Higher Education Marketing: Cross-Channel Integration and Automation

Higher education institutions are constantly looking for new ways to engage with prospective students, but the growing number of channels available to reach them can make it seem like a daunting task. As higher education organizations are faced with the challenge of increasing enrollment rates on a limited marketing budget, they are also finding themselves with an overwhelming amount of data coming from an increasing amount of channels.

The problem is twofold: firstly, organizations need a way to aggregate all of this data in order to make informed decisions about where to allocate their resources. Secondly, they need a way to automate the process so that they can keep up with the ever-changing landscape and not miss any opportunities. By applying cross-channel strategies that automate marketing processes and integrate offline activities with online tactics, you can help your organization reach more students.

This article will explore what cross-channel marketing, integration, and automation are and why a digital marketing strategy incorporating them all is so important for higher education institutes.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a form of multi-channel marketing, one of the major digital marketing trends projected for 2022. The processes are similar in that they both involve using multiple channels to interact with a targeted audience, but in the case of cross-channel marketing, the goal is to create a unified customer experience (CX).

Cross-channel strategies involve the passing of information between each channel, enabling prospective students to easily “cross” from one to the next and ensuring they are receiving a consistent message no matter where they are. For example, a future student may start their research on your website but switch to viewing your Facebook page for more information, then switch to Snapchat to see what current students are doing in real-time at your events.

What is Integration and Automation?

Channel integration is the process of bringing all of these channels together so marketers can track and analyze customer behavior across all platforms, providing a complete view of each customer’s journey through their sales funnel. This strategy allows educational institutes of all types and sizes to see which channels are most effective in driving traffic to their site and converting that traffic into enrollments.

In addition, it is important that all the utilized channels are integrated into one system. This allows marketers to automate the process from start to finish and ensures there’s no lapse in data collection. Automation is the key to success in any cross-channel marketing strategy. It makes it possible to manage campaigns and messaging across all channels simultaneously while still allowing for human intervention when needed.

Marketing Automation Platforms

Cross-channel marketing strategies can involve a lot of planning and collaboration. One way to speed up the process is by creating a marketing automation platform that can reduce the time spent on manual processes while ensuring every message sent to students through different channels remains consistent with one another. This ensures your university’s brand stays strong and recognizable no matter how the student is contacted.

Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot offer features such as an integrated CRM, custom workflows and email templates, social media publishing tools, contact databases with lead scoring based on user behavior and interactions across different channels.

What Can Automation Accomplish?

Automation platforms can be set up to handle virtually any type of digital marketing strategy — from content distribution through Facebook ads and Google Adwords campaigns, all the way to more complex aspects of direct mail, email marketing, and offline data collection.

Higher education institutions can apply automation to the following and much more:

• email marketing (welcome sequences, drip campaigns, etc.), SMS, and voice-based marketing (inbound calls, phone surveys, caller profile data, etc.)
• engage with and increase followers (i.e., Facebook, Instagram)
• generate, nurture, and close leads
• track and report target market behavior
• retarget and re-engage prospective students
• optimize their strategies

By combining all the features of a top-of-the-line automation platform with cross-channel integration strategies, higher education institutions are able to:

• obtain valuable analytic data
• better track their students’ journey through each stage of the sales funnel
• deliver a personalized, yet consistent brand message
• improve budget spending
• improve efficiency and productivity of their digital marketing campaigns
• provide better customer support

Why is Cross-Channel Integration & Automation Important for Higher Education Marketing?

When all channels are integrated, it becomes much easier to personalize the customer journey. Personalization is essential for driving engagement and conversion rates, making it vital that educational institutions have a system in place that allows them to do this effectively. Automation makes it possible to save time and money by scheduling and delivering personally-tailored messages and common automated  responses at scale across all channels, all while delivering your cohesive brand image.

Educational institutions that combine cross-channel marketing, integration, and automation strategies in their digital strategy will find it easier to: reach more prospective students, measure the return on investment (ROI) of all campaigns, target students across any platform, and track and analyze every step of the CX from awareness to conversion.

As marketing channels continue to evolve, it becomes increasingly important for higher education marketers to be able to track and analyze the behavior of their future pupils across all platforms. Without this information, they will not know how or when their target markets are interacting with different mediums, nor will they have the data to support their digital marketing decisions.

The Takeaway

Cross-channel marketing is one of the most important strategies for driving engagement and conversion rates, making it essential that educational institutions have a system in place that allows them to do this effectively.

Automating an integrated cross-channel digital marketing strategy allows for targeted messaging that is personalized to each student’s needs. Prospective students receiving consistent marketing messages across a multitude of channels from your university will associate this with a positive experience and become more likely to enroll.

It’s important to remember that not all students are the same, and this requires different campaigns for each type of student you’re trying to attract. For example, there might be a difference in how you approach an international student as opposed to a domestic one. This is where automation can really simplify things – by providing the ability to target different groups of students separately while still delivering a unified message.

About Lisa | Spherical Strategies Content Creator & Copywriter Lisa works with Spherical Strategies as a content creator and copywriter. She brings a deep understanding of human motivation to her mastery of writing by utilizing her education in market psychology. She has worked over the past several years as a private contractor, providing industry-specific content and editing for companies of all sizes. Outside of her work as a content creator, Lisa is passionate about caring for her young son and is only slightly obsessed with gardening.

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