Sharing Your Digital Story: Creating a Performance Narrative on Student Engagement

Please provide a one-paragraph overview of the session.‎ (200 words or less): Judging the impact of marketing and recruitment activities is more challenging than ever. The digital behaviors of prospective students change rapidly. The increased use of AI technology during the research process makes it more difficult to showcase the prospective student journey. As a result of these and other factors, the pressure on GEM professionals to show the return on investment of marketing and engagement activities continues to mount. How can GEM professionals share insights on the impact of digital strategy across all of these tactics effectively to their university leaders?

In this session, the presenter will showcase his approach to creating an effective narrative on digital strategy that utilizes marketing performance metrics, engagement data, and website analytics to inform decisions on what tactics to invest in effectively. By painting a holistic picture using marketing performance dashboards, CRM data and Google Analytics 4, the goal is to provide a comprehensive view of why these activities matter.

Session Agenda/Outline (200 words or less): Agenda/Outline:
Intro
- Background of Boston College
- BC’s goal for evaluating ROI
Digital environment
- impact of digital marketing
- student search behavior
- stealth applicants
- Overall user experience across marketing, recruitment, communications
Need for assessment
- how are we evaluating ROI
- requests from leadership to show value
- use for predictive modeling
Creating a narrative plan
- What engagement channels to include?
- What metrics to view?
- How much weight to assign?
- Digital marketing
- Website activity
- Social media engagement
- CRM engagement