Higher Ed Digital Marketing Insights From University of Leicester

Even as another academic year comes to a close, the kitchen remains hot at most higher ed marketing, recruitment, and admissions offices. When others discuss summer plans, these teams are sketching out strategies for another busy summer of acceptances, deposits, and combatting melt. 

At Unibuddy, we have the advantage of working with hundreds of top-notch higher ed teams from around the world. While we provide these teams with solutions, they in turn provide us with invaluable insights into how we can make our product better. 

Get our full Unibuddy Higher Ed Marketing Guide here. 

One team which stands out time and time again is the team at the University of Leicester. In addition to being a Unibuddy success story, leveraging our higher ed platform to boost enrollment numbers by 23% to the tune of $7.5M (£6.3M) in additional revenue, the team at Leicester also happen to be experts in effective higher ed marketing. 

We sat down with Elissa Parker, Head of Recruitment Marketing at the University of Leicester, to discuss digital marketing in higher ed and what her team are doing to help drive success. 

Here are some takeaways from our conversation:

Work on getting senior buy-in for higher ed marketing solutions 

You may like what a higher ed marketing tool does. Your team might be using this tool every day. But what’s the ROI? What’s the value of this tool to your overall digital plan? How can this tool help you reach more prospective students and build more brand awareness? What are the tangible results of integrating this tool at your school? 

These are questions which are asked by the supplementary senior decision makers at your school. These decision makers might have other concerns not directly related to the feature functionality of a digital marketing tool – like whether it is easily implemented into your tech stack or concerns about entering uncharted digital waters. 

“Digital marketing has become more important than ever,” says Parker. “But it’s also one of the most expensive things right now. Ensuring senior buy-in makes prioritizing this investment much easier for our team.”

Parker also stresses how important this initial investment is for further scalability of digital marketing programs. And you need to show senior decision makers the value of this initial investment to confidently make it happen. 

“You need that initial buy-in because the more investment you have, the more you can show a solution is working through data,” says Parker. “As soon as you can prove success, often to an executive board or room full of academic colleagues, people who might not have frontline touches to the solution, they’re going to be happy to invest.”

Stay focused on your higher ed audiences 

In order to establish your digital marketing presence, ensure all your efforts are laser-focused on your target audiences – both earned and prospective. Consider every facet of your audience and how you can better get in front of them. This level of focus is what enables small- to medium-sized marketing, admissions, and recruitment teams to compete with larger higher ed competitors. 

“A few years ago, we invested in gathering data to enable us to drill down into propensity modelling to help us identify who we should be targeting outside our local pools of prospective students,” says Parker. “This enabled us to break off budget according to the propensity of an identified opportunistic area.”

Related: How to Fit Unibuddy Into Your Higher Ed Marketing, Admissions, and Recruitment Programs

By understanding where you are winning and where you can be winning, you can allocate resources towards target audiences who fall within your wheelhouse. This is a win-win for your team as you can help increase the likelihood of enrollment while simultaneously assuring data results for further internal buy-in. 

Leverage the strengths of your student ambassadors

Just like not every prospective student is the same, neither are the student ambassadors who make up your student ambassador program. By identifying the strengths and areas of improvement for your student ambassadors, you can determine where they might best fit in your marketing program – and at what stage of the higher ed funnel. This ensures not only a better experience for prospective students, but also empowers student ambassadors to build out their own areas of expertise. 

Related: How to leverage the win-win of student-to-student connections

“You might get student ambassadors who are absolutely fantastic at working your Open Days,” says Parker. “But they are not always the sort of people who want to be on camera or work your digital touchpoints. We address this through briefing our ambassador team when we want things done and conduct subsequent smaller chats with students we think would be a good fit.”

Find a balance between old and new digital marketing tools

As digital marketing continues to grow exponentially year-over-year, determining where budget should go and how much is a moving target. While a chosen tech stack of tools may work today, is this set-up future proof for the world of tomorrow? In tandem with budget constraints and changing student demands, these choices can be downright tough to make. 

Related: 5 Higher Ed Marketing Trends in 2023

“You’ve got digital tools A, B, C, and D to choose from. You want them all, but you’re working off a set budget,” says Parker. “Which solutions should you choose? It’s about finding a balance between what worked last year and what you predict might work for the future. It’s a risk – but with the right data, you can push the odds of success in your favour.”

At Unibuddy, we practice a mantra of constant innovation. In addition to providing higher ed teams with the tools they need to succeed, we also strive to create a platform flexible enough to snap to whatever is around the curve. As a software-as-a-service (SaaS), our team is a one-stop partner dedicated to providing best-in-class digital solutions for your marketing plan today and tomorrow. 

Engage Gen Z students across multiple channels 

As omnichannel customers, Gen Z work across multiple devices, platforms and mediums to get the information they need. For higher ed digital marketers, this means providing as much channel coverage as possible to ensure your message resonates with this fractal audience – without overextending your team. 

“It seems higher ed marketers are always chasing that one golden channel,” says Parker. “I hear marketers say how everyone is on Instagram or how no one is on Facebook. The reality is that prospective students might be anywhere and everywhere at any given moment. While some channels might deserve more attention than others, we try to maintain a presence across as many as possible.”

Related: Social Media Marketing for Higher Ed in 2023

To help higher ed marketers, recruitment, and admissions professionals provide their own in-house brand-controlled hub-style channel, Unibuddy offers Community. In addition to providing candid digital environment for prospective students and current students to meet, Unibuddy Community also provides administrators with the data and control levers they need to provide a full-branded, safe, and tailored space. 

Encourage student-generated content for added authenticity 

The most-genuine and effective higher ed content originates from those who live your experience every single day. By providing student ambassadors with the tools to create content themselves, you not only can leverage the valuable insights and takeaways they provide but also give them an opportunity to build out their own voice. 

And it’s also about mixing things up, according to Parker. “One slip-up I see in our industry is when teams try to make their new campaigns fit every channel,” says Parker. “The reality is that it’s not always going to fit every channel scenario.” 

Parker says her team leverages student-generated content to help show other perspectives or angles on a specific topic. This A/B testing method helps her team identify what is working, what channels are working, and, ultimately, which language and content format their audience resonates best with. 

As part of our set of tools designed for student ambassadors, Unibuddy provides content creation features for users to easily write, upload, edit, and post content. Administrators can easily access this user-generated content before switching it live for a more streamlined review and feedback process. On the front-end, Unibuddy has recently added visibility features to improve how prospective students discover and interact with content. 

Stay consistent with higher ed messaging

As a keystone of effective branding, consistent messaging and a unified tone ensures a smoother student journey and streamlined handoff to subsequent touchpoints. In a nutshell, a prospective student should feel a similar vibe and level of authenticity with every interaction with your higher ed brand. 

“In the past the student journey could be quite fragmented,” says Parker. “Prospective students were getting all kinds of different communications from different sources and email inboxes, which was confusing. Today we aim to provide one picture to them so they fully understand what’s going on and where they are in their higher ed journey.”

Related: Bold Unibuddy Updates Make Less Work for Better ROI

To help higher ed institutions get more visibility for better consistency, Unibuddy offers data-driven AI-powered conversational insights. These insights vary from short synopses of student ambassador conversations with prospective students, delivered direct to your CMS, to more actionable insights like suggested questions to further engage a conversation. 

Want more higher ed digital marketing insights, trends, and tips? Download our Unibuddy Higher Ed Marketing Guide here.