Encoura

Opening New Markets Action Plan

Is your institution in the market for a new market of prospective students? This action plan empowers enrollment and marketing teams to quickly and easily understand national and institutional data about their current markets and strategically expand into new ones to boost enrollment.

As you continue through each chapter, you will learn how you can enhance these strategies further with various approaches including predictive modeling, advanced student search, and digital marketing strategies.

Chapter 1

Understanding Your Current Markets

What does today’s market look like?

Understanding the total market can seem like an overwhelming and time-consuming task, but the right research can summarize it and equip your team with the knowledge to build a successful strategy. 

Consider tools and research – such as NCES Postsecondary Education reports or Encoura's Market Analysis – to learn the demographics, academic interests, and geography of today’s high school students and reflect on how your institution currently serves these areas, student types, and interests.

Which students are interested in my college?

Next, consider where your college or university currently has brand recognition. One key approach to measure your brand recognition – or more importantly, reputation – is to see which markets you have the most student interest. If you aren’t sure where to start, consider areas from where you’ve had students send test scores or from where you’ve had students express interest.

Once again, take a closer look at these markets to learn more about these students, including their demographics and interests. Drill down to the state, geomarket, and county levels to get the most insights. These are the students who your institution’s brand has been attracting.

Which students are actually enrolling?

The last step in understanding your current market is to pinpoint which students you’ve had the most success enrolling. Again, leverage your CRM student records or team up with a reliable enrollment partner like Encoura to identify which markets have been most successful for your college. 

Encoura’s Insights Cloud shows colleges how their funnel compares to similar schools to help assess competition by state and evaluate potential new markets.

By this point, you know a lot more about the national market, your brand’s reach, and the type of students who you best attract. It’s time to put this knowledge to use. In Chapter 2, we’ll use these insights to explore new markets for your institution.

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Identify Your Best Opportunities with Market Analysis in Insights Cloud

Save time, plan with confidence, and empower your entire team to strategically plan for enrollment success. With Market Analysis, you can visualize five years of historical market data – and compare your current and historical results to your competitors – to inform your future recruitment strategies.

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Chapter 2

Exploring New Markets

How do you get started in new markets (e.g., new states, new segments of students)? What should your institution focus on?

Now that you have a good grasp of your current market position, it’s time to branch out. It can be difficult to decide which direction to expand into new markets, so spending a little time to critically evaluate your opportunities will save you many resources in the long run. 

As Vice President of Sales at Encoura Chris Tyburski shares in the Enrollminute above, it’s important to be willing to commit to two to three years of steady growth when planning to grow in new markets, rather than expecting one season to suffice. 

Pinpoint Markets With Your Biggest Opportunity for Impact

To begin expanding your market reach, it’s crucial to identify the areas that have the most opportunity for your specific college or university to grow. This can be done in a few ways.

Find Students Willing to Travel for College

While many enrollment teams are quick to turn to the biggest exporting states to recruit (those who have historically had the most students leaving the state to go to college in another state), it's important to filter this information by what students in those states are currently saying their plans for traveling to college are. 

This crucial information can be found in IPEDS data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with further insights available in Eduventures’ Admitted Student Research™. 

Additionally, it’s essential to consider how far these students are willing to travel for college. 

For example, in the chart below, we see that students from New Jersey travel an average of 222 miles to go to an out-of-state school. This is a key indicator that New Jersey high school students prefer to stay in the region. 

Here are four sample exporting states and the median distances that their students are enrolling out-of-state, in addition to which states are most often enrolling these students.

Consider Markets Where You’ve Had High Institutional Visibility

In addition to considering national and regional market data, it’s important to dive into your institution-specific data. 

Specifically, take a look at where the data tells you that your college has had students express interest in recent years. What states is your funnel showing have had a good number of inquiries and/or applications? Consider investing more attention in these markets to grow them and support more students there through the funnel.

Identify Students with Similar School Interest

Another effective strategy to pinpoint new markets for your institution is to refine your search and outreach strategies by school type and strongest or growing programs. 

