Education and Health. The two segments that remain inured to the vagaries
of economy. No matter how hard economic recession hit us, these two areas
remain unaffected, at least in India. And we know well why this is so. These
are two essential sectors the people can't do without!
When I entered the vaunted portals of one of the prominent universities in
South India, I had no apprehensions that I would be able to market it without much
difficulty. Everybody is well aware of the university and its standards.
Located on the valleys of Western Ghats, the university has everything that
can appeal students. However, there were not enough takers for its MBA
programme, despite having a tempting placement offers.
When I entered there, we had to find out answers for some questions.
- Despite having state-of-art technology and faculty, why there were no takers for MBA.
- They were spending huge amount of money, but there was no result. Why?
The first question was valid, as they had the best faculty. Most of the
faculty members earned their degrees from the US or the UK. Weren’t those the
best keywords to sell the product?
The continuous brainstorming sessions with the team fetched following
results:
- Primary stakeholders are not students, but parents.
- Sometimes ads won't work.
- You have to tell the stories of success
- Rather than conventional institution ads, your ad has to tell a story.
- Too much focus on print and television won’t work
Ads and content are created to engage the students under the misconception that
students were the primary stakeholders of an educational institution. However,
it is the other way around. A student’s education is the primary responsibility
of a parent. Taking parent as primary stakeholder, we created the campaign that
was a mix of traditional public relation, digital marketing and pay-per-click.
Till then, the institution’s ad spending proportion for print and online
were 70:30, i.e. 70 percent of the total budget was allocated for print and 30
percent for online.
Our first job was to convince the management that we would try this time
with the same budget in reverse proportion, i.e. 70 for online and 30 for
print.
But we needed a start. When we were analysing the faculty, we came to know
the MBA dean was actually from MIT and many articles have already been
published in various newspapers. That finding turned out to be a stimulant, and
we pitched his article with mainstream English dailies, which proved too good
in the later stage.
We have a man, who can help us gain entry into approach any media house
with our story ideas. That was the beginning. We started regular search engine
exercises with a minimum amount of google adwords. A blend of public relation,
digital marketing and pay-per-click changed the fate of the educational institution,
which witnessed overwhelming response from the right stakeholders.
Having said this, it is not necessary that the same strategy would work for
every institution. We were lucky enough to have a big name to bank up on.
When we design a strategy, it is important to find out answers for a few
questions
- Who are the primary stakeholders
- The position of institution
- What is the selling point? The faculty, facility, placement or location?
- Utilisation of ad budget?
- Which are the best channels to tell your brand story?
Let me finish this with the last campaign that we did. The university
was following a conventional advertising campaign, where they feature
all their courses. We launched a campaign in which the alumnus talk
about their life and the impact the university had on them. The reason
is simple: If you say that you are the best, nobody believes. If others
say that you are the best, then the picture changes.
0 Comments