This journey puts customers and their mindsets at the forefront. What are their needs? What are their motivations? What are their challenges? What are their important touchpoints with my institution and how can we make the most of them?

The funnel higher education marketers are accustomed to using is the enrollment funnel, i.e., the process prospective students go through when deciding whether to attend an institution.

The enrollment funnel is action-oriented. Students move through the funnel as they meet certain criteria. Did they inquire? Did they apply? Did they deposit?

For marketers on the undergraduate side (specifically for traditional students), the enrollment funnel works because the enrollment cycle is filled with known variables. Students’ ages, goals, and motivations follow similar patterns. The length of time and affiliate benchmarks within the cycle stay consistent. There is a clearer checklist of “at this time, I need to deploy these tactics in order to deliver students the information they need.”

On the graduate side, the funnel is an incomplete model because the enrollment cycle does not follow the same patterns. Among the differences between undergraduate and graduate are the following:

• Time: Since we generally know when high school students start looking at colleges, we can map the process out from that initial search through their first day of classes, and sometimes even through graduation. The graduate process is different. The time between someone thinking about grad school to enrolling in classes can be as short as a few weeks or as long as several years.
• Age: Though the age range of prospective undergraduates varies to a certain degree with gap years, veterans, and other specialized groups, there generally is a more consistent age range for this group. On the graduate side, it’s not unusual for age ranges to span a couple of decades and cover a few different generations.
• Product*: In their college search, prospective undergraduates seek a coming-of-age experience. The products they’re considering are universities, whereas graduate students search for specific programs as a means to an end: more money, promotion, career prestige. The products they’re considering include universities, but aren’t limited to them. Competitors include free, online resources, networking, or even taking no action at all.

Graduate marketers can account for their non-traditional audience if they adopt the customer decision journey as the model, instead of the enrollment funnel.

This method spurs important changes to your marketing plans.

• Defining customer personas: Freeing yourself of the funnel helps define the customers’ motivations, needs, wants, and desires at each stage of the journey.
• Broadening your perspective: If prospective graduate students are considering options outside higher ed to accomplish their goals, then marketers need to consider those options as competitors.

Mine your CRM and conduct research within your customer base to create customer personas, “semi-fictional [representations] of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”(Hubspot).

Customer personas break your audience into segments based on demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and more. (Not sure how to approach this? Spark451’s persona modeling services can help you transform your quantitative and qualitative data into actionable insights.)

• Background: Liberal arts degree. Working at the same company since graduation. Has on-the-job training in his work, but no formal training.
• Wants: A clear path toward prestige, promotions, and more money within his company and his field.
• Needs: To separate himself from others in the same situation. To build his résumé with real and impressive skills. To stay ahead of changes in the industry.
• Desires: Recognition. Impressive title. High salary. Prestige.
• His Obstacles: Time. Money. Motivation. Energy. Dave worries that grad school is too big an investment in time and money right now. He worries about balancing work and school and having the motivation and energy to do both well.
• Preferred Channels: Referral, email, forums/sponsored content. He is suspicious of anything that seems too sales-y.

Take each of your customer personas and design their journey map to determine targeting, messaging, and tactics at each stage.

The ways people make decisions remain the same, even while prospective graduate student behavior and the graduate education market both continue to evolve. Graduate marketers can adapt to changes quickly and effectively by shifting from the enrollment funnel to the customer decision journey. The team at Spark451 is ready to discuss your graduate enrollment challenges and help customize your marketing and recruitment strategies using a customer decision journey approach. Feel free to reach out so we can get started.

With the world currently practicing social distancing and staying at home, it comes as no surprise that social media usage and web traffic has increased tremendously across platforms and industries. According to Kantar, who surveyed more than 25,000 consumers across 30 markets, social media engagement will increase “by 61 percent over normal usage rates” in later stages of the pandemic. Additionally, Facebook reported that in Italy, the platform saw “up to 70 percent more time spent across (Facebook) apps since the crisis arrived.”

In addition to above-average usage rates on social media platforms, users are more likely to click off their app of choice to visit a website during this unique period. SocialMediaToday is reporting that overall U.S. traffic from Facebook to other websites has increased by more than 50 percent week-over-week. This is especially noteworthy for our partners, as social campaigns seeing an increase in web traffic translates to an increase in leads and engagement.

For additional context, we compared general digital media trends to what we’ve been seeing here at Spark451over the past few weeks.

For one, we’ve observed an overwhelming decrease in both CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click) across the majority of our social advertising. This is due to less competition within the platforms, as there are no longer ads running for brick-and-mortar stores, tickets, events, and similar in-person experiences, which target many of the same users. The CPMs have dropped anywhere from 20–50 percent, depending on the type of campaign. On campaigns where the CPM has seen a 50 percent decrease, we’ve essentially been able to serve twice as many ads to our target audience at the same cost as before.

Additionally, we’ve seen an increase in reach and impressions. If you’re wondering what that means for you, it means that now is the time to get in front of your audience. This is a unique opportunity to increase your reach at a lower cost (more on that later!).

As a result of lower costs and expanded reach, our number of clicks have increased. Basically, for our higher education partners, now is the perfect time to reach your audience. At the very least, all branding and lead generation campaigns not related to in-person events should be left running, and if possible, now is the time to increase your spend. If more users are online than ever, now is the time to be advertising to them.

We believe there are several types of campaigns that may help you improve your prospects and get additional leads in the months ahead. Here are some campaigns that are on the rise:

Historically, graduate and certificate programs tend to see an increase in enrollment when the economy takes a turn. Considering that most people are online and consuming content, it’s the perfect opportunity to run a graduate lead generation or branding campaign.