Best practices in marketing executive education

The four areas most commonly cited in best practices were: building client relationships, regularly publishing faculty research, conducting focused marketing events with top speakers and investing in direct selling resources.
This report is on the UNICON members research project that was  targeted on three areas: marketing for open enrolment programmes, for custom programmes and brand awareness marketing. From the 47 schools involved – out of which half are  EFMD members, several interesting findings emerge:
* 89% of schools changed their marketing strategy in the last year to include more digital marketing.
* Around half of the schools have efforts in marketing and sales combined into one operating unit (for efficiency) the other half have a separate marketing and sales unit (for dedicated focus).  
* Web-sites are the most effective marketing channel. 26% of schools make major website changes more than once a year, 22% do it once a year and 55% of the schools make major website changes less than once a year.
* The majority of schools spend 5% or less of revenue of their marketing efforts.
* For customised business, 57% of respondents use a push strategy of personal selling to prospects and clients.
* For open programmes, 85% of respondents use a combination of a push (personal selling activity) and a pull (advertising, sales promotion and publicity) to attract potential clients.    
* Marketing spend is not consistently allocated to the most effective channels: respondents cited websites as their most effective marketing channels, but the largest share of marketing expenditures is allocated to traditional methods.
* Almost 3 of out 4 schools spend 90% or more of their marketing budget to promote programmes domestically (in country), one third of schools spent 15% of their marketing budget to promote programmes internationally (outside country).
This 30 pages report is downloadable from the UNICON website. The various research activities were conducted in the second half of 2012.