Focus on Teachers When It Comes To Marketing Higher Education

Focus on Teachers When It Comes To Marketing Higher Education

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Marketing Higher Education

When taking a look at communication strategies when it comes to marketing higher education, often overlooked are the teachers.

Think about it, teachers are your marketing and sales people rolled into one. They have a great deal of power, influence and opportunities to engage students that most don't.

Teachers are also the ones who do the hard work of taking on new students, nurturing them and watching the succeed. You can't forget long term outcomes like fundraising and graduates further selling your school. Do a great job early of engaging and nurturing and everything can get much easier going forward.

If there is a specific change in schooling or a push in certain areas of studying, you need to reach teachers in a specific subject area or the Curriculum Director at every school in the country, to make real change. How do you pull off such an information change and keep it all consistent and centralized?

You set up an automated communication plan focused on marketing higher education.

In the United States, teachers are responsible for the daily needs of more than 50 million students. Their needs range from books, supplies, sporting goods, furniture, food service, and transportation to technology products. In addition to spending their own funds for classroom supplies, teachers may influence purchasing from classroom, building, or district budgets.

Teachers do so much and when you really look, they are your greatest tool when it comes to boosting enrollments and keeping students happy.

From the outside, teachers are also the ones you want to target when it comes to books, supplies and other things needed for schooling.

Therefore, you should communicate to your teachers year-round – at their school postal address and email address, as well as at their home address. In an educator survey conducted, more than 77% of the teachers responded that they have access to their school email inbox during the summer months. In addition, they said that they are most likely to open emails that relate directly to their job or include a special offer.

Targeting an individual teacher by name is required for email marketing but it is not always necessary for direct mail campaigns. If the school secretary or mail room will know how to direct your mail by job title alone, it can be helpful to extend your mail to institutions where a contact name isn't available.

Marketing automation is the new way to go about marketing to teachers and higher education in general.

From collected data you can start any number of engagement campaigns to nurture teachers and provide the centralized information that you want them to pass on to students.

Need to cover several schools for a region? This is also a convenient way to reach everyone at once.

Timing is also extremely important in the education marketplace. Administrators are very aware of use-it-or-lose-it mandates and are focused on spending remaining budget funds prior to June 30th. So if you are targeting teachers to pitch your products or services, try and do it before they head home for the summer.

Regular districts are local Public School Districts; they may be Unified, Elementary, or Secondary. Unified Districts operate Schools covering Kindergarten or 1st grade through 12th grade. You could also provide data for County, Department of Defense, Native American, Vocational Technical, and Year-Round Districts as well as Sub Districts, Supervisory Unions, and Area Education Service Districts.

Marketing higher education is challenging and changing every day. It's important to construct your marketing strategies built on a foundation of data and experience rather than chance and optimism. With a marketing automation service helping you understand the changing marketplace and creating a strategy custom-tailored toward your best prospects, you will easily keep new recruits coming in year round.. Stay at the forefront of the educational marketplace by giving customer flow communication a chance.

Other Ways For Marketing Higher Education

Campus Events

To draw a crowd to your next campus fundraiser, concert or higher education awards dinner, promote and organize it using our event software. A successful event begins and ends with strong management. Students and staff have very busy lives with a lot of messaging coming at them at once.

Take some of the pressure off your administrative teams and use marketing automation to handle the invites and tracking of who is coming. Automation will also send reminders to guests and alert those still deciding about any extra info that could help them make a decision.

Emergency Situations

In an emergency situation, with one click you can reach every student through SMS, email and voicemail to ensure safety. On the rare chance your school is closed due to bad weather or, heaven forbid, something worse, have an emergency education alert template all set to go.

This type of communication could be used to inform students, teachers, parents or whoever else needs to know about breaking news or important updates. Think of all the time that could be saved when you don't have to answer the same question several times per day.

Automated Reminders

Automated notices can be sent to specific students who have not yet paid their term fees. Stop spending time tracking down people to pay fees. Set up automatic notices to constantly remind those who have outstanding debts and how to make the payments.

While it is true that there are those who openly try to avoid paying, some simply forget. Automated reminders will show that your team is on top of things and have the student's best interests at heart, which is what higher education is all about.

In the end it is all about engagement.

Marketing educational institutions online and offline is a unique challenge. As an educational institution, use SimplyCast's 360 customer flow communication platform to help engage and understand the personal and professional goals of each student, alumni and donor. With education based marketing, you can capture the attention of your audience using several channels of communication. Like never before, connect with each student on a personal level instead of making them feel like just a number. Add in their name, their course or any other piece of information that makes the message about them.

Are you ready to start marketing higher education? Sign up for a free account and try out SimplyCast 360.

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