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Timing Your Campaign To The Enrollment Cycle

Today on The Calculate Minute: timing your campaign to the enrollment cycle.

Enrollment runs on a 12-month cycle, and your marketing strategy needs to hit the right audiences with the right messaging at exactly the right time. First-year students, transfers, adult learners, and graduate students are all at different stages of the enrollment cycle at any given moment. Your campaigns need to be organized around that.

Start by mapping out the full cycle for each audience: when they start thinking, when they start searching, and when they decide. Then match your messages to each stage.

Take transfer students. Many of them are rethinking their school well before winter break, and over break they start acting on it. So your transfer campaign needs to be live before Thanksgiving, not after New Year’s.

Use paid search to capture what they’re searching for — transferring credits, spring start dates, and transfer scholarships. Use social and programmatic to broaden your reach — to prospective transfers and the people helping them decide.

Send that traffic to a dedicated transfer landing page and answer their biggest questions up front — credits, cost, and time to graduation — and keep the form short. Then retarget everyone who visited but didn’t convert, right up until spring classes start.

That’s what timing your campaign looks like. Get it right, and the right message lands. Get it wrong, and it misses.

Want help launching your next transfer campaign? Let’s talk.

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