Higher Education Market Research: The Ultimate Guide

By George Chilton

Higher education has a secret advantage over many other industries in one key area: Easily accessible primary market research. 

Open the door and step out into the hallway – et voila! You can mind-meld with one of several thousand students. But, still, university campuses are noisy places. It can be hard to know where to look, who to speak to and even what to ask. 

Never fear. We’re about to explore the tools, platforms and methodologies you can use to build a wide and deep understanding of the higher education market at home and abroad. We also share a snazzy tool to calculate a representative sample.

In fact, our complete guide to higher education market research will: 

• Put you in a better position to speak to students in key international markets
• Help you understand student pain points and jobs to be done
• Provide frameworks for qualitative research
• Allow you to approach your campaigns from a position of knowledge and authority
• Help you uncover the all-important signals in the noise
• Let you tap into deep wells of qualitative understanding and cultural perspectives at home and abroad

…Not to mention, it will pour rocket fuel into your domestic and international student recruitment strategy, branding and marketing plan.

But be warned: It’s a long read. So feel free to bookmark it and come back to explore:

• What is Higher Education Market Research?
• Why do Market Research?
• How Does Market Research Work?
• 1. What is Primary Market Research?
• 2. What is Secondary Market Research?
• 3. What is AI Synthetic Data?
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research in Universities
• Pros and cons of qualitative vs quantitative research
• Practical Tips for Effective Qualitative Higher Education Marketing Research
• Quantitative Research: Informing Data-Driven Marketing in Higher Education
• Deeper Applications of Quant & Qual in Higher Education Marketing
• Getting to the Results: Storytelling with Data
• Leveraging Quant Tools Across the Student Lifecycle

What is Market Research?

Market research is a structured approach to gathering, analysing, and interpreting data to inform your strategic decision-making. It includes qualitative techniques (qual) like focus groups and interviews. It also involves analysing unstructured data on social channels and forums, which give you juicy thoughts and real words from real people. 

Qual feeds into quantitative methods (quant) like surveys, enrolment analytics and competitive benchmarking. These let you see trends and give you the chance to show off with snazzy pie charts in the boardroom. 

Together, quant and qual help you form a well-rounded understanding of emerging trends, consumer behaviour and competitive conditions. 

Ultimately, in higher education, market research will help you develop insights into the evolving needs of students, faculty, and staff. It’ll also give you a solid base to develop targeted marketing strategies, recruitment campaigns, and optimise your course programmes offerings. Most importantly of all, you’ll hone a competitive edge. 

Why do Market Research?

Solid market research is the difference between a campaign that attracts thousands of diverse and talented students (including international students) – and one that barely gets a click from your mum. 

Market research is truly the only way to move beyond hunches, instincts and fingers in the wind. You’ll develop an expert-level understanding of your students and partners, competitors and market trends. It should never be skipped. Or, frankly, the house you’re building has foundations of sand. But do it right and you can stay on top of shifting student demographics, preferences, and global trends. 

As a case in point, geopolitics and national policies change fast. Just look at the whirlwind of Canada’s student cap, the Netherlands unexpected pivot on English language courses –  and even Trump’s anti-DEI policy. They’ve truly affected international student migration patterns in a short space of time. 

How Does Market Research Work?

Market research works by gathering and analysing data to gain insights into your market and the competitive players working in the same space. Most people put market research into two categories – primary market research and secondary market research. But there is also a third data source emerging – AI synthetic data:

What is Primary Market Research?

Primary market research is firsthand data you collect directly from your target audience (and people in their vicinity). 

You might, for example, run focus groups with current students to understand their experiences and conduct one-on-one interviews with international applicants./

You could also survey prospective students about their preferences, asking about programme interests, campus culture, and factors influencing their decision to study abroad. 

Primary research is powerful because your competitors do not have access to the same results as you, so it’ll help you run a much sharper campaign. 

What is Secondary Market Research?

Secondary market research comes from third parties. While it’s not tailored or always 100% relevant, it’s often a very useful (and much faster) source of insight.

For instance, you could:

• Regularly review national enrolment trends from government statistics
• Analyse industry reports from organisations like QS or Times Higher Education
• Examine global student mobility data from sources like Open Doors or HolonIQ

This research will fill your brain with broader market trends, helping you to benchmark against competitors and contextualise those juicy and secret primary research findings.

What is AI Synthetic Data?

Synthetic data is artificially generated information derived from real-world data. The AI is trained to capture its patterns and structure. The new data mirrors the original’s characteristics while leaving out personal identifiers – making it cheaper to run and also GDPR (data protection regulation) safe. When subjected to statistical analysis, it should produce similar insights to the original data set. 

Beyond the obvious marketing uses (from building buyer personas and understanding trends), synthetic data can be a decent substitute for sensitive data. This is useful for AI training, analytics, testing, demos, and creating tailored products, courses, or even sales enablement materials.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research in Universities

Qualitative research vs. Quantitative research: which is best? The truth is they are two sides to the same coin and should both inform and guide your university’s marketing strategy:

• Quantitative research answers objective, measurable questions – giving you insights into questions starting with who, what, when and how often. 

