Often times one of the biggest struggles higher ed marketers face is in bringing attention, consensus and decision-making around the goals and objectives their marketing efforts should support. What’s the challenge we are truly trying to solve? But as higher ed marketing continues to mature, talented marketing leaders are forcing discussion of what successful marketing outcomes look like.
SimpsonScarborough CEO, Elizabeth Scarborough, and I recently led a webinar on the topic with Academic Impressions. And the topic was heavily discussed at CASE’s annual conference on marketing and branding.
Higher ed marketers have become more successful in recent years delivering “top of funnel” marketing measurement. Many marketers deliver regular reports or dashboards on things like levels of awareness, reach, impressions, PR/media coverage, direct response and email, web and social analytics to their leadership.And “down the funnel” measurement has gotten easier (if you can get your hands on the data). Those are things like inquiries, apps, campus visits (in recruitment); membership and event attendance (in alumni relations); and direct response and giving (in development).
So what does a new model of mROI in higher ed look like?
Well, first of all, it involves bridging some challenging gaps in heavily decentralized environments. You can’t truly get at mROI without solid partnerships with colleagues in your CFO and Institutional Research offices that can help you in gathering the data you need to do your measurement.
If you can make that happen you might consider things like:
- Marketing Cost Per Student (Total Marketing Spend/Total Students Enrolled)
- Revenue Contribution by Academic Area/Segment (Revenue Generated/Total Institutional Revenue)
- Market Growth (Student Increase This Year/Student Increase Last Year)
And if you saw University of Cincinnati President Santa Ono’s Twitter post earlier this week, you may have noticed the idea of measuring an institution’s market share. How would you do that? Consider using federally-reported IPEDS data that reports the graduates in various academic disciplines by market over time. Using IPEDS effectively can show where market growth opportunities lie and give your institution a sense of how you are performing.
Consider this example illustrating the growth in graduate students in the greater Philadelphia market from 2000-2008.
What’s it show? Well, if you’re a marketer, it shows tremendous growth of market share by Drexel University, which saw its share of graduate enrollment move from 7 percent to 16 percent in just eight years.
If you’re making a case for marketing, make sure you’re using all available data to illustrate the true mROI of your efforts.
