Industry Specific Marketing Advice
Marketing a Graduate and Professional School
Marketing plays a central role in any company. But when it comes to a graduate and professional school, your ability to market your brand can be the deciding factor between barely making it and achieving stellar industry success.
It's difficult to pinpoint a single marketing strategy that is capable of turning around a struggling business. However, great marketing strategies share a common characteristic.
Healthy customer relationships are strengthened and expanded through targeted marketing campaigns. With that in mind, it's important to leverage marketing as a path toward better customer engagement in your graduate and professional school's business model.
Technological Expertise
To those of us who are familiar with today's marketing landscape, it's clear that technology and strategy have become inextricably linked. As a result, a primary concern of growth-oriented graduate and professional schools is the need to increasingly incorporate technological marketing solutions into the marketing mix. Despite the initial cost associated with many technological solutions, the long-term payoff for the right technologies almost always outweighs the upfront expense.
Encourage Word of Mouth Referrals
Most owners of graduate and professional schools rely on a certain amount of word of mouth marketing buzz to communicate brand values and product messaging.
As a rule, your marketing strategy should include mechanisms that encourage meaningful brand conversations and spread the good word about your business. The key with word of mouth marketing tactics is to avoid using them in situations where word of mouth marketing is not applicable.
Measurement & Evaluation
With a little more attention to details, graduate and professional schools may be able to increase the impact of their marketing tactics. For even greater returns, you'll need to explore ways to improve measurement and evaluation. A robust measurement and evaluation process should include metrics that can be monitored on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. Designed to monitor marketing efforts on a campaign-by-campaign basis, these metrics can be used as a baseline for strategic planning. Simple quantitative tools are a good start. However, graduate and professional schools often choose to consult with professional marketers for assessment tools and strategic insights.
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