The biggest-ticket item in most higher ed marketing budgets is paid advertising. But how can you know for sure whether your strategy is on par with best practices, whether you’re getting the engagement, the leads, and the applications you deserve? After all, generic channel benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) don’t necessarily apply to higher education campaigns, let alone to your budget, your programs, your audiences, and your market. Plus, with how fast media changes, even last year’s best practices could miss today’s opportunities.
In this hyper-competitive enrollment climate and dynamic media landscape, a suboptimal or underperforming media strategy is a waste you literally can’t afford.
Given the scale of your media investment – and given the stakes – it’s wise to get a second opinion.
What’s a Second Opinion Analysis?
Whether you’re managing paid media in-house or working with a partner, a second opinion can either validate aspects of your current strategy, or surface insights that could drive performance lifts worth thousands or even tens-of-thousands of dollars in ad spend. We’ll assess factors like:
- Campaign Strategy – We’ll review your audience and market targeting, plus how you’re allocating effort between brand-building and program promotion.
- Channel-Specific Performance – We’ll compare your performance results to higher ed benchmarks in campaigns promoting similar offerings to similar audiences in similar markets.
- Channel Mix – We’ll assess your particular allocation of budget across digital and traditional channels, looking for mix adjustments that could lift performance without added spend.
- Funnel Allocation – We’ll consider how you’re allocating spend to key funnel stages, including awareness, interest, engagement, application, yield, and melt prevention, given your ultimate enrollment objectives.
- Spend Level – We’ll make paid budget recommendations to achieve your goals given reasonable performance expectations.
- Performance Expectations – We’ll assess whether your campaigns are delivering the results at the level of efficiency you should reasonably expect.
- Your Unique Questions – We can dig into any media-related questions, concerns, or ideas you may have that are motivating your interest in a second opinion.
Following our assessment, we’ll discuss and deliver a brief Findings and Recommendations Report summarizing our key takeaways, validating the strengths in your approach, and pinpointing our priority recommendations to improve.