Over the past few years, we have witnessed a transformation in marketing strategies for colleges which began to be based more on the inbound marketing methodology. In this scenario, you wonder if outbound can still work forYours educational institutions?
We, at Mkt4edu, argue that the best thing for an educational institution is to know how to integrate methodologies and make the most of them. For this reason, we prepared this post to show that there is still room for outbound marketing in education and when it happens.
As you will see, to reap good results from outbound marketing, it is worth taking advantage of a resource that inbound has already proven to be extremely important: data analysis.
In this post, we will discuss the following topics:
Let's dive in! Enjoy the read!
Outbound marketing for educational institutions
Outbound marketing for educational institutions is nothing more than the traditional way of doing marketing with ads in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, with billboards, flyers, banners, pop-ups and others. As you can imagine, it received this name more recently, as a counterpoint to inbound marketing.
With the emergence and strengthening of inbound, many have interpreted that there is no longer room for outbound. This is because inbound marketing results in the adoption of more natural strategies for the attraction and student recruitment, which results in a more subtle approach that is very well received by the target audience of the educational institutions
In general, however, inbound marketing takes more time to generate results. Meanwhile, thanks to its more direct approach, outbound is able to quickly capture those students who are ready to enroll and do not need to go through the other stages of the consumer shopping day.
Therefore, what the adoption of outbound marketing for educational institutions does is contribute to guaranteeing even better results than those institutions' education they would have only with inbound.
Also, take a look at:
- Learn how to generate leads online and offline;
- Offline lead generation: 4 strategies you can’t miss;
- Integrated marketing: how to unite online and offline actions.
The importance of data in outbound marketing
To include outbound marketing strategies for educational institutions, it is necessary to be clear on some issues:
- outbound marketing is not just offline and, therefore, it also has space in the world of marketing digital;
- Data collection is not exclusive to inbound. It is also possible to collect information regarding outbound actions, even when carried out offline.
Data collection is important because it results in knowledge for the institution's education. By knowing better who their audience is, what language they like most and what types of actions are most effective, the institution is able to better plan its strategies.
Thus, even with the direct approach, institutions education can ensure that your outbound marketing actions are directed to those who are most open to receiving them. A student who is ready to enroll won't mind receiving a flyer or a text message from the institution, for example.
In other words, just as in inbound, data is important to make the outbound marketing for educational institutions more assertive. Which means that its "invasive" characteristic is not seen as a problem by the public at your educational institution.
The data collection
As we mentioned at the beginning of the post, integrating inbound and outbound marketing is the best way to go by educational institutions. With this in mind, there are two factors we want to highlight about data collection:
- the information collected to support the inbound strategies can also be useful for outbound. The purchasing journey in the student market, like in all others, is not linear. In their first contact with the institution, a student may already be prepared to become a new student, which allows the educational institutions opt for a more direct approach more quickly;
- real-time data collection can be done even in the case of offline strategies thanks to marketing automation. The technology used to send SMS can also present information about the opening rate or click rate on links sent, for example.
Outbound marketing strategies for your educational institutions
We have already mentioned some actions that are characteristic of outbound marketing and that serve as an example for outbound marketing for educational institutions. However, let's present some in more detail:
Flyer distribution
A well-known form of direct approach that can generate good results for your educational institutions is to distribute flyers at the doors of high school institutions and pre-university courses.
The development of the flyer ― above all, its message and language ― can be based on data that the institution has about the preferences of its audience. Furthermore, paying attention to the timing of the action, such as when registering for entrance exams, is also necessary to obtain good results.
Ads on social media
Creating ads in social media must be done based on the correct segmentation of the audience that will receive the message from the educational institution. Again, the data collected on the profile of the public that interacts with your educational institutions in each network serves as a parameter so that the advertisement is seen as timely and not as invasive.
SMS and calls
Messages can also be sent to potential students' cell phones, which goes for traditional SMS (also called text messages) or even WhatsApp.
Furthermore, your educational institution can invest in calls, that is, in telemarketing to carry out a more direct approach to students. Therefore, it is important that the institution's education has a good sales script and know how to take advantage of the opportunity to collect additional data from each contact.
Approach to student fairs
The participation of institutions education at student fairs and career shows is another one of the marketing strategies for colleges which translates into a good opportunity to get in direct contact with potential students. At this meeting, it is possible to distribute campaign material such as folders that guide the registration process for the entrance exam of institutions education and also collect data.
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