Tertiary Education Marketing: Know the fight

Back in my time in the Arts I wrote a blog about how simply thinking about the true terms of your product can be instructive as to how to market yourself and in setting priorities.

The same is true for Universities too although with some distinctions.

'Know the fight', its a phrase learnt from Captain America of all things but its so true, when you re in the middle of a battle it helps to now what kind of battle you are in, is this the main game? Is this a distraction? What is the purpose of this fight?

Back in the days when University places were capped there wasn't really much pressure at all to market yourself, demand outstripped supply for many courses so those that didn't get into Nursing at University A flowed into University B. 

The effect of this seemed to lead a lot of Universities into focusing n the rand, it was enough that you got your brand out there and you didn't need to focus on Return on Investment much (ROI).

In an uncapped environment all of a sudden you needed to actually attract students, they had choices finally.

So 'know the fight'. Firstly and most obviously Universities provide a service not a product and we know that the customer experience is everything when it comes to providing a service, having  quality call centre, having smooth application processes, having online learning tools that work and your class schedules don't clash too much and finally the experience is fruitful and positive. When you are a service, word of mouth is king and you fail to invest in these things at your peril. 

But what other kinds of 'fight' is tertiary marketing? Well most of the sector markets itself like a premium product. For the post part I disagree, in fact I would argue universities actually sit at the other end of the scale, its a mandatory purchase for many, like insurance, whilst for others its a commodity, people just want a degree where that degree comes from and how its delivered is of little concern.

Luckily the process of selling a premium product is similar to that of a mandatory purchase, you need a constant market presence so that when people reach the time of their or their children's life that Uni is needed, your brand is on the shopping list and is well thought of, it sounds crazy but this is how funeral homes market themselves.

Fighting against commodification is harder, commodities such as flour and salt really sell on price and pricing is not a factor in a Uni under the current system. Th fight here is to convince people that they can't just do their degree anywhere but you NEED to do it with us. Which means you have to look for things that you can do better, do those things better and then adequately communicate this.

What's great about both of these above challenges is that content marketing and market automation are ideally suited to these tasks. The Uni I work for is smaller and therefore is not betraying trade secrets to say that our marketing budgets are therefore smaller than many competitors too. So the idea of maintaining a constant market presence in the old mainstream advertising manner is just not feasible. But with marketing automation we can target our markets precisely and ensure that we are engaging with them regularly to maintain a brand presence and via content marketing you can engage those people with exactly the sort of 'stories' that reduce the commodity effect.

We are only at the beginning of these processes, so it is too early to tell what the results will be but the theory is incredibly sound and it will be exciting to find out if it works.