Leverage college planning programs, competitor insights, or predictive modeling like Encoura’s Opportunity Model to find students who are interested in schools of similar size and type as yours. 

Likewise, taking advantage of these resources, your historical funnel data, or digital marketing strategies that speak to students’ interests can help you identify students who are interested in top programs that you offer.

Consider Your Competition in New Markets

After researching which geographic areas may be opportune markets for your college, it's important to filter these areas through a competitor lens. While it can be tempting to recruit students in states that are known to send a lot of students out of state for college, it’s essential to understand the challenges associated with this strategy.

For example, as seen in the graph below, Texas is where you’ll find the most competition. Instead, it could be a stronger strategy to consider which top exporting states have fewer colleges competing for their students. 

This graph reveals the top 10 states that send students to other states for college, as well as how many colleges from out-of-state are recruiting their students.

If you have been using Encoura’s Insights Cloud, take time to look into who your specific competitors are. Which colleges have had the most overlap of visibility with your institution? This pinpoints which other schools students who are interested in your college are also considering. Note which states these competitors are in (and even high schools in High School Explorer). 

Now that we’ve identified our opportune markets, it’s time to learn how to search and shape your student lists in them. 

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Communicate Your Institution’s Value

From initial outreach to responsive communication flows, Encoura’s Enrollment Marketing Services team can help your institution boost inquiry and application generation, plus yield students and prevent melt year after year.

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Chapter 3

Search and Shape Your New Market(s)

How can your institution find the right students?

In this chapter, we’ll move forward with specific strategies about engaging the right students in those markets. 

Building Your Student Search List

The simplest way to start building your search list is to narrow down your search to your new market areas and filter by your institution’s preferred academic scores, interests, or other characteristics that reflect your student body. If you are able to leverage predictive models to narrow your search, that’ll help focus your resources even more on students most likely to enroll. 

Prospect-to-Enroll Predictive Modeling

Toward this end, a prospect-to-enroll predictive model, like Encoura’s Smart+ that empowers your team to further filter your list before you purchase it, will focus your team’s time and money on students who are most likely to enroll in your specific college.

This model strategy produces a stronger return on investment for you than a typical zip code targeting strategy because it individualizes the students to focus on their enrollment factors rather than pursuing a student just because they live in a specific zip code.

New Markets Predictive Modeling

A second predictive model–designed specifically for expanding your reach and elevating your brands in new markets–is Encoura’s Opportunity+. 

Opportunity+ is a 3-in-1 predictive model that provides you three scores to assess which students to engage.

Opportunity Score

This score predicts if a student is likely to be interested in a college or university similar to yours before the student actually inquires, allowing your institution to get ahead of the competition.

Travel Score: Out of State

The score predicts if a student is likely to travel out of state for college, allowing your institution to expand into new geographical markets with less risk.

Travel Score: 200+ Miles

This score predicts if a student is willing to move over 200 miles for college, allowing your institution to invest in prospective students who actively want to leave their immediate home areas.

The size of your institution’s state, as well as its location within your state, will help you determine which of the Opportunity+ scores may be best for you to leverage for reaching new markets. For example, the 200+ Miles Travel Score may serve your strategy better if your college is near the border of your state or if your state is large and you are considering where to best recruit students from other areas of your state.

Next, let’s discuss how to ensure that you’re not missing a final key market of students – those who have already indicated an expressed interest in your college.

Grow and Shape Your Class in New Markets

Strategically increase your enrollment from new markets with Encoura’s latest data science–predictive models that weave seamlessly into your student search.

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Chapter 4

Connecting with Hand Raisers

How can your team find students who have indicated interest in your institution?

It goes without saying that a crucial market to target is those who have already indicated interest in your institution. These “hand raiser” students are already more open to engaging with you because of their familiarity with your college. So—how can you better understand and find this group of students?

About Hand Raisers

These are students who have expressed interest in your institution by responding to your marketing, visiting the website, or even they’ve written your institution down in a college planning program. They can also be connected to your school through alumni, faculty, staff, and current students. It’s also important to consider the students who are not being contacted by other colleges.

