--By Roshee Lamichhane

 

About a decade ago, there was never a need for educational institutions to aggressively market themselves, as the demand for quality education generally outgrew supply. Today, however, with increasing competition, there is a growing awareness within this community on the importance of marketing a school or college. They are also making conscious efforts to establish the institutional brand, attract quality students, and stay ahead of competition at all times.

 

Research points to the fact that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are increasingly evaluating marketing outsourcing and the growing maturity of marketing services that can be outsourced. This research evidence emphasizes that marketing outsourcing will soon become a key outsourced function globally, much in the lines of Finance and Accounting, Human Resources, Logistics, Security, and Legal services.

 

Emergence of MPO Companies

Marketing Process Outsourcing (MPO) companies provide organizations with measurable, high-impact, and cost-efficient outsourcing solutions and deliver value by partnering with them as an extended arm. The services they render to marketing are something analogous to what Finance and Accounts Officers (FAOs) do to the F & A function of an organization. They resort to componentizing all key marketing functions and sub-functions. Later, they build processes for each of these in such a way that they can be delivered by leveraging the best functional and domain knowledge banks. They also use best global practices in the most efficient and cost effective manner either onsite or remotely. 

 

Role of PMPs 

The role of Professional Marketing Partners (PMPs) becomes at once important as the education space is, slowly but surely, realizing the need to have a professional and cost-effective marketing set-up in place that proactively and continuously communicates with the target segment, rather than engaging only in seasonal marketing efforts.

 

Engaging the services of a PMP has become the first step towards firming up an educational institution’s brand through a pro-active marketing program to reach your target segment. The logic and rationale are simple: “they not only possess a deep marketing expertise and an in-depth understanding of the education marketing, but design and deliver compelling solutions customized to its needs”. Educational Branding and Marketing Services and Solutions generally include but are not limited to:

• Admission Marketing: Offering tried and tested program mix to help expand admission outreach and attract quality students.

• Placement Connect: Providing continuous engagement with corporate houses to increase student placement opportunities, to supplement or substitute institution’s placement office.

• Online Reputation: Leveraging social and other online/digital media to enhance the brand value of the institution and engage effectively with the ecosystem.

• Ecosystem Engagement: Crafting marketing strategies such as alumni engagement programs, corporate branding, etc., covering all stakeholders—including corporate, faculty, parents, and alumni—to facilitate continuous interaction and support to the institution.

 

This continuous engagement with a Professional Marketing Partner helps:

• Attract and increase quality of students every year

• Retain top faculty 

• Increase student placement opportunities through continuous interaction with businesses 

• Optimize cost of acquisition per candidate 

• Increase support from alumni and benefactors

 

There are several pioneering MPO agencies that have been helping the education community on how to market a school/college and formulate winning marketing strategies to effectively engage with the ecosystem, build a sustainable brand, and address the challenges faced by them. Their distilled experiences enable them to identify the key challenges faced by their client organizations in the marketing function. They align their services to help Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) address some of these challenges and bridge the gaps while improving the efficiency/effectiveness of their marketing function. 

 

Challenges

Some of the typical challenges in the context of branding and marketing an educational institution include:

 

People and hiring challenges

• It is difficult and expensive to build in-house expertise for all the key programmes that firms need to run

• A significant part of  a company’s bandwidth is consumed by low-impact tactical work, leaving very little time for strategic marketing work

• Training people is a big challenge and businesses will seldom be able to hire experienced practitioners and best practices are difficult to come by

 

Lack of outsourced expertise

• It is tough to find the right outsourced resources. Advertising, design and web agencies offer little strategic insights and are seldom aligned with the firm’s strategic business objectives

• External agencies seldom bring the practitioners’ view to the table and would like to work with someone who has done this before

• Monitoring metrics and ROI on marketing programmes is a big challenge

 

Cost challenges

• Companies are always under pressure to do more with their marketing budgets and resources, but their costs don’t seem to be going down

• Companies’ marketing requirements are globally distributed, but their costs and people are not

• Businesses would like to leverage shared services to benefit from economies of scale and process efficiencies but there are no marketing shared services offerings easily available

• Companies don’t want to invest in building expensive in-house resources or teams for certain tactical marketing competencies or for cyclical or part-time marketing requirements

 

Marketing Outsourcing Partnership Model for SMBs

The services of MPO companies extend from managing specific functions or processes for large marketing organizations to running the complete marketing function for SMBs. Generally, the Marketing Outsourcing Partnership (MOP) Model is backed by an expert team of marketing professionals with significant expertise in global marketing. They offer their clients a range of ‘marketing in a box’ and ‘marketing on demand’ outsourcing options that include full function outsourcing, outsourcing of specific projects and programmes as well as their execution.

(Lamichhane is Manager, Business Development, at Chaudhary Group)