Digital Marketing to recruit University Students in the UK

Source: Royal Holloway, University of London

Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) rely on an integrated marketing mix to promote their services, be they undergraduate, PG or CPD programmes. The scale of the investment – financial (especially considering the significant increase of tuition fees, from £3000 to £9,000 for UG courses), emotional (potential relocation away from friends and family) and social (their decision impact upon career progression and social standing in years to come) – means prospects are unlikely to make an impulse decision.

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SMS marketing campaigns

SMS marketing. Picture: tatango.com

Currently, mobile phones have a huge popularity all over the world and this can be used to benefit your business by developing a good SMS marketing campaign that allows you to engage and attract your customers. Currently, SMS is part of our daily life and people always need to be connected, nobody leaves home without keys and mobile phone.

This is like an ideal dream for marketers, being able to access directly to customers at any time and place through SMS. (Derrick, 2004). However it is important to highlight that first the client must give their permission to contact them and we can not abuse this permission, otherwise, the result will be disastrous for your company.

Do you know that “98% of text messages are read, with the average response time a mere 90 seconds (compared to 2.5 days for an email)” (Davey, 2013). This figure is amazing and we should take advantage of this one, as the short message service (SMS) could be included in our digital marketing strategy in order to reach our customers quickly and safely, because even if the customer wants to delete the message, necessarily they have to read it before deleting.

KLM “Trace the place”, good example of viral marketing

KLM “Trace the place”. Picture: KLM’s website.

Last month, KLM has developed one of the best online viral marketing campaigns, which is characterized by its ability to engage with audience, share the message and be simple, original and creative.

What did KLM do? The airline created a micro website called “Trace the place”, where users of different countries can access to play an online contest-game that allows them to win two return tickets to their favourite destination.

You can check this game here: “Trace the place”. The dynamic of this original game is as follows: