8 minute read
The 4 P’s of Graduate Marketing
by nagapgem
By Michael McGetrick, MBA, Spark451, Inc.
Whether we realize it or not, as graduate enrollment professionals, we are also marketers. As such, we are called upon to apply the principles of marketing on a regular basis. Anyone who has studied marketing for more than a minute has probably heard of the “marketing mix” or “4 P’s of marketing,” as coined by Marketing Professor and Textbook Author Philip Kotler. The 4 P’s are of course Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. In our work with dozens of graduate programs at Spark451, we’ve come to find Kotler’s framework somewhat incomplete for the task at hand and have thus derived our own 4 P’s of Graduate Marketing. Allow me to walk you through them.
The 4 P’s of Graduate Marketing are:
P = Program
P = Personas
P = Platforms (Student Journey)
P = Performance
Narratives
Let’s take each element of the PPPP framework one by one.
(P) Program
Whereas undergraduate marketing tends to deliver a message about the experience at the university as a whole, graduate marketing operates at the program level. Our first priority is always to define and communicate the strengths of the graduate program. Of course, this type of work cannot occur in a vacuum. One must position your program relative to the competition. A good formula for that is to look at the strengths of those programs and find those that are unique. We call these unique strengths differentiators, and they will be the points we will want to lean on most in our messaging. Understanding your program requires some discovery and research by our teams.
(P) Personas
Our second priority will be to study and identify the many audiences of learners and their traits so that we’ll be able to pinpoint which aspects of each program will appeal to them most. Consider this marketing intelligence. A key deliverable will be to define these audiences and segment them for optimal marketing opportunities. A subset of this work is to create and maintain a set of personas that identify historical demographics (who) and motivations (why) for pursuing each program (see below). The audience identification is more or less a quantitative exercise (derived from historical data when sufficient quantities of it exist), wherein building the personas and mapping their motivations is more qualitative (derived from surveys and interviews). We’ve included a few examples below:
Graduating College Students Young Professionals Career Changers/Shifters Influencers
Ages 20-23 Location: Northeast
What we want them to know
Undergrad gave you the soft skills to succeed in a career. Our program will give you the business skills. Ages 22-27 Location: NYC Ages 25-45 Location: Major U.S. Cities Ages 30+ Location: Northeast
What we want them to know
The [program] offers rigorous, industry-relevant training and produces better prepared graduates than competitors.
What they want
A fulfilling job, money
How they feel
Afraid, uncertain, confused – unsure whether working or grad school is the better choice. Unsure whether grad school is worth the expense.
Other takeaways
How the [program] will help them get a job they like without incurring too much debt
How the [program] will prepare them to succeed in their career
What we want them to know
The [program] is the fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to take your career to the next level.
What they want
More actual marketing knowledge, more money, promotion, strong work/life balance
How they feel
Frustrated. They feel stuck in their jobs and feel they aren’t progressing quickly enough. They feel like they are missing the business background to do transformational work. They want to do something tangible that will help accelerate their career.
Other takeaways
How the [program] will help them advance their career
What we want them to know
The [program] will help you find a job you enjoy.
What they want
Fulfilling job, more money, strong work/life balance
How they feel
Unfulfilled. Though they may enjoy their company or industry, they aren’t excited with the day-to-day responsibilities of their job. They want to shift or change careers to something that suits them better.
Other takeaways
How the [program] will help them enjoy their work more
What they want
A reason to care
How they feel
Neutral. Without a connection to the grad school, we need to provide incentives to support us.
Other takeaways
Why they should care How the [program] will help them and their organizations Why they should recommend the [program] to others
We typically look at personas as either “audience types” (abstracted groups) or archetypes (individuals as models).
PERSONA NAME:
1
BACKGROUND
Job? Career path? Family?
DEMOGRAPHICS
Male or female? Age? Income? Location?
2
3
IDENTIFIERS
Goals and motivations? Challenges? Communication preferences?
SIGNALS
Actions in our platforms? Journey? Stumbling blocks?
4
5
What does personal modeling give us?
Delivering a set of personas is often an important part of the scopes of work that we do as an agency, but you can pull them together using the resources at your disposal. Start with a deep dive on historical student demographic data and add pain points and motivations through some personal interviews with students and faculty.
(P) Platforms (Student Journey)
The student journey is the set of experiences a student has while interacting with your graduate school on their way to enrollment. Student journeys are unique because there are many ways to interact with a college. Each of these experiences, known as touchpoints, are specific ways that a student or potential student interacts with a brand. Examples of touchpoints include: • A prospective student discovering a program on a blog • A prospective student viewing a display ad on Facebook • A prospective student receiving a follow-up email from your grad school after they make an inquiry They can be comprehensive, include lots of data points, or be fairly simple.
“How do we talk to them?”
“When and where can we best connect?”
These touchpoints can be positive or negative based on the experience of the prospective student (for example, hearing about the positive experience of a friend taking an MA program or reading a negative Google review). The student journey begins before enrollment when a prospective student realizes they have a desire or pain point and need to satisfy/explore a particular learning goal. The journey proceeds through the experience of researching, inquiring, and enrolling in the program and continues after they begin classes, declare their intention to pursue a certificate, and then complete that certificate. The student journey is important to us because it helps reveal the specific opportunities your grad school has to reach its potential students. Specifically, it helps inform where to find students and how to message the brand. The following diagram is an example of a student journey. In this image, the curving line represents the unique path that one student goes on in their enrollment experience, including all the various touchpoints (such as websites, events, and emails) that they experience.
The Digital Student Journey
(P) Performance
Grad schools can define and communicate their goals through objectives. The objectives will specify measurable outcomes that will be achieved within a particular time frame. They help individuals across our joint teams understand their goals and determine whether their strategy is effective and tactics are well executed. Objectives are used to align expectations and plans,
Spark451 works with our grad school clients to establish unit-level goals and objectives and use an online dashboard to monitor progress toward them.
Goal
Build brand awareness for the grad school
Generate leads
Qualify leads
Convert leads into applicants
Drive revenue
Example Objectives and KPIs
We will generate 50,000 visitors to the grad school’s website this year.
We will convert 5% of visitors into leads this year (2,500).
We will establish a metric for program-fit, and achieve a 50% fit rate among inquiries.
We will help achieve a 20% applicant conversion rate by the end of the year.
We will achieve $1 million in additional revenue by the end of 2023.
Conclusion
OK. So now you’ve had a chance to learn about the 4 P’s of graduate marketing. It’s important to point out that the 4 P’s are not the actual deliverable, but are a means to an end. With the strategic work you’ve accomplished working on your 4 P’s, you will construct a narrative (story) about how your program will transform the lives and careers of the people who pursue it and then generate and deliver the messages that share that story. For many people, that’s the fun part, and they want to skip the strategy and get right to it. I get that, but don’t skip the strategy. It will pay off in the long run. I wish you coordinate efforts, measure progress, and hold teams accountable for results. Our objectives are fed by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that help us track our progress toward meeting the objectives. They are usually metrics that are defined by percentages such as landing page conversion rate or an email open rate. Here are some examples:
the best of luck in achieving your enrollment goals for 2023. For questions on the 4 P’s of graduate marketing or anything else enrollment marketing related, feel free to reach out to me at mmcgetrick@spark451.com.
Michael McGetrick is the vice president of creative & interactive and graduate marketing practice lead at Spark451. He holds a bachelor’s from Brooklyn College and an MBA from New York University.