• Qualitative research dives more into motivations, opinions and subjective experiences. 

Pros and cons of qualitative vs quantitative research

It’s worth knowing the strengths and weaknesses of both qualitative and quantitative research, but ultimately, you’ll need to carry out both. 

	Pros	Cons
Qualitative Research	Provides in-depth, detailed insights Captures nuanced behaviours and motivations Flexible and adaptive during data collection Explores context and meaning	Often involves smaller, less representative samples Subject to researcher bias in interpretation Can be time-consuming and resource-intensive Can take you off course

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	Pros	Cons
Quantitative Research	Offers measurable, objective data Supports statistical analysis and generalization Efficient with larger sample sizes Enables trend and pattern identification	May overlook context and individual nuances Can be rigid in structure Might miss unexpected insights or key details Relies on the quality and design of survey instruments and subject to errors

Practical Tips for Effective Qualitative Research

Before you dive head-first into large-scale surveys and analytics, it’s important to start with qualitative research. 

Primary qualitative research will help you to ‘get’ the human side of your institution first. While more anecdotal, it still uncovers the deeper motivations, attitudes, and emotions of your domestic and international student community. The insights you get here will then help inform and shape the questions you ask in surveys. 

1. Prepare a focus group or one-to-one interview:

Schedule in-depth interviews and focus groups with segments of your community – and try to get a decent cross-section of participants involved. For instance, arrange focus groups with current students from different programmes, interest groups, demographics, home countries, etc.  

2. Moderate Actively:

Your focus-group moderator should be an approachable, active listener who can spot opportunities to go deeper into interesting points. Make sure they know to create a space for quieter participants to share more.

3. Understand the jobs to be done

The Jobs to be done (JTBD) approach looks at the basic needs of your customers. JTBD uncovers why people make the choices they do, so you can adapt your services to better meet their needs. 

Finding out the deeper drivers behind domestic and international student choices can feed into course development, additional support delivery and, ultimately, improve enrolment, retention and satisfaction. 

Higher Education Market Research ProTips: 

• Your higher education market research should start with one-to-one interviews, because these can help guide your focus group preparation. 
• In your focus groups (about 6-10 people), you can borrow a tip from the classroom and get participants to “think, pair and share”. This avoids too much homogeneity – where people fall in line with everyone else, so they don’t stand out or seem contrarian.
• Always record interviews (with consent) and transcribe them for analysis. Tools like NVivo or Atlasti can help you code the data and pick out recurring themes.  If you do it online, Google’s Gemini AI is a great notetaker and summariser (be sure to check the transcript). 
• Feedback from your listening sessions can help you adjust your approach to better capture the insights you need as you go deeper into your research.
• Events like the PIE Live often run international student round tables, where attendees can ask any questions they like. It’s a nice collaborative approach and other conference-goers often come up with insightful questions you may not have considered. Explore more events in the education space.

As a guideline, the following questions and structure can help develop your own interview framework: Get an ungated template.

At Hubbub Labs, we support our clients with higher education market research by designing, developing and delivering interviews and focus group research. Get in touch with us now. 

Quantitative Research: Informing Data-Driven Marketing in Higher Education

Quantitative research helps you collect measurable, objective data that directly informs strategic marketing decisions. When you have a representative sample, you can extrapolate from it to say something about an entire population of people. You can use surveys for anything you need to, but in a higher education marketing context, they help you uncover insights into key areas such as: 

• brand awareness
• perceived strengths/weaknesses of academic programmes
• typical questions and doubts
• enrolment likelihood
• alternative university/course choices
• international student support needs

How many people should you survey to get representative results?

If you are surveying your student body, you’ll want to know how many people you need to speak to so you can be confident your results are representative. Use our sample size calculator to work out the number of student you need to survey.

• Add in the population size of the group you want insights from (e.g. how many students you have in total)
• Select the confidence level you require (90-95% should be good enough for marketing purposes)
• Type your margin of error and you’ll be shown how many people you need to poll.

Survey Sample Size Calculator

Number of Students (Population Size):

Confidence in results (%): 80% 85% 90% 95% 99%

Margin of Error (%):

Calculate

Higher Education Market Research ProTips:

• Define your student segments first. You may not need a survey that covers all students, perhaps you only need to survey international students from MENA for your strategic insights. If that’s the case, you won’t need as big a sample size.
• Do a test run with 10 or 15 people. Pilots uncover any tricky questions, unexpected results, misinterpretations, or logic problems with the survey before you roll it out in earnest.
• Explain why it’s important to you (e.g. we want to make the student experience better).
• Include a prize draw in the survey to encourage your students to do it.

Getting University Brand Insights from Your Survey

Start by defining what you want to measure. This will help you keep your questioning concise. For example:

• You might want to know if a recent campaign has improved brand recognition among high school seniors. 
• Or you might want to understand what influences enrolment decisions among prospective international students in Nigeria. 

