Determining Marketing Needs
What are the marketing needs for online delivery of courses and programs at your institution? Discuss how those needs were defined and who is responsible for implementing them.
I don't think a strategy has been fully developed to address the marketing needs of our planned online programs and it has proven to be a source of frustration for our sales and marketing teams. I don't think we really know who our online students will be. The typical student in our brick-and-mortar classes is a mid to senior level business executive looking for short-term courses in management, leadership, finance, strategy, and marketing. A large percentage of our students are also international and among their reasons for choosing our university is reputation, faculty/staff engagement and support, and opportunities to network with other executives from a variety of industries and countries. But how will this translate online? How can we create an online learning community that meets the needs of the executive student? My feeling is that we don't know enough about our potential online students and this is why determining our marketing needs is proving problematic. Fortunately, this course has taught me the questions I didn't know needed to be asked, and I will be sharing my thoughts with all parties concerned. In the end, our sales and marketing team will be responsible for determining our marketing needs and developing new strategies for promoting our future online programs.
Veronica,
It is important to remember that an unavoidable but healthy tension exists between creating a new "product" (while preserving the best of the current one) and marketing it. Your challenge is to know how to manage that tension. Having a strategy for marketing and sales starts with alignment of the "learning strategy" with the business objectives and responding to the needs of your potential online community. From your posting, I presume that you already have enough information about who purchases your courses and where they see the value in your institution. The challenge to the marketing folks is to make the online programs fee as "real" to potential online students as the your on-ground courses have been to the executives who have taken and applied them to their work environments.
Dr. Robert Roehrich
At our school, we plan to use social media and youtube as our primary marketing vehicles. We know our online student prospects are those that are comfortable with computers. Word of mouth is our best advertising, and so we put our resources into the quality of our programs and our student services to build our reputation. We love good feedback and testimonials from our students. We use facebook as our alumni connection tool and that results in great free exposure. So far, our aumni only say nice things about the school, and we work hard to exceed our students expectations.
Mark,
Great strategy! Have you considered establishing an alumni group or association? You might also want to consider establishing an active blog for your alumni to interact with your faculty, thereby keeping them engaged with the school.
Dr. Robert Roehrich
