5 Minute Power-Session: Solving 3 Key Higher Education Marketing Data Challenges

May 4th, 2022 by Alison Zeringue

When it comes to marketing and recruitment pipeline data and analytics in higher education, there are a few common challenges universities and professional, continuing, and online education units (PCOs) often face:

60% of Higher Ed Marketers do not know cost per inquiry

Silos within the university

Marketing is responsible for owned and paid media including the website, social media channels, and placing media buys but it often has limited or no access or insight into the enrollment CRM. Meanwhile, the recruiting team isn’t even aware of the depth of rich data available to them about prospects and current students. The existence of this data presents an opportunity for marketing to better understand the ideal student, and adjust their strategy to reach more of them, in a more effective way.

Data systems challenges

Many institutions have data about their students and prospects living in disparate systems, there’s simply too much of it, and it is incredibly time consuming to collect and understand, much less piece it together for insights.

Fragmented data

There’s largely an inability to string together information about a single prospect all the way through the recruitment to enrollment funnel, or even to understand the funnel end-to-end.

Recently we were honored to present a quick 5-minute power sessions at HighEdWeb Analytics Summit, where we dove into Marketing Data, Dashboards, and Decisions, with a goal of helping universities and PCO’s understand the impact they can have when they’ve done the work to better understand their own first party data and overcome these common data challenges.

Higher ed marketer looking at marketing metrics

As we’ve presented this and similar insights to higher education stakeholders and conferences over the last 3 years, we’ve polled to get an understanding of where most institutions fall within those 3 key data challenges. The results are telling: 60% of our respondents didn’t know how much they currently spend on marketing for an inquiry. As an analytical marketer I can tell you – that pains me!

Check out our presentation for more on where to start to overcome the most common data challenges facing universities today, tools you can use to facilitate deeper insights, and examples of how access to data can influence key decisions and strategic direction.