Global Trends: Looking at emerging trends in international higher education one can see a number of  distinct developments.

1. More and more countries are competing for students from many of the same group of countries.

2. The division between recruiting and target recruitment countries is blurring since several countries are key recruitment countries for other nations, while they are also actively recruiting international students themselves..

3. Changing direction of mobility, reflecting shifts in economic, political influence and power, from West-East.

Trends:

1) The number of countries that are actively involved in international student recruitment has increased over the past 5-10 years.

 2) Many countries that used to only send students abroad, have started to improve the quality of their own higher education and developed strategies and policies to attract international students:

 These countries include China, South Korea, Mexico, and – to a lesser extent – Russia, Taiwan,

Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and (at least until the recent political change) Egypt, Gulf States.

3) Their target countries for recruitment are often within their own (Asian, Latin American, or North African) region, and to a large extent, they often match the main target recruitment countries of the big players in the global recruitment market (the US, UK, Australia, Germany and France).

4) Many have ambitions to become top destination countries for higher education and research in their respective region, and become study hubs (Singapore, Malaysia, some Gulf States)

5) The more traditional study abroad destinations, such as the US, Europe and Australia, will likely remain study, destinations in the foreseeable future. However, as a consequence of this multi polar world and increased international competition for students and knowledge, directions of international student mobility are beginning to change, essentially in two ways.

a) The economic and political balance of power is slowly shifting east, international mobility patterns are beginning to change in this direction as well. The clearest example of this is China, which, as the second most powerful economy in the world, is rapidly becoming a study destination for students from all over the globe. This development is actively encouraged by the Chinese government. China will become a serious competitor, followed by countries such as Malaysia.

b) The regionalization of international student mobility is accelerating. More and more students are studying abroad within their own region. This development is most obvious in Asia and Europe, but is also taking place in West-Africa and East-Africa. The increased regionalization is mainly due to (i) the improved quality of higher education in many parts of the world, which offers opportunities for good-quality education in regions where such opportunities used to be scarce, and (ii) the gradual development of regional “higher education following the model of the European Bologna Process.  If these regional higher education areas take shape, international student mobility is likely to regionalize further.

How should Institutions respond effectively to manage and exploit the challenges and opportunities both at a strategic level and operational level in Global Higher Education?

What are your thoughts, ideas, experiences, which areas can we assist you with ?

Lets start the conversation alexandros@weknowbettermarketing.com

Alexandros Dearges-Chantler

Director WeKnowBetter.

Strategy 2012.

 1) Search: Personal online searching based on location metrics and interests is the next big thing. How can your online strategy reflect this? Are you utilizing tracking cookies and analytics to gain information about your customers?

2) Content: its still king. What knowledge and information are you providing and how? Do you have a marketing communications plan? Are you keeping up with developments in your industry? By planning for all eventualities and setting out where you want to be in the future, your marketing strategy will have a clear focus and keep you a step ahead at all times.

3) The media: Bloggers, journalists and early adopters are crucial to success in some industries. Who’s who in yours, and how can you get them on your side?

4) Website: What is its function for your business? Is it just a landing page, or is it a way to actively generate leads? Who maintains it and are they doing a good enough job? Is there potential for growth that you’re missing out on? Think about your audience, what they’re currently getting out of your website, what you’re getting out of your audience, and what more you can do to engage customers online.

3) Social Media Networks, how do you use it, Twitter has continued to explode, deal-of-the-day group discount websites are in, ‘checking in’ and location specific marketing is getting bigger. Google+ and LinkedIn are soaring in popularity, as well as Facebook introducing new features. Do you have a Social Media Strategy?

4) Dialogue: How are you communicating with your customers? How valuable is the information to them? Is there a more effective way to engage your customers? Are you listening to what they have to say to you, and are there feedback channels for them to do so? Consider how your customers interact with you, and what you can do to remove the barriers.

5) Innovation: What are you not doing that you could or should be doing? What new marketing channels could you use? How can you reach your customers in a way that hasn’t been done before? Think about what your competitors are doing, and how you can get an edge on them.

6) Strategy: Do you have a plan going forward? Where do you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months? Does your marketing strategy reflect this? Is it future proof?

Nearly every major company has a presence on them, but being on every network isn’t always needed .Think how you wish to engage with your customers, and therefore which social networks you need to be prioritizing. How you want to be seen by your audience, and therefore how will you position yourself and also make yourself stand out, to achieve this. Twitter has continued to explode; deal-of-the-day group discount websites are in, ‘checking in’ and location specific marketing is getting bigger. Google+ and LinkedIn are soaring in popularity, as well as Facebook introducing new features. How have you adapted to this in 2011?

2) Location based social networks

Whilst these have yet to really take off, social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla have grown steadily in popularity with businesses and consumers alike, offering location-specific offers and advertisements to users’ mobiles depending on their geographical location. The potential of these has yet to be realized and they will most definitely be something to look out for in 2012. As well as vouchers and deals, there’s considerable potential for paperless ordering and ticketing, business and professional geo-networking, and much more.

3) Group buying

Group buying sites like Groupon and Living Social have really taken off in 2011; most people who have already used them rate them enormously highly. They work on the principle of offering huge discounts that change on a daily basis, on the condition that a minimum number of buyers commit to purchasing. Consumers enjoy great savings, and businesses benefit from getting more trade in through the door that they can use to grow their customer base.

4)QR codes:

 These are barcodes that can be printed pretty much anywhere, and read by a camera phone to provide encoded information like pictures, special offers or URLs to websites where you can provide additional content. Think about the best way you can use them to integrate your offline and online campaigns, as well as how to make it worthwhile for your customers to decode them.

