The steady decline in funding, even for core activities, has meant that universities and learning providers must be increasingly creative in how they generate revenue. To be successful, participation rates in fully funded programs need to be greatly improved, and to do this, education and business need to work together and engage more effectively.
So how is it achieved? Here are six engagement strategies that work.
1. Do you know your target market?
In the past, learning providers have tended to take a ‘sizzle gun’ approach. They have listed a wide range of possible courses because they have the staff in place and the core students are already being served. They see the market as homogeneous with few differentiating characteristics, except perhaps attendance patterns. However, when the offer is too generic, customers get confused and don’t buy.
So the key is to target specific groups and tailor the messages according to their needs. In particular, it is about understanding the pain that is affecting their business and providing them with some strategies to help them overcome their problems. In this case, less is more and the messages will be more powerful if they are not surrounded by publicity ‘noise’ and general university hype. The answer is to do less things but do them very well. Find a niche and become an expert in that field.
2. Find out exactly what they want?
Have experts who understand the common factors/trends in your industry. These people will go and find out what your prospects want and probably more importantly what they need. Although they are experts in their field, this reason alone will not get the employer to commit. These learning professionals will need very good listening and questioning skills if they are to build rapport with their clients and move the discussion forward.
A useful methodology to use, devised by Neil Rackman, is SPIN, where the following points are analyzed: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need or Need payment. At all times, the learning professional should address client objections as they arise, although these can be minimized if adequate research, client selection, needs analysis, questioning and empathic discussion have been carried out. .
The next stage is to come up with a solution that fully meets your customers’ requirements, and is packaged in the format they require, at a price they can afford, and that the vendor can deliver profitably. If you know that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have time constraints and tight budget constraints, a ‘Rolls Royce solution’ lasting several weeks with daytime assistance is unlikely to be well received. Clients may want short presentations from seminars to conferences and will almost certainly prefer nuggets of ‘need to know’ information with direct relevance to them than what they see as unnecessary theory and ‘fluff’.
3. Capture, preserve and manage customer contact details like gold dust.
All employers visiting your facility, website, exhibition stand or simply sending students on courses should be encouraged to submit their contact details. They have already shown interest in what you offer when buying, visiting or asking questions and there is a good chance that they will buy from you in the future. This information can then be ‘mined’ so that the appropriate products and services can be marketed in the relevant market segments and through the correct distribution channels. This ensures that limited marketing resources are used economically and, most importantly, does not inundate an already overworked executive with unnecessary communications.
The secret to success with this employer involvement strategy is that everyone within your organization must ‘accept’ the need for accurate record keeping. Gone are the days when staff kept track of their contacts on sheets of paper, their own IT system, and worse, in their heads. Effective knowledge management and systems built on trust, openness and transparency are crucial, but so are change management interventions that underpin a responsive culture.
4. Does it stand out as different in that market?
The learning provider must think about generating leads and capturing interest. Again, it’s much more than just advertising in local newspapers and sending out press releases, although press releases are useful for general purposes and when used in conjunction with other marketing tools. Multi-channel marketing is a really important concept and to be successful you need between five and seven different channels and at least two must be fully automated. Standard channels can include your website, brochures, flyers, press releases, telesales, networking, and word of mouth referrals. Automated channels, such as “select and pay” online, via a shopping cart, can help you generate business even when your facility is closed, such as weekends, holidays and after hours.
Also, is there something you can give away for free up front that will build business in the long run? For example, your experts could write articles, speak at conferences, present at webinars, produce podcasts, offer demo workshops, and generally develop communities of good practice around specific topics, functions, and industry sectors.
With this strategy, it is important that there are higher value follow-on services that participants can be funneled to and that will drive business forward. For example, a free resource like a downloadable podcast or trial session offered to employers on how to lead a team could lead to a one-day workshop and then a 5-day custom management development program with proven results. . The goal, as always, is to increase the number of customers, make them spend more money with you, on higher value items and increase their frequency of purchases.
5. Other effective internet marketing strategies
You can also increase your ability to be found by search engines by using social/business networking sites to point to your organization. Such examples include: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging. You can also make sure your business appears on Google Maps and Google doesn’t charge anything for it.
A new form of advertising is pay per click (PPC). This is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. There are many PPC providers out there, but Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCentre are the three largest network operators and all three operate under a bid-based model. Content sites often charge a fixed price per click instead of using a bidding system.
Websites using PPC ads will display an ad when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. These ads, called sponsored links or sponsored ads, appear next to or above general results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses to place the ad on a content site. The cost per click varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword, but it can be very profitable if used effectively.
6. Test and measure everything
To improve and innovate, it’s important to stay ahead and to do this, you need to test and measure response rates to every employer engagement strategy you use. If you buy a booth at an exhibition, how many employers visited, how many converted to live prospects, how many bought your products and services, and how much revenue was generated during the sales period. It is surprising how many organizations do not follow these steps. They consider it enough that they were seen to be there because their competitors were also present.
It is also important to know if your website is achieving its goals. The key is to collect traffic data; Not just how many hits you’re getting, but which pages are popular, who’s visiting your site, when they’re visiting, where they’re coming out, and a host of other data that can give you a clearer understanding of what’s going on in your cyberspace. . It will give you insight into the interactions between your web visitor, their actions, and what the website offers. It will help optimize the site for greater customer loyalty and could inform your plans to handle future growth. Importantly, you can also identify pages that receive little traffic and where the investment can be reduced or redirected.
And finally
Employers can also provide valuable help to universities. For example, they can help with the design, management, and delivery of relevant segments of the curriculum, provide practical definitions of job skills, and structured work experience. Many can arrange tours of their business premises and tutoring services for both students and faculty. Where appropriate, employers can help provide access to live data and provide resource packs, practical advice with interviewing and other job skills, as well as relevant career advice.
But it is necessary to address them in a coordinated and considered manner. They don’t want lots of different people asking them to do things regardless of time constraints. This is especially true of SMEs, but it also applies to larger companies that seem like pushovers. A good CRM (employer database) system will record all the activities carried out and show that the training provider is well organized, knows what is going on and, above all, is professional in their approaches to the industry.