5 Education Marketing Conditions for Enrollment Success

Strategies, tactics, and tools are great – but if you’re not using these to create the right marketing conditions, your education marketing won’t work (well).

There are lots of methods and tactics we use as education marketers to give our enrollment officers more prospective students and parents to talk to or give our development officers more opportunities to raise funds for our schools.

But sometimes we’re so deep in the woods, we can’t see the forest for the trees.

In education marketing, what exactly are we doing?

At the highest level, here’s how I see it. All of your marketing efforts and tactics should be designed to create the right conditions for marketing success.

When you have the right conditions at work, hitting recruitment and development goals becomes much, much easier.

Wise marketers seek ways to improve the marketing conditions.

It’s like growing coffee.

Conditions for Growing Coffee

You may not have any experience in growing coffee. I don’t. But chances are, as a marketer, you’ve had a sip or two of that delightful java.

There are as many methods for cultivating coffee as there are coffee farmers. Because every region has its own challenges and every farmer is different in how they approach their trade, you get a lot of different ways to cultivate coffee.

But come to find out, no matter where you are in the world… no matter what kind of coffee you’re growing… you need a certain set of conditions to do well as a coffee farmer.

Specifically, you need…

• The right amount of rainfall each year, 47 – 86 inches to be exact.
• Moderate yearly temperatures, between 59 – 75 degrees.
• The exact right location and altitude.
• Just enough sunlight — but not too much!
• Soil that will absorb the right amount of water, and drain the rest.

Coffee is a picky plant. It needs all of these conditions to be at the right levels all at the same time.

Keeping an Eye on the Conditions

No matter what kind of tractor the coffee farmer uses, no matter what kind of harvesting method they choose, it all can mean nothing if the conditions for growing coffee are not just right.

That’s why successful commercial coffee companies focus on growing coffee in these conditions. Much of the focus of research and development is on improving these conditions because the growth will happen naturally if the plant gets what it needs.

It’s much the same in education marketing.

Education Marketing Conditions

As a marketer, you need certain conditions for your efforts to work.

No matter what activities or tools you’ve chosen to use in your marketing, you must keep your focus on creating and improving the market conditions for recruitment success to happen.

Here are the 5 marketing conditions every education marketer should focus on improving:

1. Brand Authenticity
2. Brand Authority
3. Brand Promises
4. Brand Awareness
5. Brand Loyalty

These conditions are necessary to boost enrollment pipelines and donor prospects for your college, university, or school.

When these conditions are humming along, good things begin happening. If — or better, when — you get these conditions to a certain level, marketing success becomes almost a foregone conclusion.

Once you’ve got these conditions right, it’s a matter of proper recruitment or development to engage the prospective students that are coming in. You’ve done your job — now the ball is in their court.

Simple, right?

Simple, yes. Easy… not so much.

There’s a lot of confusion about what these marketing conditions are, how they work, and how much education marketers can do about them.

That’s why I want to begin a blog series covering them. Over the next few weeks, we’ll talk about each one of these important marketing conditions and how you can improve them through your marketing.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, we’d be happy to talk with you about these conditions in your school and how to improve them. Get ahold of us today!

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Featured image by amenic181 via Adobe Stock
Picking coffee image by khamkula via Adobe Stock