How to Define Community Marketing Goals in Higher Ed

From connecting a prospective student with a school ambassador to running a dedicated higher ed community hosting hundreds of students, community marketing tactics offer unique engaging ways for higher ed teams to promote their brands. 

Download our full 2023 Community Marketing Guide for Higher Ed here. 

But, without specific goals, targets, or objectives, community marketing can quickly eat away at available resources without leaving much to show for it. 

Here are some quick tips on how to define community marketing goals in higher ed to help ensure focused success for your efforts:

Define your higher ed target audience 

From different geographical areas to different programs to different levels of accessibility, there are countless ways to slice and dice the demographics of prospective student audiences. Each of these categorical groups might require different ways and methods for interaction, from language to preferred digital mediums to degrees of personalization.  

In order to focus your community marketing efforts, and to avoid spreading yourself too thin, be sure to clearly define exactly who your target audience is. A good place to start, according to a recent report from Salesforce on “student-centric” marketing, is by taking a look at available quantifiable behavioural data. This type of data ranges according to collection capabilities, potentially including sources like student conversational insights or engagement data from an emailer, as examples.

Related: How to Plan Digital Marketing Strategies for Higher Ed

By observing what your audiences are engaging with, what questions they are asking, or where your messaging is getting the most traction, you gain more visibility into which audience groups you’re resonating with (and which you’re not). By defining and categorizing these audience groups, you can make more confident community marketing decisions about reaching them efficiently, concisely, and predictably – all three of which need to be part of your recipe for success.

Indiana University Bloomington (IU), for example, wanted to create a higher ed space where prospective students from India, Taiwan, and Korea could interact with one another. By defining their audience ahead of launching their community marketing campaign, IU knew they needed to create a branded, safe, and forum-style digital group to help reassure international students that they were in the right place. Since adopting Unibuddy Community, the university has experienced a flurry of activity among their target audience, with one group, “Future Hoosiers 2022 – India,” seeing nearly 850 messages exchanged between prospective students. 

Sketch out primary metrics for your community marketing campaigns

After determining who your audience are, how they engage, and what they want, you can set clear quantifiable benchmarks for success. If, for example, you want to leverage community marketing to drive domestic student recruitment for an undergraduate arts and science program, you can try matching average year-over-year deposit rates to expected results. Not only do specific benchmarks help track ROI of your campaigns, but they also flag where you might improve. 

Related: Higher Education: Pathos or Logos? The Best Digital Student Recruitment Tools Blend Both

Consider the University of Leicester, for example, when they launched their campaign to reduce student anxiety pre-enrollment to help boost subsequent enrollment numbers. In order to quantify success for this goal within their pre-defined audience, Leicester invited offer-holders to join groups hosted on Unibuddy Community. They then tracked how many of these students completed their course of study. These metrics enabled them to attribute a 23% rise in undergraduate enrollment, and just shy of $7.5M (£6.3M) in additional revenue, to this campaign’s efforts.

Determine brand positioning within your higher ed market 

You may know your higher ed audience. You may know exactly what metric benchmarks you need to hit to ensure success. But do you know how you want your audience to view your brand amidst a sea of higher ed competition? What exactly does your audience expect from your brand and how do you deliver this? 

If, for example, you want to emphasize that your school prioritizes student safety and privacy, you might want to assure students that you are in compliance with even the most-stringent privacy laws, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For a community marketing play, this might be as simple as opting for more controlled platforms for students to communicate through and subsequently communicating this to users.  

Third-party communication platforms, like WhatsApp, for example, can open your brand up to privacy or safety issues – like the fact that anyone can join groups and phone numbers must be exchanged. Additional issues might rise when students who do not feel comfortable or safe joining these open groups are put at an accessibility disadvantage.

Meanwhile, when you opt for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools built specifically for higher ed, like those offered by Unibuddy, you can maintain control over brand positioning at every step. From being able to vet who joins groups to features enabling conversational insights, you can ensure you have full visibility over your brand at every step of your community marketing campaign.

Have a data measurement plan for higher ed success

Community marketing goals are great provided you have access to the data you need to define them. Going further in this vein, you also need to ensure the data you are collecting is in a format you can easily understand within manageable volumes. Without a concrete data collection plan, you might find yourself and your staff spending too much time sifting through reams of raw data to collect even basic insights. Or, worse, you might find you don’t have the metric data you need to plug into your outlined goals.

To this end, we recommend ensuring your tool set and data collection infrastructure are in-place before launching your higher ed community marketing campaign – and searching for ways to make this process easier. With the Unibuddy platform, for example, you can harness the power of AI to help collect and interpret piles of conversational data into small synopses for your team to quickly gather insights into what prospective students want. 

Want more? Download our full 2023 Community Marketing Guide for Higher Ed here.