Understanding Your Audience
Targeted Marketing in International Education
A better understanding of our customers’ needs and desires leads to innovative new products and services, which creates differentiation, competitive advantage and increased revenue.
And naturally, the more you understand your target audience, the more effective your marketing - and ultimately your products and services – will be. In addition, you’ll increase student or customer satisfaction, reviews, ratings and referrals.
Some activities to help keep track of student and consumer opinions and preferences include:
- Focus groups, user testing, surveys, feedback forms, and flash polls.
- A/B testing and multivariate testing in advertising and email marketing.
- Strategic experimentation which may include co-creating or crowdsourcing ideas.
Finally, it’s essential to ensure others in your company or institution are aware of the feedback you’ve received so that you can act upon it across the whole of your organisation.
Creating Student and Customer Personas
Did you know that websites using personas are two to five times more effective than those with general copy?
The more tailored your marketing content is to your target audience, the more powerful it will be.
Why are student and customer personas so important?
Building, refining, and utilising student personas can achieve many benefits, such as:
- Increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities by creating campaigns and marketing messages that speak directly to a persona type.
- Shape content around a customer’s or student’s decision-making drivers.
- Give clarity and focus for future business development.
- Guide the creation of new products and services that appeal directly to a specific persona or buyer.
- Provide better support and direction to agents, partners and franchisees. For example, enabling recruitment agents and school counsellors to easily guide students to the right school and programme for them.
- Gives you the ability to flag persona types, VIPs, and influencers in your CRM system to ensure each receives targeted messages and optimum customer care.
Working with Jackfruit Marketing to improve our international branding and positioning during a pandemic year has been productive and rewarding. We were able to work virtually as a team with Jackie’s guidance to develop personas and leverage them in our marketing and outreach efforts. Jackie combines her international branding expertise with an approachable demeanour and is a joy to work with!
-- Salma Benhaida, Director, International Recruitment, Admissions & Sponsored Student Services at Kent State University
We can help you create personas for the types of students you have now or the ones you’d like to have in the future.
While staying true to the core brand, we'll create customised campaign slogans or variations per persona.
Feedback Loops
In international education, the student journey is a long one. It might begin in the young learner or junior market, with students going overseas to summer camps or boarding schools, and it could extend all the way through to a postgraduate degree abroad. And of course, we can’t forget our international alumni, who have a lifelong connection to education brands.
With such a long lifecycle, creating ongoing feedback loops needs to be a vital part of your long term strategic plan.
Before establishing feedback loops, you first need to have a solid map of the student or customer journey. Jackfruit Marketing can help you plot this journey or conduct a journey audit for a fresh perspective.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic might feel like a long time ago, it has had a dramatic impact on the student journey and decision-making priorities.
Have you updated your journey maps for prospects, parents, students, and partners?
If not, now’s the time to do so!
Once you’ve got a clear picture of the journey, you can build in feedback opportunities along the way.
This intelligence we gather can then help us to:
- Get real-time data on what your audience is thinking, feeling, wanting, or needing.
- Adjust content and services on the fly, as needed.
- React immediately to prevent or resolve problems.
- Draw attention to unsatisfactory aspects of the prospect or customer experience, which will enable you to continuously improve and meet or exceed expectations.
- Benchmark performance results across your portfolio or in comparison to your competitors.
- Engage your audience and enhance your relationships, increasing sales, enrolments, or brand loyalty.
- Pinpoint opportunities to create “wow” moments to surprise and delight your audience throughout their journey.
- Increase touchpoints with prospects which will improve your direct marketing which in turn lowers your acquisition cost and improves effectiveness.
- Create before-and-after progress reports to measure the impact of changes you’ve introduced.
- Implement predictive modelling so we can use the data we have obtained to predict what will happen with future prospects.
- Gain clarity to guide internal decision making through the ability to distinguish between isolated issues or signs of larger trends seen via a steady buildup of data over a longer time frame.
Finally, through regular feedback loops, your students or partners will feel listened to and reassured that they have a voice and their concerns are being addressed. This aids retention and builds brand sentiment.
Keep Exploring
Browse through more of our services to learn how you can tap into our expertise.
Staff Training and Professional Development
In order to educate and empower your team, our founder Jackie Kassteen also regularly gives customised professional development training sessions to institutions, staff, and teachers.
Jackie is well-known for her dynamic presentations which provide both inspiration as well as practical tips and proven techniques.
Explore our training topics or use the contact form below to ask us about Jackfruit Marketing's services or training sessions.
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