In the student recruitment sphere, many institutions lean on their vast higher ed experience to inform their strategy. But Katie Intihar, Managing Director of Two Ocean Marketing Services, takes a different approach, pulling from her extensive background in the larger marketing world to guide her thinking. In this blog, she shares her unique perspective on how institutions and marketers alike can leverage real-time, comparative data to achieve their goals more effectively.
The current, digital-centric landscape has introduced many new metrics for institutions to track how they’re performing with the students they’re trying to reach. While this data can seem helpful on its face, Intihar explains how it doesn’t always paint the full picture of enrollment performance.
“Today, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of KPIs — being able to turn those numbers into meaningful insights is the real challenge,” Intihar said. “You can have a strong click-through rate or a low CPC, but those are irrelevant if the marketing isn’t influencing your ultimate goals.”
Performance data doesn’t do much good if you can’t glean anything actionable from it — or rely on its timeliness. That’s why the Two Ocean team powers their student marketing campaigns with real-time, comparative data from MARKETview. This allows them to identify the students who matter most to an institution’s goals and shape their campaigns around those insights, while monitoring performance daily. Intihar highlights the value of this focused clarity.
“As a marketer, the ability to leverage the robust data in the MARKETview platform is a true strategic advantage,” Intihar said. “It creates a foundation for meaningful and measurable impact that goes beyond just traditional marketing metrics. Having real-time data as a single source of truth simplifies the narrative.”
MARKETview identifies the “Critical Elements” for each school’s success — allowing you to closely measure tangible enrollment progress. These performance metrics can more accurately illustrate if your class is building the way you need it to in order to accomplish your goals. Intihar shares how this enables marketers to make sure their engagement numbers are leading to the desired results.
“Having the MARKETview platform allows us to measure goals and Critical Elements, which are the outcomes that are ultimately most important to our partners,” Intihar said. “That visibility helps us understand whether our marketing is advancing their highest-level objectives and not just generating surface-level engagement.”
Advanced data context also helps marketers with audience targeting — which is incredibly important for getting the greatest ROI from your campaigns. With MARKETview, it’s possible to zoom in on the most impactful student cohorts and track your marketing performance with those specific segments in real time.
“MARKETview enables us to splice audiences and target with more specificity,” Intihar said. “By focusing on Critical Elements, we can analyze performance at a more granular level, looking at those audiences that matter most for helping our partners achieve their goals.”
As you make your sizable investments in enrollment marketing campaigns, make sure to think about how a data savvy marketer might approach your institution’s goals. After all, the end result may be student enrollment, but a primary path for achieving it is still through effective marketing.
Chat with our team to see how MARKETview’s real-time data can keep you in the know throughout the enrollment cycle on the student populations that matter most to your goals.