Marketing Communications

Percept Research Marketing Communications

Why enhance your marketing communications?

Expectations for how an institution communicates with its prospective students have never been higher than they are in today’s marketplace. Your prospective students expect authentic, personalized communication that puts their needs front and center whether it be an email campaign, advertising, or social media.

Crafting a strong, strategic approach to your marketing and communications can shine a light on your program’s greatest strengths and differentiators, helping you to attract more qualified students, enter new markets and increase your yield and retention rates.

Common questions:

  • With the proliferation of MBA and specialized master’s programs in the marketplace, how do we differentiate ourselves and capture the attention of potential students?
  • How do we nurture prospects and accelerate their movement through the admissions pipeline?
  • How do we increase the brand awareness and perception of our school with both students and external audiences, like the press, other academics and business practitioners?
  • How do we improve the content on our website to increase awareness and applicants?
  • What should we include in our communications to improve acceptance yields?
  • How can we help prospects overcome barriers to entry (time, cost, etc.)? 

How we can help:

Marketing Plan Development

  • Craft an integrated marketing plan that ensures all your efforts are working in concert towards your strategic goals, and allows you to clearly articulate the work you are doing throughout your institution
  • Create personas or sample profiles of your target audiences to serve as a guide for both your own team, and the key administrators more widely
  • Provide a full competitive analysis
  • Determine ways to leverage the thought leadership of your faculty in a way that has the greatest impact for the school

Email Audit and Planning

  • Provide an in-depth assessment of current email strategy, reviewing performance and trends
  • Establish a mailing calendar that identifies content, optimal timing and target audiences
  • Determine audience segmentation opportunities
  • Provide in-depth review of email analytics
  • Create guidelines for email campaigns, including frequency, tone, and format (i.e., color palette, imagery, layout, font, overall style)

Paid Media Assessment and Planning

  • Create or review paid media (or advertising) strategy that optimizes impact within budgetary constraints
  • Identify potential partnership opportunities with media outlets
  • Develop or review a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, including key search terms, target geographies, and spend amounts

Web Analytics Audit and Training

  • Provide an in-person intensive for your team to demystify Google Analytics for measuring site traffic, engagement, ad performance, and social media activity
  • Set up tracking tags and conversion goals for all your marketing efforts, providing better insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns.
  • Analyze your existing data in-depth to track engagement, identify trends, and recognize opportunities among audience segments

Collateral Development

  • Determine the types of collateral needed for each school offering
  • Recommend content of brochures, provide design consultation, and determine print versus digital format
  • Curate testimonials for collateral and website that best highlight the student experience

Brand Guidelines

  • Establish brand guidelines for your school so all stakeholders across the institution are utilizing a clear playbook that represents look, feel and tone of your brand.