Marketing Your Student Diversity with a Marketing Automation Platform

Attracting diverse candidates is at the top of the list for most schools, and Higher Ed marketing teams need to do their part to help drive interest and applications amongst this population of prospects. But marketing teams will have difficulty doing that using just a website and an email marketing platform.

To effectively attract diverse candidates, you will need content that authentically portrays student life and outcomes among a diverse student body. That’s the starting point. But after that, how does a school know that it actually attracts diverse prospects?

They don’t.

That is until applications come in and school leadership realizes that they missed their diversity goals again, and then everyone goes into “reactive mode.” More photo shoots! More videos! Revamp the website! But, yet, nothing has changed. The school still doesn’t know when diverse candidates visit its website and has no way to nurture them.

Enter a Marketing Automation Platform. A “MAP” will help you track, identify, and nurture any type of candidate you choose. But for explanatory purposes, let’s stick with our diverse candidates’ example.

Suppose you run a Marketing Automation Platform such as Hubspot™, Pardot™, Marketo™, or a Higher-Ed-focused MAP like HeadStart Marketing Platform™. In that case, you are already tracking everyone who visits your website. The tracking happens anonymously until a candidate fills out a form identifying themselves, in which case, all of that anonymous engagement data merges with the newly added ‘First Name, Last Name, Email’ and now, finally, you can begin to see how prospects are engaging with your website.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s cover what you need to identify and nurture diverse candidates:

1. A custom field to hold “Ethnicity.”
2. A form containing a dropdown for “Ethnicity.”
3. One or more web pages in which to embed the form
4. A segment or “list” to add a person to when they identify as the ethnicity you wish to nurture.
5. A simple multi-email “drip” campaign to send out pertinent information about how your school best serves and supports diverse applicants.

Once you have the content for the emails (let’s say three emails), you are probably in the 2-3 hour range for creating the flow itemized above, including building out the emails with the provided content.

Here are those steps broken out a bit more:

1) Create a custom field to hold “Ethnicity”

2) Create a form which contains a dropdown list for “Ethnicity”

3) Embed your form into a webpage by cutting and pasting the javascript code

4) Create a segment which represents the ethnicity(s) in question and add a prospect to that segment when they choose the ethnicity(s) for which you have prepared content.

5) Create a three-email “drip” automation. When a new prospect is added to the segment you created, they will automatically be enrolled in this new campaign. (A video of how to create automations will be available soon).

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Hopefully, this post will be enough to get you started. This same concept can be applied to any demographic, or even any data point that you are storing or asking for in a form.

Now get prospecting!