Loyalty is the ultimate goal of marketers and it should be on the minds of anyone managing brand or new venture. It is often said that 80% of your company’s profits will likely come from the top 20% of your customer base. Another name for the top of that 20% is loyalists. Loyalists talk up their brand, actively engage in promotions or brand activities and rarely switch or move even if discounts or incentives are offered. They give back in the form of spending more of their share of wallet and through referrals. In higher education, loyalists are the alums that go to homecoming and give back year after year. They go to the reunions and keep up with their former classmates even when it is years after they graduate.
Moving prospects from unaware to awareness is an advertising and social media challenge. In marketing Monmouth College, direct mail to prospects is the traditional route for generating awareness among graduating high school seniors, but today most research on college is done online by the prospects themselves.
Once the prospect is aware of your brand, you should consider the best strategies and tactics for getting into the consideration frame. The consideration frame is the “short list” of schools the prospect wants to consider. Another way to describe consideration frame are the the finalists in your wish list.
The next step is generating trial. Trial could be a visit to the college web site to see a virtual tour. At this point you will begin to reap the benfits of your loyalty intiatives. Before you achieve loyalty you need to establish a pattern of brand perference. Many loyalty programs are built on the premise that this phase is the most important link to loyalty.
Repeat might mean coming up with retention staregies if you are an institution of higher learning. The objective is loyalty. Using the example of marketing Monmouth College, loyalty is a current student or alum recommending Monmouth to someone else.
Helping brands plan promotions and incentives for each step in the continuum, let alone planning how to handle challenges is challenging. Each company must distinguish its marketing programs or its methods to get attention. In higher education a common practice is to copy or patterns oneself after an aspirational peer.
Another proven marketing principle is that a high perceived value translates into brand preference and goodwill in higher education. The brand value equation provides a meaningful model that helps us understand how to build that goodwill. Ultimately the marketing plan, resources available, execution and learning from results determine the success of your marketing program. Marketing criteria and milestones established in a business plan will become your recipe for brand momentum and success.
Prior to beginning any marketing plan it is recommended that the institution conduct study and research on the key stakeholders. The problem most institutions face is that marketing is inherently repugnant because it smacks of manipulation. Plus the task of market planning requires colleges to do something that is not natural. Traditional universities were not designed to brand distinctively or address metrics of quality as benefits. Promoting a quality education or faculty is like telling prospects you have good customer service—everyone says the same thing. Large universities have not successfully educated students around their individual and distinct needs, yet their faculty are often quite accomplished. They must be effcient and teach students in very large groups to compensate for their high salaries. This is especially true in the first few years of a student’s education in business. It happens often in general education too. If your customer’s goal is to land their desired job you need to convince prospects to take a closer look at your school, look around its offerings via the website, and convice them to visit campus. If they live far from the college, your job will be tougher. No matter what their incoming academic achievement, you need to convince them that they will be a better job prospect, smarter, and more able to handle leadership opportunities when they graduate or you will fail.
Asking traditional universities to market something distinctive and memorable is challenging. Becoming a “great college” is a process. Focusing on student success represents a seismic shift in how society, broadly speaking, has judged high quality—in higher education. Its a move away from the trational focus on research and knowledge creation. A focus on teaching and smaller classes moves the brand benfits toward a focus on learning and knowledge proliferation (Christensen, 2011).
But at the end of the day, the success of your new company is still depended on getting new customers. But to be truly successful you will need to move new customers down the continuum towards that path to loyalty.
