Target all decision-makers, not just pupils: Samyaak Jain

In conversation with Social Samosa, Samyaak Jain, Client Relations Head, Admatazz traces the journey of evolution of marketing in regards to education brands over the years. 

The ongoing pandemic has affected businesses across the spectrum, education brands being one of the positively impacted ones. From finding innovative ways to get lessons across to market them in ways to increase reach, a lot has changed for remote learning over the last few months. It was a change in the making, however, it has been accelerated due to need. Admatazz is an independent Digital Marketing and Media Solutions Company that has worked with a plethora of brands across banking, automobile, real estate, publishing and education.

Among their client roster, education brands form a huge chunk, lending the team niche expertise in the sector. Some of the major education brands handled by the agency include JBCN Education, IIDE, Children’s Nook, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, T2XCL and S.P. Jain. 

Admatazz Client Relations Head, Samyaak Jain shares with us the experience of witnessing growth in the sector.

How have the fundamentals of Education Marketing or marketing for education brands evolved in the past few years?

I think not just the marketing, but the industry, in general, has evolved. With the advent of digital media various institutions, foreign and Indian, used to advertise their courses. Now, most of them are even selling their short and long courses to be consumed online. There are scores of online courses from new-age institutes to even the age-old IVY Leagues.

Marketing such courses have definitely evolved, especially the change in demographics. Last year we marketed an online course from a USA based university all over Asia, the best results we got were from northern and eastern Indian tier 2 cities, and this was an expensive course. 

When it comes to marketing a programme or degree that cannot be attended online, we have noticed how it’s important to target all the decision-makers in the family, not just the one who will be enrolling. Another observation of evolution was the importance of regional content and tonality. Foreign universities use the same messaging for all parts of the Indian demographics. We know that the communication tonality (not the language always) changes even if you are moving from South to North Mumbai. This has been learned after years of trial and errors and data analysis. In a nutshell, education marketing has evolved to become far more specific online.

With education being a competitive space, how do brands stand out through their Marketing Initiatives? Please share a few tips.

We manage campaigns for more than 25 education brands. One thing we feel is common to all the marketing strategies is the time spent on understanding the target audience. It helps that we have developed our own data analytics tools to understand them better. Since ticket prices are usually high in education even a small tweak in cost per lead can increase profitability multifold, so spend a lot of trials on understanding the audience and locking in a particular audience type. 

Secondly, video content is better than static is a no brainer, but it makes a lot of difference when you spend adequate time developing the right story to deliver to the audience. This is where you can beat established brands at their game. When ads with a preview of what is going to be taught come on an interested person's home feed, it improves the CTR tremendously and thus leads to a better acquisition cost. Lastly, don’t neglect search. Search is the most powerful digital medium and if you can place a high organic ranking for your target keywords, you’ve hit a home run. 

Online education has gained prominence in the background of the pandemic. How can education brands leverage this demand? 

We’ve seen a huge uptick amongst the audience for online courses. Whether it’s a trend analysis or search volume for specific keywords, the increase has been multifold for the education industry. Broadly, the audience can be classified into two kinds. First ones are those who are looking at upskilling. Which is where people will buy into courses such as digital marketing, graphic design, python programming, data science etc. Here, it really matters how good the quality of the course is that you are providing. One of our oldest client’s IIDE (Indian Institute of Digital Education) did a Free Masterclass webinar series that managed to acquire approximately 21,000 leads in a matter of just 3 weeks. They usually have to limit admissions due to the inflow for their offline courses, this time they had to for the online ones as well. This proves my point above that a good preview always works for online courses.

The second kind of audience is hobby learners. From home-makers to owners of MSMEs to C-suite of big corporations, everyone has a passion they are looking to pursue during these times. In this case, a lot of established brands should and are coming up with courses such as stock market nuances, culinary, design and art, game theory and even various types of coding.  There is a huge market out there and brands need to develop ancillary courses such as these.

The pandemic has changed the axioms of campaign creation & execution. From an agency perspective, what kind of capabilities & units that agencies need to add to create a holistic setup? 

We have always had this belief as an agency, and this is something that our Founder, Yash, is very vocal about as well, in the digital world, media and creative go hand in hand. Now, even basic data analytics need to be accompanied by the two. If you want your clients to benefit out of you, I think we need to have creative and media expertise in-house. Another very crucial setup is a search specialist team. No digital marketing plan can start without an effective SEO strategy, that’s the first point on the checklist.

Apart from the above, we have also got an in-house video team and the right kind of specialist vendors for jobs that require specific expertise. Its an expensive setup but we are testing the waters in our aim to become a more holistic and one-stop agency for all kinds of digital solutions.