Educational institutions must have a strong online presence and effective digital marketing strategies to attract prospective students. However, assessing your business’ digital marketing capability can be a daunting task. In this article, we explore how you can benchmark your institution’s digital maturity and set targets for improvement. 

Why measure your digital marketing maturity?

With ongoing developments in technology for delivering customer experiences across mobile and desktop, and the need to integrate content and social media from multiple sources, it is essential to benchmark the overall capability of your digital marketing using a simple scoring system. Benchmarking can be applied in different ways, either for measuring your institution’s overall digital marketing capability or for analysing performance in specific areas, such as SEO, social media, email marketing, and content marketing.

Choosing an assessment tool 

There are numerous tools available online for assessing digital maturity, including ones created by the likes of Google and Smart Insights. Each of them are well-established and have long been used in the digital marking sector. There is some variation between them, but they all work on the basic premise of answering questions against a category to output a rating or score for your business.

Key benefits of benchmarking

Assessing your educational institution’s digital maturity can offer several benefits, including:

1. Identifying areas for improvement: A comprehensive audit of your current digital marketing approaches will pinpoint areas that need attention.
2. Competitor analysis: Benchmark against competitors to gauge your institution’s strengths and weaknesses.
3. Best practice adoption: Learn from more advanced adopters and incorporate their best practices into your digital marketing strategy.
4. Setting targets and roadmaps: Develop strategies for improving your business’ digital marketing capabilities over time.
5. Communicating and prioritising: Effectively communicate the current situation to stakeholders and highlight investment priorities for different digital marketing activities.

Ultimately, it’s essential to continually assess your educational institution’s digital marketing capability in order to stay ahead of the curve and attract international students effectively.

Written by Stephanie Clark