Joining The Dots in Your Marketing

For any organisation, joining the dots between departments and teams to provide a coherent customer journey can be a struggle.

Working within the college sector, Blueberry understands how challenging it can be to coordinate multiple initiatives, from apprenticeships to funded training programmes to commercial training opportunities.

Follow our top three tips to boost your college’s business development and business engagement.

1. PLAN YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Amidst the multitude of obligations and marketing activities across your college, fostering strong communication between departments can be the key to empowering your business engagement. Effective planning of your customer journey can put you in control, ensuring that your marketing messages are not missed or overlooked.

Engaging with prospective students and business prospects at the optimal time helps everything click into place, preventing your marketing messages from getting missed or falling by the wayside. So how do you achieve this?

Having an overview of what’s coming up at college means you can plan marketing resources effectively – pooling them when needed during peak times (for example, around enrolment time) and sharing any spare capacity during quieter periods.

Think about how businesses you work with tend to move through the programmes and the support you offer. Which programmes are complementary or tend to be of interest at a similar point in a business’s engagement journey? How do most businesses engage with you in the first instance? You can tailor what you promote to each company based on the stage of your relationship and where the business sits on its development lifecycle.

For instance, if you’re promoting training commercially, could you target businesses you already have a trusted relationship with through apprenticeships or funded training schemes? Or, if a company you’re working with is experiencing a period of growth, can you capture this information and classify it as a potentially high-value prospect for further targeting?

2. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

In any organisation, connecting the dots between departments and coordinating engagement can often be challenging. For example, the apprenticeship team might be chasing a business about an apprentice they have agreed to take on, while another team working on a different programme is contacting the same business without an awareness of this existing relationship.

Sharing information between teams to provide a single, comprehensive customer view can be immensely valuable. It not only allows you to leverage these existing relationships to their full potential but also makes your audience feel valued and integral to the process, as you can tailor your offerings to their specific needs.

What’s more, it makes for a much smoother customer experience. It also allows you to plan an interconnected customer journey with multiple touchpoints to guide businesses through the various levels of support and training on offer.

3. JOIN THE DOTS

By mapping out the customer journey and ensuring that you have a centralised view of the data, you can join the dots and develop a marketing plan to guide a business through the support and training you offer.

By adopting a more integrated approach, each business should receive more targeted communications focused on the most interesting and relevant elements. This coordinated communication strategy can make your audience feel reassured and confident, knowing they receive the most relevant information.

Without some degree of control, teams may avoid sharing their data for fear that other departments will heavily target it. If different departments or teams communicate independently with the businesses they work with, they risk bombarding them with too much information.

Joining the dots can help foster and grow your existing business relationships. And, just as significantly, joined-up communications will help the businesses you work with navigate what you have to offer and identify how to get the help they need.