Next, make sure you get a representative sample (as noted above).

…And check out our Survey Design Checklist. It guides you through defining objectives, setting effective questions, running a pilot well and goes into analysis.

At Hubbub Labs, we support our clients in designing and developing surveys. Get in touch with us now. 

Engaging Education Agents for qual and quant

Agents on the ground know your target markets well. They are brilliant at engaging students, building relationships, and guiding them through the application process. 

But they can also give you real-time, first-hand insights into student needs and even trends they are spotting. It often only takes a form or a call to get the insights you need. 

Agents can also help you distribute targeted surveys. The feedback can uncover local market dynamics like the best social or comms channels. 

You can also use them dig into cultural factors affecting decision-making and the types of support services international candidates need in the specific regions you’re targeting.

Deeper Applications of Quant & Qual in Higher Education Marketing

Numbers always tell a story, but it’s your job to find that signal in the noise. At Hubbub Labs, we can help you turn your findings into engaging, action-oriented plans, strategy and messaging to connect with prospective students, faculty, corporate partners, ministries and others.

In the following section, we look at:

• using quant tools to their full potential across the student lifecycle
• feeding insights into a marketing plan
• using interviews and focus groups to shape campaigns
• creating your market segmentation
• building data-driven buyer personas
• storytelling with data

Getting to the Results: Storytelling with Data

To get on the right track, start by identifying key metrics that tell a clear story. Stories are the most compelling when they are data-driven and don’t appear to be biased. For instance, if your data shows that “90% of STEM graduates secure employment within six months,”  you have a golden nugget and a key piece of evidence for students who are considering applying for a course. 

You can build trust and also positions your academic programmes as gateways to career success. 

Creating Visual Dashboards:

For internal teams especially, try to be as visual as possible. Looker Studio is our recommendation here, as it offers interactive dashboards. You can plug in survey results but also tie in other audience research metrics from your Google Analytics or social channels. 

We also use Looker for regular reporting purposes. Here’s an example report using dummy survey data:

Data-driven Persona Segmentation

By analysing your results, you can develop detailed personas that represent different segments of your market. For instance, you might create personas like:

•  “Career Changers,” who value practical, career-oriented programmes
•  “Aspiring Researchers,” who are drawn to cutting-edge academic opportunities
• “Global Nomads,” who prioritise international exposure and diverse campus life

Once these personas are defined, you’ll be better able to position courses and culture towards them, tweaking your messaging to address the jobs to be done and motivations of each group. 

For example, a targeted email campaign might highlight career services and internship opportunities for “Career Changers.” A separate campaign for “Global Nomads” might instead highlight multicultural campus experiences and study abroad programmes.

Persona Map Example:

Using Looker, you might develop a persona map that visually segments its prospective student audience. This map could highlight demographic details, key motivators, and preferred communication channels for each persona.

For example, the Looker dashboard below shows the most common influencers on decision makers, for Indian students (dummy data set).

Leveraging Quant Tools Across the Student Lifecycle

Quantitative research isn’t just for recruitment it can help you understand and improve entire student lifecycle. It can form the basis of targeted strategies that improve retention, boost alumni engagement, course expansion, and even tailor your approach to international student candidates from different regions.

Why is this important? It elevates the voice of marketing and gets you a seat at the strategy table. 

Domestic and international student retention 

In retention initiatives, predictive analytics, based on quantitative data can help you identify at-risk students early. 

Tracking engagement metrics like attendance, participation in online courses, and early feedback surveys can help you pinpoint students who show signs of disengagement in their first semester. This is where also marketing can provide value product feedback. With these insights, you can intervene with personalised academic or social support or mentorship programmes.

International student success

Understanding the unique needs and preferences of international student candidates is also crucial. Targeted surveys and website analytics can reveal factors that influence international applications, such as the availability of scholarships, campus safety, and cultural diversity. 

Alumni Engagement 

In terms of alumni engagement, data analytics provide insight into donation patterns, event participation, and website interactions. By segmenting alumni based on their engagement levels, you can design outreach strategies. 

Course expansion and corporate engagement

There’s bound to be a bit of give and take when it comes to deciding what programmes to offer as an institution. While you won’t be changing your flagship degrees and courses any time soon, there is still a need to remain responsive to market demand. You should take into account what the students want to read and address the skills gaps that corporates are trying to fill. 

Quantitative research is key to understanding this market demand. Surveys, enrolment trends, corporate needs and competitive analyses can reveal emerging fields that resonate with prospective students and their future employers. 

Bringing it all together

Integrating research management, student listening, quantitative and qualitative insights, tech and third-party data creates a powerful, differentiated marketing strategy. 

Next Steps:

• Audit current data-sharing practices between strategy, research and marketing.
• Integrating student feedback and external data into your recruitment and brand campaigns.
• Regularly update your strategies based on internal metrics and external benchmarks.

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Hubbub Labs can support you in deriving insights from your research and building an international marketing strategy to engage and attract candidates to your institution, college or university. Get in touch below.