Five Steps to Decoding and Reaching Your Target Audience
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Find, attract, and recruit your best target students
Student Recruitment Strategies:
Five Steps to Decoding and Reaching Your Target Audience When it comes to deciding where—and how—to earn a higher education, today’s students have an almost unlimited number of options to choose from. In this changed environment, many institutions struggle to stay competitive and reach their enrollment goals.
This mini-playbook takes a quick look at how market research can help your institution determine which students are most likely to enroll and be most successful in your degree programs. With a clear picture of your ideal students, you can then target and reach them to grow enrollments. Read on for insights on how to: • Understand who is most likely to enroll in your degree programs • Grow enrollments to new audiences • Reach potential students in ways that resonate with them
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
Step 1
Step 2
Before you try to reach new audiences, identify what you’re already doing right. Use demographic data to find common features among those who have already enrolled at your institution, such as:
Examining your current-student profiles can provide valuable insight into a potential new target student audience that you had not considered. For example, viewing current-student profile data on a specific program may surface new groups that are currently underserved.
Set a starting point: understand your existing successful student
• Age • Gender • Sex
• Employment status • Income
• Geographic location
Next, survey your students to discover insightful information about what attracted them to your institution, as well as their needs, preferences, and career goals. With this information, you have a strong foundation for expanding your student pool.
Step 3
Define potential new audiences With the information gathered in step 2, expand your student profile to include traits and trends of distinct prospective audiences: • What are their education • What motivates them? hat are their or career backgrounds? • W demographic traits? • What are their career aspirations? Questions like these will filter common traits into categories. Those categories or “audience segments” will become useful when developing messaging specific to them, which we’ll get to in step 5.
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
Seek new pockets of opportunity
Combine this information with insights from primary and secondary research (you may need to partner with a research specialist) to determine the needs and preferences of this new group. Internally, you can conduct surveys with faculty, program directors, and employers to further refine the new student profile. Throughout this process, align common traits and trends so you can begin to develop a profile of this potential new student audience.
Step 4
Step 5
Before developing high-level messaging for each new audience, you’ll want to confirm your findings with analytics software. Again, this is where working with a research partner can really help.
When you understand what drives your audience, you can take advantage of insights such as personal preferences, needs, income, and career goals to speak more effectively to them. Now, all of your hard work and research culminates with a foundation of effective messaging you can deploy on the channels your target audience prefers like email, voicemail, and social media.
Confirm category size and media preferences
Using predictive marketing analytics software, your research partner can analyze data to determine the size of each audience segment, as well as their media preferences. For more on media buying, read our playbook 6 Things You Should Do Before Investing in Media Buying This information, combined with your student profiling from step 3, helps put a human face to the person you’re trying to reach. Most importantly, it lays the groundwork for effective messaging that will resonate with each new audience.
Develop targeted messaging
This strategy not only helps your team more easily understand and visualize who they are talking to, but it also provides the student on the other end with a more personalized recruiting and enrollment process. And that’s what today’s student is looking for in their education experience. For more on creating a student-centric environment read our playbook: Top 3 Ways to Give Your Student Lifecycle a Boost
Blackboard works with more institutions than anyone in the higher-ed industry, giving us unique expertise in the business of education. By building a custom marketing and student recruitment strategy, and by leveraging our data insights and deep understanding of today’s student, we help institutions grow and become more competitive. Our services include: market research and strategic planning, marketing services, enrollment services, and more.
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
Find, attract, and recruit your best target students
Student Recruitment Strategies:
Five Steps to Decoding and Reaching Your Target Audience When it comes to deciding where—and how—to earn a higher education, today’s students have an almost unlimited number of options to choose from. In this changed environment, many institutions struggle to stay competitive and reach their enrollment goals.
This mini-playbook takes a quick look at how market research can help your institution determine which students are most likely to enroll and be most successful in your degree programs. With a clear picture of your ideal students, you can then target and reach them to grow enrollments. Read on for insights on how to: • Understand who is most likely to enroll in your degree programs • Grow enrollments to new audiences • Reach potential students in ways that resonate with them
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
Step 1
Step 2
Before you try to reach new audiences, identify what you’re already doing right. Use demographic data to find common features among those who have already enrolled at your institution, such as:
Examining your current-student profiles can provide valuable insight into a potential new target student audience that you had not considered. For example, viewing current-student profile data on a specific program may surface new groups that are currently underserved.
Set a starting point: understand your existing successful student
• Age • Gender • Sex
• Employment status • Income
• Geographic location
Next, survey your students to discover insightful information about what attracted them to your institution, as well as their needs, preferences, and career goals. With this information, you have a strong foundation for expanding your student pool.
Step 3
Define potential new audiences With the information gathered in step 2, expand your student profile to include traits and trends of distinct prospective audiences: • What are their education • What motivates them? hat are their or career backgrounds? • W demographic traits? • What are their career aspirations? Questions like these will filter common traits into categories. Those categories or “audience segments” will become useful when developing messaging specific to them, which we’ll get to in step 5.
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
Seek new pockets of opportunity
Combine this information with insights from primary and secondary research (you may need to partner with a research specialist) to determine the needs and preferences of this new group. Internally, you can conduct surveys with faculty, program directors, and employers to further refine the new student profile. Throughout this process, align common traits and trends so you can begin to develop a profile of this potential new student audience.
Step 4
Step 5
Before developing high-level messaging for each new audience, you’ll want to confirm your findings with analytics software. Again, this is where working with a research partner can really help.
When you understand what drives your audience, you can take advantage of insights such as personal preferences, needs, income, and career goals to speak more effectively to them. Now, all of your hard work and research culminates with a foundation of effective messaging you can deploy on the channels your target audience prefers like email, voicemail, and social media.
Confirm category size and media preferences
Using predictive marketing analytics software, your research partner can analyze data to determine the size of each audience segment, as well as their media preferences. For more on media buying, read our playbook 6 Things You Should Do Before Investing in Media Buying This information, combined with your student profiling from step 3, helps put a human face to the person you’re trying to reach. Most importantly, it lays the groundwork for effective messaging that will resonate with each new audience.
Develop targeted messaging
This strategy not only helps your team more easily understand and visualize who they are talking to, but it also provides the student on the other end with a more personalized recruiting and enrollment process. And that’s what today’s student is looking for in their education experience. For more on creating a student-centric environment read our playbook: Top 3 Ways to Give Your Student Lifecycle a Boost
Blackboard works with more institutions than anyone in the higher-ed industry, giving us unique expertise in the business of education. By building a custom marketing and student recruitment strategy, and by leveraging our data insights and deep understanding of today’s student, we help institutions grow and become more competitive. Our services include: market research and strategic planning, marketing services, enrollment services, and more.
To learn more visit: blackboard.com/lifecycleservices
