Are marketing orthodoxies limiting online student recruitment?
A key, if not the key, metric for the success of online courses offered by universities is student recruitment. It has a tendency to disproportionately influence perceptions of current success and the overall health of operations. You can have the best online courses and outcomes in the world, but if recruitment is weak, particularly over a sustained period, everything else can pale into insignificance.
This means that although there are lots of organisational functions involved in successfully offering and managing online courses, it’s marketing, the very act of seeking to generate online student enrolments, that often tends to have an outsized importance.
There are, of course, other reasons for a stronger emphasis on marketing capability for online education, because it usually involves targeting a different demographic and audience from the archetypal campus-based undergraduate, where so much activity is focussed. This change in target audience, and the associated changes of strategy, tactics and approach, further amplify the importance of investing in marketing for online student recruitment.
Another element of the online education landscape that brings more attention to marketing and recruitment is the presence of online programme management (OPM) companies, who undertake the marketing, amongst other things, for their university partners, and spend significant sums of money on this.
Having worked with universities on online student marketing and analysed approaches taken by universities and OPMs over the years, I’ve begun to increasingly question whether the playbook for online student marketing and recruitment has become too formulaic and rigid. I’ve also begun to speculate on whether this is limiting recruitment opportunities and, in some instances, constraining universities from being more competitive.
The rise and appeal of performance marketing in online education
One of the marketing approaches most commonly associated with online course marketing is performance marketing. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is an approach where digital marketing spend is directly tied to measurable actions such as clicks or enquiries. This could be prospective online students clicking a sponsored link on a Google search results page (SERP), or entering their details into a contact form on an affiliate website. This approach enables you to analyse very closely how the money you’re spending on digital marketing is being translated into specific actions. For OPMs especially, and for some universities offering online courses too, this feels as though it has become a dominant tactic, and one that probably has the strongest association with online course marketing.
It’s a very alluring approach for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s “data-driven”, which, irrespective of what that term actually means in reality, is so sweet to the ears of many people that it is blindly accepted as good. In our contemporary world, numerical digital data has attained a hugely important status as a critical capability and driver of success, often rather uncritically.
Secondly, it feels like a logical way to use your budget, because there’s a clearly recorded result or impact from your spending. You’ve allocated X amount of your budget, and you can equate this, for example, to a certain number of people visiting your online course pages. You’re seeing a result tied to how you’re spending your marketing budget, and this makes it much easier to report on and justify your spend. That’s a very appealing principle for any business or organisation.
It also supports a common forecasting equation and performance measure used in online student recruitment. This approach is essentially based around the number of leads you need to generate in order to achieve target enrolment levels, based on past or predicted lead conversion rates and patterns.
In a sector in which the main thing that you can’t really control is prospective students’ behaviour, this approach, especially if you have the budget, feels somewhat controllable. It can feel as though it is a winning formula, and that if you put enough money in, you’ll continue to get the number of leads, and therefore enrolments, that you’re aiming for.
The most commonly used tactics for performance marketing approaches are paid search, paid social and affiliate marketing. If you were to search for one of the more commoditised online degree titles, for example an MBA, via Google, you would witness the paid search results firsthand.
Rising costs, competition and the risk of diminishing returns
While this tactic is appealing and has delivered enrolments for numerous providers, it requires budget, and in recent years there have been various reports of rising costs for activities such as cost-per-click (CPC) advertising on Google, for example.
Increased competition is highly likely to be one reason, and as someone who analyses the UK HE online education market, I can validate that many more UK universities have started offering online courses in the last five to seven years. There is no doubt that competition for online student enrolments has been increasing, and this has impacted several universities, either through a diminishing of their market share or through struggles to recruit a sustainable number of online students.
Although the digital marketing landscape is clearly changing due to the impact of AI, significant sums of money continue to be spent on performance marketing tactics to recruit online students. The problem is the extent to which that investment is delivering the same returns in student interest, in the form of leads, and student recruitment as it was three, five or seven years ago. There is also the fact that some performance marketing tactics have increased competition, which means increased costs and, in turn, exacerbates these challenges.
Performance marketing is clearly an uneven playing field, and one in which those with larger budgets and greater capabilities and capacity to translate that investment into enrolments can outperform others.
This is one important factor explaining why some UK universities with OPM partners have seen significant online student enrolments over the years. I can point to several examples of universities working with OPMs whose enrolments have outstripped those of many universities that do not work with a partner.
