Lattice

Those of us with an entrepreneurial spirit and a global network typically see things others don’t. In our view, the entrepreneur mindset is an asset, and yet…and yet, if only those in control of the purse understood what we understand about global markets and audience motivations.  

The opportunities are there for many of our clients. The need is growing increasingly intense as revenue sources, particularly in education and healthcare sectors, are threatened or declining. The Tessellati team shares your entrepreneurial enthusiasm and we are here to offer the insights that help you succeed. It’s one reason we connect so well with our colleagues like you.    

Now, if only there were an easy way to satisfy your global entrepreneurial instinct while demonstrating recruitment success in such a way as to unequivocally justify your funding requests and get the programs you envision started and growing.   

The simple truth: the root of successful international marketing lies in understanding your target markets, connecting with them, and effectively managing them over time. It has to do with simply doing the work as opposed to finding some magical online tool that suddenly produces all the enrollments you ever wanted. (Note the word magical in that last sentence). 

To DO the work, you’ll need to take a deep dive into the macro- and micro-economics of what drives customer interest. Sounds more complicated than it is.   

If you’ve been working with us, then you know we’ve been helping institutions like yours find global marketing success for a very long time. Our multi-cultural marketing team, our bandwidth, and the tech systems in place bring focus and produce macro and micro level insights. Oh, and meaningful results.  

Our work takes a load off our in-house counterparts who, like you, are being asked to over deliver while being chronically underfunded (and understaffed). We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, including three common mistakes that will derail any international marketing program. Avoid these at all costs. Read on… 

Every CFO’s dilemma: how much discounting do we have to do to fill our classes?

But before you get there, it is the Enrollment Management team’s job to answer a few other questions:

1. To whom do we market? (this takes us from suspect to application)
2. Whom do we accept? (this takes us from applicant to accepted pool)
3. And now we turn to the CFO and financial aid team to answer, “How much do we award them?” (this takes us from accepted to tuition-paying)

Private institutions have faced, and will continue to face, a world of trouble in the years ahead. If you are not clear about what makes your institution highly valuable to your target audience (and no, the answer is not, “we provide a personalized level of attention to our students”), then your classrooms and dorms are going to look sparser. Those doubles you converted to triples will be double again. 

And for other institutions, those with lower price points, there are significant headwinds in terms of how students and parents are evaluating your value as well. Competition will continue to grow. 

With this post we share our concern, and it should be yours as well, that the marketing agencies offering enrollment/recruitment services for so many institutions are taking their marketing plans from their most recent client and applying them to the next one that comes in the door. 

Literally, some of them are simply slapping your logo on the marketing plan they delivered to the client that came before you and selling it to you as something unique and fresh. They are that  cynical about their own work and what you are doing on your campus. 🙄 

Read on for tips on how to frame the pertinent questions and approach the answers for your institution. While the framework has common elements for all, the resulting marketing plan must be different based on your specific institution type, location, ranking and academic strengths, tuition, culture, etc.