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Are you looking to improve your education marketing efforts? One of the key steps to success is identifying and targeting your ideal audience. Today's education industry is highly competitive and constantly evolving. Accurately targeting your audience enables you to deliver customized messaging and offers that resonate with your target market. Here is a six-step guide on how to find your target audience for education.
Start by reviewing any information you have, such as Google Analytics data, to learn more about your clients. Google Analytics breaks down your website insights according to gender, age and location. You can also derive information from email lists and current student demographics.
This information will give you an idea of who is already interested in your educational offerings. Analyzing this data lets you identify trends and patterns associated with repeat, loyal customers. This analysis will help define your education target audience.
Next, consider researching education trends and student preferences. This research helps you identify any education niches that you can take advantage of. For example, students may be increasingly interested in innovative online education options like what we offer at MedCerts.
Education trends appear and disappear, which can affect your learners and competitors. Staying on top of these trends will help you create effective marketing campaigns that resonate with your education target market.
Once you have an idea of your target audience, create a customer persona or avatar. A customer persona is a detailed fictional representation of your ideal customer. It personifies the key traits of your target audience, allowing you to effectively interpret audience insights and market research.
To create the persona, you’ll need to collect general demographics, client interests and student psychographics, like hobbies, desires, motives and lifestyles. Your customer persona will guide your marketing messaging and help you connect with your target audience on a deeper level. Remember to update the profile regularly to keep up with emerging trends.
Layer interests, demographics and other variables to create different audience subsets. The subsets will help you road-test and refine your audience-targeting efforts. The world of education has a wide audience that goes beyond young learners. A few subsets you can target include:
Adult learners
Active-duty service members or spouses
Marginalized groups
Retirees
Working professionals
Career changers
Creating different subsets allows you to identify the groups that are most likely to respond to your messaging.
Identifying who your target audience isn’t can sometimes be as helpful as determining who your target audience is. Reverse thinking helps you identify groups that are unlikely to be interested in your educational offerings. These groups often resemble your target audience but won’t be receptive to your offer. Tweaking your marketing strategy appropriately allows you to avoid targeting the wrong people and wasting your budget.
Working with a trusted academic partner like MedCerts can be incredibly beneficial in expanding your reach and growing your target audience. MedCerts has years of experience in the education industry and can help you reach the next generation of individuals pursuing higher education. Working with MedCerts allows you to access academic partner resources and increase your ROI. Work with us to broaden your academic reach and prepare for the new landscape of academia.
Patrick Verda is MedCerts' Director of Partnerships and a senior-level sales leader. With more than 20 years of sales and sales management experience in the Ed-Tech sector, Patrick understands the complex needs and challenges that organizations face, and he enjoys working collaboratively to address these challenges.
Patrick spent years in various sales and sales management roles at Blackboard, IBM, and Cengage Learning. Patrick earned a BA from Illinois Wesleyan University and a Master of Business Administration from Hamilton University.
Patrick resides in Bloomington, IL with his wife and four grown children. He is a member of the advisory board for the Chicago-based nonprofit 'Cardz For Kidz'.