The process is the plan.
Yes, you can get there from here.
Most in-house teams — whether one person, a tiny-but-mighty staff, or a multi-department organization — simply don’t have the full range of expertise and capabilities needed to execute smoothly on the spectrum of strategies and tactics it takes to do contemporary enrollment marketing. And that’s okay, because you don’t have to.
By embracing a systematic approach and partnering with qualified experts, you can go further faster. North Star Marketing can help your team get aligned around strategic objectives and focused on developing effective campaigns that connect with qualified families and students. We work as an extension of your team to collaborate on initiatives that deliver results.
But before we talk about North Star's systematic approach to planning and executing marketing strategy for your school, college, or university, let's take a step back and consider three common enrollment marketing gaps.
Three Common Enrollment Marketing Gaps
Strategy
The impact of gaps in strategy:
Expertise
The impact of gaps in expertise:
Capacity
The impact of gaps in capacity:
In every client engagement — whether it’s a single project, such as a brand or website build, or an ongoing digital marketing initiative — we want our clients to grow in their knowledge of contemporary marketing strategies and tactics. Using the Principles of Prioritization, our flexible, scalable framework for prioritizing and planning marketing initiatives, we walk our clients through our proven process for mapping out marketing priorities and developing high-impact campaigns.
Principles of Prioritization
With so many options, teams often struggle to know where and how to invest their limited resources. North Star's proven process, the Principles of Prioritization, helps teams develop a systematic plan to address short-term gaps and deploy long-term promotional campaigns.
Philosophy
We start by learning about your mission, vision, and values. Although we aren’t necessarily reframing these core purpose statements, it’s imperative that we have a clear understanding of who you are, where you are going, and how you behave along the way.
Priorities
Next, we develop a backlog of big-picture objectives. What does your school need from marketing? Right now, six months from now, a year from now, and beyond. You can’t do everything, so where should you focus? How will you measure progress for each goal?
Platform
The Platform phase is all about readiness. Is your marketing infrastructure solid? We’ll evaluate your brand identity, messaging, multimedia, website, print/digital collateral, presentation collateral, and MarTech. Are they ready to support Promotional Campaigns?
Promotions
With a solid Platform in place, we then deploy Promotional Campaigns focused on specific audiences, delivering dialed-in messaging by age-and-stage. The cohesive Campaigns blend In-Person, Digital, and Traditional tactics to connect with qualified prospects and guide them through the buyer journey.
Plan
It’s all about execution. Working from a prioritized backlog, we help you map out your budget, timing, roles and responsibilities, and metrics for success. For clarity and accountability, every Campaign is mapped in Via, our marketing planning and project collaboration platform.
A bias toward action ... and results.
When you engage with North Star Marketing, you grow your team’s strategic thinking, expertise, and capacity. Here’s what that looks like.
