Do You Need to Partner with a Higher Education Marketing Agency?

Marketing your school offerings to prospective college students should be a huge priority, especially if your goal is to prevent troublesome enrollment dips. A steady stream of interested students isn’t just helpful for filling seats in the current academic term. It’s also crucial for maintaining an active campus community and keeping stakeholders and leaders pleased with your institution’s growth.

Plus, higher education marketing is an enormous industry all in its own right. Recent data shows that colleges and universities invest upwards of two billion dollars annually in marketing collegiate offerings to new students. Obviously, the market share is huge, and capitalizing on student interest is on everyone’s minds.

But the question remains—do you need to outsource your marketing efforts to qualified higher education marketing agencies? And if not, are there other alternatives that help you accomplish your most important enrollment goals?

If you’re weighing the pros and cons of full-service agency work, we’ll help you navigate current options. Learn what these agencies do and how you can leverage alternative options.

What Does a Higher Education Marketing Agency Do?

A higher education marketing agency is a specialized firm that works with colleges and universities to advertise and reach incoming students. Different agencies may offer specialty or niche services that cater to specific segments of a target audience.

Higher education institutions may turn to marketing agencies when they need to compensate for a gap in their current team. For example, if a school is short-staffed when it comes to social media advertising, a short-term contract with an outside marketing agency can fulfill those responsibilities and bring in new student leads.

Types of Agency Services and Work to Explore

With the advent of digital marketing and remote agencies, it’s easier for colleges and universities to partner with a qualified team, even if they aren’t local to the school’s campus.

Agencies provide a variety of services, including traditional and online, to help schools achieve better outcomes with enrollment and admissions.

Most agencies provide a combination of the following higher education services.

Digital marketing generally references inbound sources of marketing material and can describe activities related to published content. This includes blog posts, web strategy, email copy, and any material created for digital advertising audiences.

Schools often need assistance with managing social media profiles and pages. From post creation and publishing to engagement, outsourcing can free up time spent maintaining these channels. Paid media is another option that forward thinking colleges use to grow their target audience and establish greater brand positioning.

Producing marketing visuals, including video, requires advanced skills and production capabilities. Agencies might specialize in videos that can be pushed to websites, embedded in marketing materials, or posted to platforms like YouTube.

Occasionally, schools need an outside party to review performance and engagement data that’s already in-house. Some agencies offer analysis as an added service for measuring results and offering new recommendations for important KPIs.

When to Outsource Marketing to an External Agency

It’s true that making any sizable investment outside of your in-house team can feel daunting. Schools may be under increasing pressure to make the best use of available resources and “do more with less.” When marketing budgets and resources are tight, maximizing return on investment (ROI) is even more critical.

There are, however, times when calling for outside help is important. This might be true if your school or admissions marketing team is facing any of the following challenges.

You need to fill an unexpected gap in your higher education marketing teams due to employee turnover, hiring cycles, or lack of resources.

You’ve identified a specific issue in performance and need third-party help to identify and fix the problem.

You’re looking for specific skills or digital marketing strategies that aren't available on your in-house team, and you’ve identified an agency with proven success in that area.

You have the available resources and budget to make such an investment possible.

Benefits of Using a Marketing Agency for Admissions and Enrollment

Of course, if your admissions marketing results seem like they’ve hit a plateau, getting a fresh perspective could be the move you need to make. This is especially true in a crowded market like higher education, in which fierce competition is only growing due to a number of challenging factors.

There are several advantages to leveraging an outside marketing agency for your higher education enrollment needs.

Obtaining a third-party review of your current activities and programs

Getting access to expert-level help and advice

Leveraging knowledge of the broader higher education market (including recommendations for standing out from the competition)

Accessing flexibility when it comes to new and innovative marketing solutions

The top higher education marketing agencies in the United States are known for delivering results, driving website traffic, and helping attract more incoming students. And while it’s certainly not the only way to grow or move forward, fresh insights can keep your marketing program from stalling out.

How to Choose the Right Branding and Marketing Agency for Your School

If you’re leaning towards using a marketing agency, making the right choice is essential for long-term success. Remember, any marketing agency should be considered a partner on your marketing journey. Your campus-specific goals, motivations, and values should drive the process and the activities from start to finish.

As you do research and seek out agency options, consider asking the following questions, both on your higher ed marketing team and of the agency you intend to select.

What is the available budget for marketing agency projects?

Are there specific initiatives to address first? Which items are top priority?

What tangible benchmarks do we want to achieve during the designated contract time? (i.e. a certain number of new student inquiries in a given time period)

What is the process for “passing the reins” back to the internal team?

What are the options if a project stalls or the results aren’t as expected?

When working with any external team, transparency is one of the most important things to keep in mind. Regular updates, insights into project status, and marketing results are critical for knowing what’s happening at all times.

What are the Alternatives to Using a Higher Ed Marketing Agency?

Collaboration with an outside marketing agency can be beneficial, but it’s certainly not the only way to grow or reshape your college’s marketing and brand strategy. An in-house team, equipped with the most modernized tools available, can often accomplish unexpected and powerful results when it comes to reaching and recruiting new students.

If outsourcing to external teams isn’t on your radar this year, consider choosing an intelligent student CRM platform like Element451. In many ways, a highly functional digital marketing platform or CRM software can accomplish similar results by alleviating manual team effort and automating several important processes, like data collection or outbound marketing.

Plus, when your CRM suite leverages the power of student engagement and personalization, the results can be just as impressive—if not even better! Timely and conversational support to incoming students makes the experience unique and special. In other words, it’s not your average enrollment marketing cycle, which means that your institution truly shines.

In short, when you have a powerful student engagement platform in your tech stack, you can easily accomplish your marketing goals for prospective students. 

Advantages of Staying In-House with a Powerful Engagement Platform

When you keep your marketing initiatives in-house (among your own recruiting, admissions, or enrollment team), you’ll be able to oversee processes more directly. Additionally, you can change course or pivot at any point, without needing to check with external players.

Other benefits of leveraging a customizable engagement platform include:

Saving on outside operational and technology costs by investing in a service that you can continue to use with a license

Having immediate access to real-time marketing data and performance metrics

Keeping student information and data more secure with internal policies for data protection and communication

Being able to react immediately to any pressing needs or marketing requests, without having to pass this information on to a third party 

Needless to say, there are certainly times when you’ll want to consider all options to improve and enhance your marketing efforts. The decision should always start with knowing where your school stands and which steps you want to take to proactively grow.

Accelerate Your Marketing with Element451

At Element451, we work with schools and teams of all sizes. While some have limitless resources for marketing growth, other teams know the importance of being resourceful. Regardless of where you stand, having powerful student engagement tools in your pocket is the key to successful marketing initiatives—and we believe that it always will be.

If you want to get more return on your marketing investment this year, choose a powerful platform that delivers proven results to institutions from coast to coast. Element451’s all-in-one CRM platform for higher education is intuitive, AI-powered, and highly personalized to your unique student personas. 

Grow your marketing results in-house, with modernized tools and features that make everyone’s job a lot easier.

Most schools don't have the right tools to do efficient marketing and recruiting. At Element451, we help schools with software that keeps students engaged and enrolled.

Do You Need a Higher Education Marketing Agency?

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