Thinking About Marketing Automation For Higher Ed?

How can we put our name in front of someone right when they are thinking about committing to a brand? This is the question we ask ourselves in marketing. The best marketing campaigns deliver a coordinated high-quality experience across every channel and with every prospect interaction. Marketing automation tools from Salesforce bolster an organization’s ability to deliver this syndicated message. Higher education organizations are thinking more and more about how to attract news students through marketing as the space becomes increasingly competitive. Marketing automation is a dream for any organization. Salesforce has made it possible for higher education institutions and Mirketa Inc is able to implement that possibility with you.

The Salesforce marketing cloud unlocks incredible recruiting possibilities for the higher education space. At a high level, the marketing cloud uses data collected about prospects to then market back to prospects in a way that makes the most sense to each prospect and higher education organization. Salesforce has the ability for organizations to track the activity of prospective students on their website. Let’s say for example that a recruiter has met a bright student at a recruiting event at a local high school and this student agrees to give the recruiter a few pieces of administrative data like their name and email. The recruiter would then go back and enter this student as a prospective student as a prospect in their Salesforce. From that moment forward the recruiter would be able to see what sort of things the student was clicking on while visiting the school website, what they were searching, and how often they came back to visit.

It is obvious how powerful this information would be in targeting students that higher education organizations might view as a potential fit for their university. This same technology within Salesforce will assign this prospect a grade that communicates how good of a fit they would be within a university. So, for example, if the prospect continues to search for programs and look at things that may not be a strength of a higher education institution, then that prospect’s grade would be a little lower. This sort of information-based targeting and grading has enormous implications in ensuring students who start with a university, finish with that university. This is a metric that the Higher Ed domain watches with a close eye. Higher education organizations want to reduce the churn of students as much as possible to uphold their university reputation. After all, reputation in higher education can be some of the best marketing available.

Organizations that have introduced these practices have been able to reduce the churn of students from Freshman year to Sophomore year by 17 percent. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxCykfB2ABY&t=171s)
We can see now that marketing automation in higher education is an obvious advantage. So, what are the next steps to making it a reality in your organization? Get organized.

It is essential to define the marketing process and marketing funnels prior to planning the technical aspects of implementation. Getting clarity on the end-state upfront will make for an efficient marketing machine, post-Salesforce implementation. The first step is to define what an ideal prospect is and where they can be reached. It is essential to decide what information can be gathered at the top of the marketing funnel and then how this information will be used to communicate with prospects at each point in the sales process. Defining the people, data, and touchpoints of the marketing process will allow the planning to begin for how legacy systems will interact with the new Salesforce instance.

The technical planning portion of an implementation is a discussion unique to each organization. We have been involved with several digital transformations over the last 10 years and each one has called for its own unique technical roadmap to completion. It all circles back to what an organization wants Salesforce marketing automation to do and what ERP or other infrastructure they already have in place. That is where the Salesforce Ohana comes into play.

Salesforce partners play an essential role in guiding higher education organizations through their digital transformations. Mirketa has helped several universities and higher education facilities navigate the Salesforce ecosystem based on their local requirements. We love to be part of these transformations and are eager to help you with yours.