Digital marketing isn’t anything new, especially in the world of student recruitment. Most schools run social media accounts on sites like Meta and X. But the savviest schools are investing more of their enrollment budget in their digital presence on sites like TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat that are popular with student demographics. While that might seem like a bold investment, when done correctly, digital brand building can be an ROI-positive method for reaching students.
Katie Intihar, Managing Director of Two Ocean Marketing Services, has a lot of experience running data-informed digital marketing campaigns (we’ll be referring to these as just “digital”). In this blog, she’ll share her expertise on what makes digital so effective in today’s competitive higher ed marketplace. She’ll also present a few guidelines for how you can build and measure your institution’s online brand to generate more inquiries while using less of your precious enrollment dollars.
An Efficient Way to Generate Net New Inquiries
One of the most unique strengths of digital is its ability to generate brand new inquiries with students who have never previously given any signs of interest to your institution. Generally, for digital, a student must submit their contact info via a digital form to be considered an “inquiry”, and a “new inquiry” represents a student who has never submitted their info or had their name purchased from list providers before.
The Two Ocean team has seen how digital can effectively engage new inquiries — reflected dramatically in their data. Of all the form fills submitted by high school seniors, 78% were new inquiries. For pre-seniors, the number was even more impressive at 93% new inquiries. Intihar shared why digital can be a game changer for connecting with students who were previously unresponsive to other methods.
“It’s an opportunity to communicate with audiences that institutions aren’t already reaching through licensing names,” Intihar said. “Obviously, licensing names is a huge component of how we build audiences in higher education marketing. [Digital] provides institutions with an opportunity to have additional targeting around audiences that they’re trying to reach or geographies that are important to them. It enables us to target more exhaustively.”
When it’s used in tandem with accurate, student-level data, digital can be an incredibly powerful way to target critical student populations. That’s particularly important in a crowded marketplace where students are already inundated with email and SMS marketing; it gives institutions a new way to directly connect with audiences that have a lot of room for improvement in terms of engagement.
The Positive ROI of Online Brand Building
The value of digital for higher ed seems clear; we’re meeting students on the sites and platforms where they’re spending the most time. But measuring that ROI can be somewhat complicated, creating barriers for budget-conscious institutions wary of making the wrong investments. While inquiries can be measured, the value of digital brand recognition can be more nebulous. Intihar described the hidden multiplicative effect that digital can provide to other marketing channels.
“What we are seeing is that the general awareness digital provides will raise the tide across all channels,” Intihar said. “You’re not necessarily expecting someone to click through a display ad or even a TikTok ad and then start a college application. But if you can generate awareness, then when you send an email [the student] is ready to apply. They’re more likely to take that action because you’ve already done the work.”
To better quantify that impact, Two Ocean conducted a “Brand Lift Study” on their YouTube campaigns. This was accomplished by sending survey-style ads to users that were previously served targeted digital from their campaigns. These surveys help measure if those users recognized the institutional brands after being advertised to. You may have seen these firsthand while browsing the web:
The results of their study proved just how cost-effective digital campaigns can be for student recruitment. Users were 26% more likely to remember the partner institution’s advertising over competitor schools, and 16% more likely to be aware of the institution’s brand as a direct result of the YouTube campaign. And the average cost to acquire these “lifted” users was only $0.11 per user.
Optimizing Your Digital With Better Student Data
To achieve outsized results with digital, it’s not as simple as throwing your budget into YouTube and TikTok ads and hoping for the best. A big part of what makes digital so effective is how it can work alongside your enrollment data to conduct precise campaigns targeted at specific student groups. Being strategic about what students you’re targeting is key to harnessing the full potential of digital.
That’s why Two Ocean’s ability to leverage MARKETview data puts their digital campaigns at a distinct advantage; only MARKETview can identify the student populations that matter most to an institution’s goals. Intihar explained how this relationship puts partners in a better position to make smarter investments.
“It starts with audience targeting — making sure that it’s reflective of a partner’s goals and the “Critical Elements” for achieving those objectives as informed by MARKETview data,” Intihar said. “You can make sure you’re targeting the right students and ultimately leveraging your limited dollars to have an impact on those students, as opposed to just taking a generic targeting approach.”
MARKETview’s ability to monitor the performance of those Critical Elements in real-time also provides another distinct advantage — agility and flexibility. Student marketing is a constantly evolving landscape, so knowing sooner when your digital may not be performing well gives you the chance to quickly pivot. Intihar elaborated on how her team tracks partner performance throughout the cycle.
“We’re not just measuring click through rates and impressions,” Intihar said. “We’re measuring whether our partners’ Critical Elements are moving in the way that we want them to after their marketing campaign is deployed.”
Intihar revealed how her team makes adjustments when the MARKETview data suggests changes are needed.
“We’re not just sending it and forgetting it,” Intihar said. “We are in those social platforms on a daily basis, monitoring performance to understand how certain pieces of creative are performing versus others and making any tweaks to ensure that we’re optimizing our campaigns.”
This combination of active monitoring and advanced targeting using MARKETview data has resulted in outsized success for Two Ocean’s digital campaigns, performing 108% better than higher ed benchmarks across platforms.
Two Ocean is a comprehensive enrollment marketing partner informed by MARKETview — higher ed’s only real-time, comparative data set. If you’re looking to make a more budget savvy enrollment investment, reach out to our team so we can chat.