 5) Google+

Google+ was launched in 2011 as a social network rival to Facebook and Twitter. Whilst it already has a rapidly growing user base, it’s set to explode next year with the recent unveiling of Google+ Pages, which allow businesses and organizations to maintain a presence on the network, and target customers using innovative new features like Circles and Hangouts. Google’s real trump card will be the integration of Google+ with existing tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Gmail, as well as their search engine, making it a marketing opportunity not to be missed.

6) App-based internet browsing

With the Smartphone market increasing all the time, this is likely to be a huge growth market in 2012. More and more smart mobile device owners, use access the internet more often than no Smartphone owners, in terms of social media, search engines, and for purchases .Apps, and specifically in-app purchasing can simplify the transaction process for businesses and customers alike.

WeKnowBetter- has the expertise to carry out your 2011 Marketing review and create the strategy you need for 2012.

Most Small/Medium companies tend to be owner managed, and have limited resources. They tend to focus their time on sales and operations, often neglecting marketing; either they don’t have the time, the expertise or the finance to employ a full time marketing department.

BUT they need marketing more than ever in a very competitive business environment- So What Do They DO?

The Answer: Outsource all or part of marketing to a professional Integrated Marketing Company.

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• Generate more business and grow the company
• Generate constant sales and leads
• Improve Market Position your business
• Sell more to your existing customers
• Tap into the skill-sets and attributes of a large pool of marketing experts as opposed to limited resources from your current team or sole marketing employee
• Only pay for what you need
• Have one point of contact for all your marketing
• Creative input relating to getting your business noticed in new and innovative ways
• Ensuring continuous marketing is practised.

Marketing support from an outsourced marketing agency includes:

• Developing your marketing strategy, and operational plans
• Evaluate, re-designing, maintaining, improving and optimising (SEO) websites
• Project Management for Marketing Campaigns
• Developing Company Brand
• Developing and managing advertising campaigns
• Creating direct mail campaigns
• Social media Campaigns, content provision and continuous management.
• Creating videos of your organisation, products and services.
• E-mail Marketing, SMS Marketing.
• Mobile Marketing- SMART Phone and Mobile Apps.

Employing a full time marketing professional is expensive – especially when you consider the amount you have to pay a formal employee as opposed to an outsourced service. Also maybe you don’t need for a full time marketing person or department.
Working with different freelancers and agencies on different projects can be both time consuming and expensive.
An Outsourced Marketing Department is the most cost effective way for a business that needs professional marketing, in a flexible and professional way, which will ensure that they get the results they need, and give them a competitive edge.
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Social media researcher Dan Zarella has been exploring these questions not just by trial-and-error with one business account, but by number-crunching with data sets of thousands and even millions of tweets, blog, and Facebook posts. His slender new book, Zarella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, puts that data to work to answer the question: How can you use social media so that your own ideas will spread to the most people?

Along the way, he uncovers some surprising findings, and demolishes more than a few cherished myths about how you should be using social media.

Five rules that any social media user should follow:

1) Know when to share. The same tweet or Facebook post shared at a different time of day or day of the week is much more likely to be re-shared and spread by your audience. Part of this is competitive pressure (if everyone else is tweeting, your own tweets get drowned out). Part of it is user behavior (on average, people use Facebook and Twitter at different times of day). Zarella’s data suggests that afternoon and evening are best for Twitter, and Friday is the best day to get retweeted. Facebook shares get more attention on the weekend, though. And blog posts attract the most links when published in the early morning. Be warned, though, that the optimal timing may vary based on your own audience, and if everyone starts tweeting on Friday now, Thursday could become preferable. So test it for yourself.

2) Focus on your audience, not yourself. The most popular word in the tweets that spread successfully in social media is “You.” That’s right, your readers like to hear how what you are saying relates to themselves. By contrast, Twitter accounts that frequently use self-referential language (“me” “I” “my” etc.) have fewer followers than average. Many experts put great stress on showing the “authentic you” in social media, but it’s important to realize that doesn’t mean you should keep the focus on yourself.

3) Keep language simple and direct. Strunk and White famously exhorted writers to strive for a clean, direct style that focuses on nouns and verbs before adjectives and adverbs. Their advice holds in social media as well. Posts rich in nouns and verbs are statistically more likely to be reshared. Simpler language (in articles or blog posts) is also much more likely to be reshared. On average, language at a 5th grade reading level or lower is much more effective. (You can use Microsoft Word’s readability test to check your prose.)

4) Share more than you “engage.”Social media can be great for conversation, whether chatting with a friend, or answering a customer service request. This has led many experts to advocate a social media strategy based around “engaging in the conversation.” But this is actually not your best strategy if you are looking to attract followers and spread your own ideas. Zarella’s data shows that customers are much more likely to follow you if you spend less of your social media posts conversing (e.g. @ replies in Twitter), and more of it sharing content that is valuable or interesting to your customers.

5) If you want something, just ask. The biggest question most social media business users fixate on is, “how do I get people to retweet my post, comment on my blog, or like my Facebook posting?” It turns out the most important thing you can do is to simply ask. Zarella found that tweets including the words “please retweet” are consistently among the most shared. I have seen other data showing that best way to get people to comment on Facebook is to end your post by asking them to please “comment below” or “like this post.” It’s simple psychology, and common marketing knowledge, that an explicit call-to-action is always more effective than an implicit one. But for some reason, many people forget this when they operate in social media.

Check your own data, and re-check it
But his most important advice is when  he urges businesses to get out there and test their own social media with a scientific eye, to figure out what works for them. Your customers may operate on a different time clock than the average of millions of social media users around the world. Your customers might be more likely to click on a different type of content or headline than my readers do. But any business that uses social media to communicate should make use of the many free tools for tracking when and where their ideas spread, so that they can keep learning, and be sure their voice is being heard.

Don’t just do it. Measure it.

WeKnowBetter- The Social Media Experts.