Ep.12 Student Journey Mapping Workshop

Video Transcript

Pip

So Alice, a lot of my clients recently have been asking me about student journey mapping and why they should be interested in getting involved. Do you want to tell me a bit more about it?

Alice

Yeah, so we have a three stage approach here at Social Garden. The first stage is where we sit down with your recruitment team, marketing team, web services team, and really map out what exactly you’ve got in place right now.

Looking at how all the different teams are working together, what campaigns you’ve got in place and then map that against your current student enrolment journey.

Pip

That sounds really interesting and then what do you do from there? How do you analyse what you’ve seen and what you think should be happening?

Alice

Yes so, the second most important stage is actually getting in the mind of a student when they are enrolling.

You might run a workshop with 3 or 4 students, or prospective students, to see and understand from their eyes how they would apply at university or how many options they’re seeking, how many different universities or TAFEs they’re researching at each stage.

Then go through the actual funnel with them, that way you can see the opportunities where they may actually fall off the funnel and it starts giving you these understandings of where the gaps are – your pain points.

It also, starts you thinking about ways that you can bring leads back into the pipeline. Or opportunities where you might be able to re-engage that person at a later date.

The third stage is mapping out your ideal future state. So, key roles and responsibilities for your three teams. It’s so important that at this stage you’re connecting your recruitment team, your IT team, and your marketing team.

Pip

So people aren’t working in silos. They’re working together across the whole campaign.

Alice

Yeah absolutely and universities are huge organisations. So it’s so easy for that type of thing to happen.

Pip

There’s so many people.

Alice

Yeah there’s so many people, so many teams, and it’s really important. That’s where we can add value because we can come in and kind of join the dots between the different teams.

Together we then map out the future state of how we would like all of our existing technologies to work, and maybe look for opportunities of where we should be investing in a new technology, like investing in a marketing automation platform.

It also gives us really good opportunities to start mapping out ideas for nurtures or where we can utilise SMS, how we can use custom audiences to re-engage leads who may be falling off the pipeline. And makes us look at that last piece of the funnel, when it so important.

We’ve already invested so heavily in this prospective student and it’s so easy for them to fall off. They may have already submitted an application, but they haven’t yet accepted their offer.

So we want to have some conversion steps in place so to ensure that we are moving them towards that final point.

Pip

Great.

Alice

We’ve recently launched a student journey mapping workshop. Please do get in touch if you’re keen to hear more about this service.