This isn’t simply down to marketing and budget, but also to recruitment operations. The importance of the latter function is demonstrated periodically in university and OPM partnerships when company marketing and university recruitment are miscalibrated. In these instances, it could be said that the flame of student interest is quickly doused by university recruitment operations that are slow and cumbersome.
Overall, the risk of this approach is that it has you hooked. Marketing spend is clearly attributable to actions, which can be more easily justified to budget holders, and it can provide a comforting sense of correlation between marketing spend and enrolments. These are a strong set of conditions in modern operations that can lead you to believe this is the only way to approach marketing online courses. In addition, the current financial climate in higher education clearly aligns well with any kind of spend where return on investment (ROI) and justification are easier cases to make. How, in the current climate, can you justify a marketing approach or tactic where it is much more challenging, or in fact practically impossible, to attribute a more direct return on investment?
Questioning the dominant playbook in online course marketing
It has felt in recent years, both anecdotally and through enrolment analysis, that there have been greater struggles to achieve the levels of online student recruitment that some have achieved previously. I don’t want to paint a picture of struggles across the board by any stretch of the imagination, but in aggregate it feels to me that more challenges are being felt than growth being celebrated.
Based on what we’ve considered so far, the question at the front of my mind is whether online course marketing has become locked into an orthodoxy that is simply exacerbating the challenges of growing competition. One of the commonly cited unique selling points (USPs) of OPMs has been what they can deliver for universities in terms of online student recruitment through their marketing and sales operations, but it feels as though there has been a little loss of lustre. I, and others, have a recurring question mark over the long-term sustainability of the traditional OPM model, particularly in terms of costs versus returns, of which marketing is a significant component.
What universities get from OPMs in terms of marketing and recruitment does not tend to be an enhanced, holistic capability, but rather a capability with a fairly set playbook for marketing that is focussed on performance marketing and skews heavily towards short-term, bottom-of-the-funnel conversion. Some OPMs are essentially flat-track bullies of performance marketing rather than companies that bring a more holistic, creative and innovative marketing function. However, I question whether their playbooks are hindering them, and their ability to deliver on their key performance measure, student recruitment.
For universities going it alone, I also wonder whether this orthodoxy has conditioned people to believe that this is the sole way to approach online student marketing, and something they need to work towards replicating.
I think some may need to break away from the idea that there is essentially one main way to do online course marketing and recruitment. There are other strategies, other approaches and other ideas of merit. The problem is that some require people to be bolder and more willing to try something different. Deviating from common tactics will inevitably involve exploring and investing in approaches that feel less comfortable and that create greater difficulty in matching spending to a measurable outcome.
There’s certainly a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, and my overarching point is not to totally invalidate a particular marketing tactic, but rather to challenge whether mindsets have become too fixed on how you should market to, and recruit, online students. As more universities have entered the online course market, it has felt to me as though, metaphorically, everyone is fishing with the same bait in the same spot, and while there has been a small increase in fish, it has been outweighed by a larger increase in fishermen.
Strategy and opportunities to think differently
The changes being wrought by AI give the impression that, rather than offering opportunities for divergence from the norm, they may seduce people deeper into current marketing and recruitment practices with the promise of greater effectiveness and efficiency. If that ends up being the case, it will further increase the opportunity space for different and differentiated approaches to marketing and recruitment for online courses. The key question is whether people are willing to even contemplate, let alone explore, approaches that diverge from orthodoxies.
Although what’s been covered here inevitably leans into specific marketing tactics, at its heart this is also about competitive strategy, or a lack thereof. This area feels like something of a blind spot for some universities, who seem more comfortable complaining about the existence of a market than competing for prospective students within it. The uncomfortable truth is that where there is choice, there is competition, and competition is only growing in online education. The necessity of having a smart strategy that enables universities to build sustainable cohorts of online students is becoming ever more important and, whilst marketing and recruitment approaches should flow from strategy, I would argue that there are opportunities here if people are willing to think differently and allocate some resource to experimentation.
To an extent, online education has had a couple of decades of being considered as a newer, pseudo-innovative form of higher education, but this does not make it any less prone to developing rigid orthodoxies about how things should be done. These orthodoxies exist in operations as well as in teaching and learning. However, as we enter another year, the real opportunity for some may well lie in being bold, smart and strategic enough to diverge from these, particularly when it comes to marketing.
