Guus Goorts

We approached Guus because I had purchased his book about recruiting international students using Google Ads and I liked how practical, easy to understand and useful the book was for semi-beginners like me.

By signing up for the course I wanted to help my team and different teams in our university in Communications and Graduate Schools speak the same language of digital marketing for student recruitment, whether domestic or international. Our aim was to become more fluent in the key concepts, measuring the performance of digital marketing campaigns and being able to brief and evaluate external agencies in a way that would reduce spending money or effort on the wrong things.

Our group was mixed in terms of seniority, functional areas and years of experience with digital marketing. It was a pleasure taking part in the weekly live sessions where we would go over the key lessons of that week (watching the videos took about 1 – 2 hours every week) and complete exercises in small groups. The exercises allowed us to re-evaluate existing campaigns for some of our programs from different perspectives but anchored in the key metrics given in the course. Of course, you can’t remember every detail after a couple of months but we can always refer to the course PDF document which is long but has pretty much everything you need in there.

Today, I feel our team is able to completely run succesful in-house digital marketing campaigns to recruit international students to specific programs. Our area for further work is the measuring success part as it does involve having full control of several institutional websites but we’ll get there eventually.

The Irish Universities Association (IUA) was delighted to facilitate access to the e-course on "Fundamentals of Online Student Recruitment" for a group of staff working across its seven member universities.

This training enabled 31 seasoned professionals in the Irish higher education sector to gain valuable new insights into their work in an online context, as well as tangible plans of action to support future student recruitment.

This course is a must for colleagues who want to improve their abilities and knowledge in digital marketing for student recruitment. The course made me see the bigger picture of digital marketing and brought ideas about how can we aggregate all digital marketing efforts to serve the ultimate strategy.

The course is extremely helpful, particularly for colleagues working in student recruitment but perhaps not with extensive marketing background. I would also recommend the course to colleagues that are based in a College/Faculty within a University.

I think the format of covering the chapters mixed in with assignments prior to the class time is good as you cover all of the material and then have the opportunity to review aspects and have considered the learnings prior to the class discussion.

I would have much better confidence in running a campaign or appointing a digital marketing company to promote my University, following the completion of this course.