Predictable Recruitment Success Via the Two Pronged Prospecting Approach

By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc.

As the economy begins to slow down due to higher interest rates that hinder job and wage growth, it is more important than ever for leaders to determine their organization's market potential and identify--via targetable lists-- its optimal prospects. Yet, this step is often overlooked, or underwhelmed in the process of developing enrollment management plans. The result is “hit or miss” enrollment management programs that aim relatively blindly.

I learned the value of bringing strategic and operational rigor to the “Know Thy Customer” process during my formative years as a Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble “University,” and never forgot this critical lesson. Not knowing your school's actual market potential is akin to playing a sport without knowing how to win!

The “we want to pull out all the stops” enrollment management team will recognize that there are two pathways to data driven prospecting and that these pathways complement each other. That is because each pathway enables a different kind of marketing rigor to be brought to bear, yielding more certain gains. The two pathways are Market Segment Identification and Individual Prime Prospect Identification.

Market Segment Based Prospect Identification 

This prospecting approach involves creatively assessing your parent/student body and identifying underlying, targetable market segments based on discernible social networks. Once this is done it will be possible to assess the enrollment potential of each of those segments for your particular institution and to establish concrete market share targets for each segment. Knowledge of the market segments offering the best opportunities for growth enables a school to employ its most potent enrollment management weapon with great effect: Ambassadorship. Parent, Student and Faculty ambassador programs that generate word of mouth advocacy within market segments enable a school to have a veritable army working against key segments on its behalf.

Individual Family Prime Prospect Identification

This approach entails using Big Data to study the individual demographic characteristics of your families and then mine the universe of families for “more like them” targets. In essence this is what social media companies like Meta and Google attempt to do for millions of clients. But a school has the choice of relying of social media companies to do its prospecting for them or to work to master its own approach to this task. The value of a school working at this on its own is that it can actually own a prospect list, perform marketing experiments and become a learning organization that constantly improves its ability to manage its market. Leaving the job to the social media companies means only seeing the fringe of the market: those who have responded–and missing those who have not yet done so and not having the opportunity to learn why they did not respond.

In Summary

Thoughtfully choosing how it will go about prospecting for prime prospects is one of the most important strategic decisions a membership organization can make. Ensuring your organization's prospecting strategy decisions are made after a careful data-driven consideration of (a) all the options and (b) the costs versus benefits is key to success and should involve senior leadership at the highest levels of the organization.

To learn more about how your school and its network can maximize enrollment using this two pronged approach please contact Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org

# market segmentation    #Big Data   #demographic analysis    #strategic planning