Marketing
Steps:
- Department will decide if they will use a 3rd party vendor for their marketing initiatives.
- A marketing strategy will be created considering the target audience, market positioning, and channels they will use.
- The marketing team will develop and execute a marketing plan with the approval of the department.
Questions to Consider:
Marketing Strategy
- Who will provide marketing for the program? (content, creation, delivery, website creation)
- Will your marketing efforts focus at the following levels? (program, department, college)
- Will you partner with 3rd party marketers to target prospective students?
- Determine appropriate positioning for Purdue institutions and develop brand messages and attributes to identify the institutions with these positions.
- Position: (a) Purdue institutions vis-à-vis other providers in the market (goal: capture fair share of the market); (b) Purdue institutions vis-à-vis each other (goal: avoid brand confusion).
- Use PR/Communication to position Purdue as a leading edge provider of online education, communicate new program launches and program innovation.
- What is your go-to-market strategy?
- List and rout student program inquiries to the department’s recruiting contacts, through the Purdue Online (PO) website, and 3rd party websites.
- Coordinate end-to-end marketing activities (e.g., strategy, planning, execution, performance analysis).
- Generate insights from spend, inquiry volume/mix/quality, and channel performance analytics to further improve marketing effectiveness.
- Optimize vendor performance through data analytics and regular performance reviews.
Marketing Channels
- Do you intend to employ the following marketing channels? (lead generation vendor, search engine marketing/optimization, email, direct mail, digital media, social media, out of home (EX: bllboard, radio, etc.))
- Develop a digital and social media marketing strategy targeting relevant channels (search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, database marketing).
- Utilize Purdue Online’s social media channels or website.
- Will you execute direct (SEM, website, mobile, email), institutional, and programmatic marketing campaigns?
- Design a telephony operations model: perform vendor evaluation, selection, and ongoing management.
- Use alumni base as a marketing channel – both to tap into their further and continued education needs and to seek their help with student recruitment.
Content Development
- What is the message you would like students to have about your program?
- Consider advertising how your program is different from the competition.
- Keep Purdue’s brand policies in mind.
- Who will develop marketing content?
- Develop content-rich landing pages to drive traffic to Purdue institutions’ websites with mobile capabilities.
- Ensure that PO-supported programs and courses are appropriately represented on the PO website and other campus venues.
Marketing Targets
- Who is the target audience? Who will you market to? Will you market directly to students, corporations, government, other organizations?
- Consider the following targets:
- Alumni
- Location of current/future workplaces (industry (for-profit), industry (not-for-profit), government/education, self-employed)
- Job titles of people who complete this program
- Professional organizations associated with the program/profession (EX: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants)
Who is Involved:
3rd Party Vendor (Initiator)
Purdue Online (Initiator)
Faculty (Collaborator)