Abstract:

Every year, universities compete to attract new students by investing resources in marketing campaigns. However, to minimize costs, universities that offer a large variety of undergraduate and graduate programs are often forced to run non-tailored marketing interventions. It is exactly what our own university tends to do by concentrating its investments in marketing interventions aimed at attracting students from all disciplines without tailoring their efforts to specific programs. In 2012-2013, the Faculty of Social Sciences developed and implemented a multifaceted marketing campaign tailored for the Master’s Program in Public Affairs, a multidisciplinary graduate program aimed at training future civil servants, mainly policy analysts. A professional in advertising campaigns for higher education institutions developed the intervention. The objective of this study was to examine, descriptively, whether the number of new enrollees increased after the implementation of a tailored multifaceted marketing intervention that was mainly based on the Web, emails and the social media. Using administrative data, we conducted a longitudinal descriptive analysis for the yearly number of new enrollees, the yearly number of demands received and the yearly number of offers made to potential new students. From year 1999-2000 to year 2012-2013 (i.e. pre-intervention years), the highest yearly number of new enrollees was 27 (year 2009-2010), while the lowest number was 12 students (years 2004-2005, 2005-2006 and 2007-2008). In years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 (the post-intervention period), the number of new enrollees increased to 46 and 36 students, respectively. Although purely descriptive and non-inferential, these results suggest that the multifaceted marketing interventions generated an increase in the number of new enrollees.

Keywords:

student recruitment, advertising, higher education, social media.