Recently, Intelliworks had the pleasure of sponsoring the Stamats Integrated Marketing: Graduate Student Marketing Conference in Boston. Among the attendees were deans and directors of marketing, admissions and enrollment from graduate programs around the country. For many, the challenge was clear, there's a lot of noise out there with respect to recruiting graduate students in today's environment.
Among the themes we noticed at this year's conference was the increasing importance in treating students as customers and providing them with customer service across multiple channels. According the folks at Stamats, the top priority should be to invest in your online presence and have that serve as the hub for your student interactions as north of 97% of prospects visit your web site during their discovery phase.
However, once you've built a solid online channel, the work does not end. How you manage online inquiries, interactions by phone or email can all have a tremendous impact on a student's perception of your brand. Providing a consistent message and value-added service is paramount in capturing the attention of today's graduate students...the majority of which are part-time students with other commitments, including families and jobs, and thus little time to waste as they're evaluating their graduate education options.
So what are schools doing to break through the noise?
Todd Gibby, CEO of Intelliworks, shared his thoughts on the matter during a presentation on Day 2 of the conference.
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