How to Use Personalisation in Student Acquisition

Video Transcript

Alice Nuttall

So, in our last episode we asked our focus group which factors influenced their decision and the answers were really interesting, there wasn’t two the same.

Brett de Leijer

Yeah, I think that the sort of overarching take-away from it was that there are so many different personas that come to universities and there’s so many different factors in these decisions that the more segmented your marketing campaign can be, the more effective it will be.

Alice and Pip

Yeah.

Pip Hamilton

And we had Kane who was our non-school leaver. So, he was more focused on something that was easy to access, location-wise and also smaller classes. He wanted more of that one-on-one time with his students and his lecturers.

Kane Fitzgerald

What impacted my decision the most of choosing a course was something that was mostly convenient and as well, maybe not as – how can I put it – maybe high density sort of with like, populated with students.

Pip

And with Molly, of course she’s keen to go somewhere that’s a bit more social and get out of her comfort zone and having bigger classes, bigger lectures and more kind of orientation week and all of those kind of fun activities.

Molly Steel

So I wanted to go out of my hometown when I was deciding what uni to go to. I also I was thinking about… I wanted a fresh start and even though I still enjoyed all my friends, I just wanted to make some more and get out of my comfort zone a little bit.

Alice

Yeah, she’s the almost looking for that next chapter in her life, that life experience. Whereas Kane is on a mission, he’s on a career mission.

Pip

Jack was then, he was very, he was similar to Molly in wanting to go somewhere his friends were going and kind of keeping the social circles intact but then also focusing on the degree or double degree that he’s interested in so there’s kind of dual priority there.

Jack Quartermain

I took into account all the social factors, where are my friends were going, the range of courses and things like double degrees… Do they offer a double degree or a single degree?

Alice

And Tim’s… Tim was different again, he knew that he wanted to do teaching and that reason behind why he wanted to do teaching was really interesting as well because he was that family man, he’s the oldest in his family, and that’s really what kind of influenced his career decision which was interesting.

Tim Newton

I’m the oldest out of all my cousins on both sides so I’ve had that experience of like being the elder one, looking after little kids and it just sorta became a second nature to me.

Brett

So, as a – you know – a higher education marketing team, how would you take these sort of responses and the knowledge that there’s so many different types of personas and reasons people choose universities.

Alice

Yep.

Brett

How would you put that into action?

Alice

So, the more data, or the more insights you can get each on an individual, the better you can personalise your communications with that person, because as we saw everyone has such a different decision making process, everyone’s been influenced by so many factors that there isn’t ever gonna be one common or one answer to suit these different groups of people, these different people. So, the more data we can collect on their digital behaviour, so which pages they are looking on at your website, the better we can customise our communications with those students as well.

Brett

And there are so many mini battles to be won along the way during the student journey that you can’t just be happy with yourself because they applied. You know, they still have to accept the offer, they still have to turn up to class.

Pip

Make it to Census day.

Brett

Exactly, there’s so many things that need to be won. And personalising your marketing during that whole time is gonna see better results across the whole journey.