Outbound marketing. We’ve all seen it at work — the TV commercials and the email blasts for products and services we don’t need. Outbound marketing does have a place and a value. It’s often a good traffic generator (think online display advertising), but it’s not necessarily good for converting visitors and bringing them further into the sales funnel, especially in higher education.

People search for products and services based on their needs. Your prospective students are no different. If you’re trying to persuade them with information they don’t need, there is a good chance your efforts will be wasted. However, when you give prospective students what you already know they need, you’ll be one step ahead of the institutions still focusing on outbound marketing.

How do you know what your prospective students need? Setting up a buyer persona is a great place to start. Once you have more information about your audience (e.g., goals, behaviors, barriers), you can be more confident that you’re meeting their needs. When you start by helping students wherever they are in the funnel, they begin to trust you. You prove to them that you care about their education.

One of my favorite resources for creating personas is HubSpot. HubSpot makes it easy to put together a campaign based on user behavior — you start with a persona, create your keyword list, etc. Integrating an inbound marketing campaign in this way is unique. You’re pulling prospective students into the funnel when they’re already interested, giving them what they want when they want it. That’s the key to inbound marketing.

Obviously, marketing this targeted doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a great deal of internal buy-in and pulling together more assets. This is a huge challenge for institutions that are already short staffed and constrained by a fixed budget. But in the end, it’s worth your time and effort.

As higher education marketers, if we can help students along their journey from inquiry to admission, our campaigns will be much more effective. While students are weighing their options and thinking about which institutions best fit their needs, we can provide information to guide them — not with the traditional marketing materials of the past, but with relevant information that empowers them to make their own decisions.