchange of information must be daily. Also because it is in the work routine that specific and valuable situations for possible improvements occur. Therefore, it is interesting that the educational institution provides channels for internal communication and encourages this practice.
Establish shared goals
A good way to get rid of the old-fashioned idea of rivalry between marketing and sales is to promote the sharing of goals and even incentives between departments.
This is because, as we have seen, the idea is to ensure success in the common objective of attracting students to Higher Education. So, it may be interesting to make departments have more in common so that they can commit more to smarketing.
Invest in the use of integrated tools
The success of smarketing depends on collecting, measuring and analyzing data. This allows for a better understanding of the flaws that need to be corrected and the opportunities to be taken advantage of in joint work by the departments.
Therefore, it is important that the institution has good tools to enable this stage. In general, we address the importance of using software in the post 5 tools to monitor educational marketing performance.
One of these solutions is CRM (Customer Relationship Management), which tracks information about the processes of attracting and converting students, before they enroll. And another idea is to combine data collection with business intelligence, which allows for a more strategic direction in the actions of both departments.
Hold joint meetings frequently
It is also very important for smarketing in educational institutions that meetings between departments take place frequently and regularly.
Meetings are ideal gatherings to formalize the exchange of information and share it more broadly, in order to improve alignment between marketing and sales.
Weekly meetings, for example, can be faster and more practical, just to ensure that everyone is updated on objectives, goals and performance. While monthly meetings serve to promote deeper analysis of results, aiming to improve the strategies adopted for smarketing in educational institutions.
Did you like the post? Read too Does data analysis in the educational market really work?
Portugal