How to Find Interested Students

While it’s possible to engage with some affiliated or under-engaged students through reaching out to your community directly, the Encoura Combined Data Set has several tools to help you quickly and easily find and reach these students:

Declared Student Connection™

Connect with students who have already expressed interest in your institution and are 6x more likely to enroll.

Affinity Connection™

Build on prospective students’ existing foundations of familiarity and connectedness with your school via alumni, faculty/staff, and current students.

Undiscovered Students

Identify and engage students not being contacted by other colleges to boost your enrollment and create access for all students.

We’ll also discuss opportunities for connecting with students who have engaged with your digital marketing or website in the next chapter.

Complete Student Information to Increase Engagement Opportunities

With Encoura’s eMatch, you can integrate your CRM and we will fill in missing info (mailing address, email address, etc.) on prospective students and inquiries from other sources to expand your personalized outreach and marketing.

Reach Hand Raisers with Encoura’s Declared Student Connection™

Connect with students who have already expressed interest in your institution and are 6x more likely to enroll.

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Chapter 5

Engaging Your New Market

How do you stay connected with students and their families? How do you stay connected with parents?

Once you’ve found and shaped your new markets, the question becomes, how do you engage consistently and effectively? Just like with your current markets, successful connections with target audiences requires a multi-touch outreach strategy to stay top-of-mind amongst their multiple college options.

Stay Connected with Website Retargeting 

Website retargeting helps your institution stay in front of students who have already demonstrated interest by visiting your website. Used effectively, this tactic allows you to continue to engage with the prospects, even if they didn’t interact during the first visit to your site. 

Use Website Retargeting for your institution’s:

  • Offers, like application waivers
  • Upcoming deadlines (e.g., application, deposits)
  • Upcoming events (e.g., Admitted Student Day)
  • Engaging parents with key dates and deadlines

Example 1:

In Northeastern State University’s retargeting ad, they’re reminding prospective students of the start of their spring semester. Including a date in retargeting ads reminds your audience to take action by a specific time.

Meet Them Where They Are With Residential Targeting

Another invaluable tool in engaging with your new market is to use residential targeting. Using offline data, residential targeting allows you to reach students and their families at their home on their most-used devices. 

Our clients have seen 5x more engagement with this family outreach strategy.

Example 2:

In this parent-specific ad, Kent State is congratulating parents on their students’ acceptance while also keeping them informed on next steps. We know that parents are influential in helping their students work toward deadlines, so parent-specific messaging helps your ads stand out in feeds.

Robust Data and Parent Emails 

Parent/guardian and family connection is also hugely important to staying connected with prospects in your new market. Recent research from Eduventures revealed that 96% of parents/guardians want communication directly from colleges, proving that recruiting is no longer about only connecting with students. 

Ensuring you are communicating with families in addition to students is an extremely beneficial part of your engagement strategy – especially when entering a new market. 

The Encoura Combined Data Set is the only double-validated parent/guardian data in the country so you have confidence that you are reaching parents/guardians that want to hear from you. 

When working with a new market, having robust student and parent/guardian data will make staying connected all the easier. 

Reengage Students in Your New Markets

Encoura’s Digital Marketing team can provide a retargeting plan to reengage students in your new market(s) and continue building your connection to them and their families.

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Chapter 6

Tackling New Markets Checklist

A checklist for opening new markets.

You’ve made it through the learning and now it’s time to get started! Here’s a quick checklist to help your team start understanding how to approach new markets.

  • Gain an understanding of your current markets. This includes high-level data, your recent student interest, and prospective student views on your college.

  • Strategically pinpoint your opportune markets. Take into account national data, your institutional visibility, and competition.

  • Solidify a student search strategy for your new markets. Consider boosting your search with predictive models that focus your resources where they’ll pay off.

  • Connect with hand raisers—those already interested in your institution.

  • Develop a communication plan to engage students (and their families!) in your new markets.

As always, we would love to partner with you to set up a winning strategy to engage your next class using Mindsets.

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