Stefan is the founder of Inteleagent – they help education & migration agents get organised, stay sanely productive and 3X the number of clients they manage without hiring more staff, through their all-in-one CRM marketing and operations automation software.
Before launching your online marketing student recruitment campaigns, it’s important that your messaging resonates with your prospective students. You’ll need to know how you want to position your education agency in the market, so your message stands out from the crowd of other education agents.
There are 5 key things you need to consider:
- Ideal Student Profile – what does your ideal prospective student look like?
- Impact and Transformation – what impact do you make on your student clients and how can you transform their lives?
- Features and Benefits – what are they?
- Proof and Credibility – how can you prove that you can deliver on your promise?
- Value Statement – what is your unique selling proposition that will help you stand out against your competition?
Let’s look at each one of them in detail.
1. Ideal student profile
It’s important that you understand your prospective students’ situation before you approach them. You will need to brainstorm a little before you move forward.
You need to put yourself in your prospective student’s shoes. If it’s hard for you to do this, ask one of your current students. Don’t be afraid to talk to some of your current students or even a prospective student to understand them more. It will help you when approaching them later with your offering.
There are 5 key attributes to identify for your prospective student profile:
Position – this is a broad element, but identify where they are located, their income or funding capacity, their budget, etc… Anything related to demographics about your prospective student.
Deepest desires – What do they want to accomplish the most on their mission to achieve their goals? For students generally, their deepest desire would be to get a well-paid job. If you’re a migration agent, your client’s deepest desire might be to get a permanent visa in the country of their choice.
Problems/Frustrations – What problems do they run into when trying to accomplish their goals and desires? Students for example, face a lot of challenges, from not knowing where to start in life, to funding of their studies.
Implications of problems – What happens if those problems aren’t solved? If the students are not able to find funding options they won’t be able to achieve their
goals.
Failures – What is your prospective student failing at? Is your prospective student failing at scoring enough in their IELTS test?
2. Impact and transformation
I haven’t seen many education agencies market to their prospective students by using the impact and how they transform their students’ lives.
For years I didn’t even think about this myself. It’s still tough to focus on this because we live in a world that values benefits and features. It’s easy to talk about them.
I’m not advocating against features and benefits, but before we tell prospective students about them, they should know the impact that your education agency makes on your student clients and how you can transform their current situation into a better one.
Here are some examples of impact and transformations we’ve used in the education agencies I worked with:
- Learn the power of foreign languages – change how you see the world and realize what a small sliver of information you have access to on the whole.
- Gain real world experience – study abroad, coupled with an international internship, is an incredible way to gain some real-world experience.
- Take your future career to new heights – international experience is ranked high among many employers as a critical asset for prospective employees. Studying abroad shows that you are resourceful, adventurous, internationally minded, and appreciate diversity.
Impact statements are similar to benefits but are broader. Think of this as a funnel. At the top of the funnel you have impact & transformation statements, then benefits, and lastly features. Each step gets you closer to be more detailed about your offer.
3. Features and benefits
Benefits don’t need a lot of introduction, so I want to get a little deeper and give you some tangible takeaways on how to write them.
Let’s use the impact statement above of “Learn the power of foreign languages”. If we were to list out a benefit of this, what could we say?
A benefit is usually a verb followed by a noun. To make this easy, let me give you a couple of formulas to start this out.
“You will be able to {verb} {noun} {metric} (optional).“
“You can forget about {verb} {noun} (optional).“
Now let’s fill in the blanks…
“You will be able to increase your chances of getting a student visa by 90%.“
“You can forget about stressing out about your student visa application.“
Just make sure you can back up your metrics if you’re using them.
As we continue down our copy funnel, let’s get more descriptive. A feature is essentially just the “How” to your benefit. In the example above “how” are we going to help them hit their IELTS test goal?
Here are some examples of features:
- General English course
- IELTS Preparation programme
- Voluntary work
- Language workshops
- Language clubs
4. Proof and credibility
This can transform your offer because you’re showing people that you can do what you’re saying and backing it up with things like:
Proof
- Case students
- Testimonials
- References
Credibility
- Client Logos
- References
- Years in business
- Partners
- Publications/articles
A lot of prospective students get “sold” from what we call “social proof”. Essentially social proof is showing your prospect that other students, similar to them, are using you as their education agent.
5. Value statement
A “Value Statement” is something you might not have heard of before. To boil it down, it’s a one sentence description of what you do and for who. This is also an opportunity to help you stand out from the crowd.
Here is the formula:
I help ………………………….. (Niche)
To ………………………….. (Impact Statement)
And ………………………….. (Benefit)
Through ………………………….. (Feature / Proprietary Method)
Niche
Be specific here. If you help eskimos in the southern part of the north pole, then say that.
Don’t go too broad.
Example: “I help international students from India with low IELTS scores.“
Solve problem
Pick the biggest problem that you solve for them. You can easily use any of the impact statements you mapped out. Any of the ones I listed above would work here.
Example: “Learn the power of foreign languages.”
Desired result
What do they want to accomplish the most on their mission to achieve their goal? Pick the one thing that is most important to them.
Example: “Improve the chances of getting your student visa by 90%.”
Feature / Proprietary Method
Let’s wrap it up here by telling them how we do it. Make sure you give your “Proprietary Method” a name. This can be the name of your company, product, service, etc… Some education agents like to use acronyms here. For example, “The ABC Education Agency Method”. Naming your method will help you stand out from the crowd and your competition, so make sure you get this right.
Example: “All-in-one CRM applications management software, Inteleagent.“
Final Statement
Let’s see what the value statement looks like when we put everything together:
I help small & medium education & migration agencies (niche)
Get organised (impact statement)
And 3X the number of clients they manage (benefit)
With our all-in-one CRM applications management software, Inteleagent (Proprietary Method)
As you can see here, if you were to use this in your sales copy, when you’re introducing yourself to someone, it’s very descriptive and helps you stand out.
Let’s use the example of an Education Agent. If you’re introducing yourself to someone and they ask you what you do and you say “I’m and education agent”, is that going to stand out to people? The answer is pretty clear. No, it’s not. It’s boring and unoriginal. Now put that in a cold email and you’re going to hear nothing but crickets.
Instead you should say “I help international students enrol in their dream course in Australia and increase their chances of getting a student visa by 90% with our ABC Education Agency Formula”. A little better than “I’m an education agent” and more likely to get a response.
Conclusion
Most education agencies haven’t gone through this exercise to identify all of these considerations. Use this information as a starting point before you head out and spend money on online marketing student recruitment.
Once you’ve done this exercise, you might find our free international student recruitment online marketing email course useful.
