Designing a Social Media Marketing Plan for Coventry University

This project aims to design a social media marketing plan for Coventry University in London to attract more international students. The plan will utilize LinkedIn as the chosen platform.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN
Social Media Marketing Plan
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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Executive summary
The main purpose of this project is to design a social media marketing plan for the Coventry
University in London. LinkedIn is being chosen as the social media platform to serve the
purpose. It is being found in this study that Coventry despite receiving rewards and accolades for
its excellence in providing world-class learning environment has limited and ineffective presence
over digital marketing environment. This marketing plan is a consequence of the concern being
felt by the management at Coventry regarding their efficiency in attracting international students.
Hence, a social media marketing plan is being designed to help the client to reach more
prospective international students.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
Part A: Analysis...............................................................................................................................4
Situation analysis:........................................................................................................................4
Goal performance:...................................................................................................................6
Customer insight:.....................................................................................................................7
E marketplace SWOT:.............................................................................................................7
Brand perception:.....................................................................................................................8
Internal capabilities and resources:..........................................................................................8
Part B: TWO SMART long term social media marketing objectives.............................................9
Five Ss objectives:.......................................................................................................................9
Part C: Recommend a justified digital marketing strategy............................................................10
Strategy:.....................................................................................................................................10
STP:.......................................................................................................................................10
Online value proposition (OVP):...........................................................................................10
Sequence:...............................................................................................................................11
Integration (consistent OVP) and database:..........................................................................11
Tools:.....................................................................................................................................12
Tactics:.......................................................................................................................................12
E-marketing mix:...................................................................................................................12

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Details of content strategy:....................................................................................................12
E-campaign initiative schedule:.............................................................................................13
Actions:......................................................................................................................................14
Responsibilities and structures:.............................................................................................14
Internal resources and skills:.................................................................................................14
External agencies:..................................................................................................................14
Control:......................................................................................................................................14
Customer satisfaction surveys:..............................................................................................15
Site visitor profiling:..............................................................................................................15
Frequency of reporting:.........................................................................................................15
Process of reporting and actions:...........................................................................................15
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................15
References......................................................................................................................................17

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Introduction
Digital marketing if planned well and done on the most feasible and productive platforms
can impact on the clients’ capability to attract the most prospective clients. There are various
platforms that can be used to conduct digital marketing. These include but not limited to such as
E-mails, and social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.
However, to be effective with these or more other digital marketing platforms it is important to
understand the platform. An understanding will be required in regards to the contents to be used,
the profiling of the client, the purpose it serves and the value creation (Ryan 2016). This project
is also related with digital marketing to be performed through LinkedIn to enhance the
international social presence of the Coventry University London and to help it attract more
international students. Therefore, the main purpose of this project is to design a marketing plan
for LinkedIn to help the Coventry University London utilise it to appropriately reach to more
international students.
Part A: Analysis
Situation analysis:
Company analysis:
Mission: “Coventry will be the premier university in the United Kingdom in terms of
enabling education that has global connection for the future jobs, and research that causes
difference to the communities” (Coventry.ac.uk 2019)
Culture: The culture is about creating innovative learning environment both in the
location and online, progressing a competitive and sustainable enterprise and building employee
capability, capacity and productivity (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).

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Goals: The goal is to strengthen the communities, enhance the enterprise and enable the
partners (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Objectives: With the help of world-class facilities and research, forward-thinking staff,
the technological infrastructure and the exclusive partners the university is constantly making
changes to its systems and striving for innovative ways to improve the student experience
(Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Target market:
Under demographic segmentation, millennials willing to pursue the graduates and post-
graduates degrees are the target market segment. Under behavioural segmentation, aspirants
those who prefer to be graduated and post-graduated at different field of expertise are a part of
this university. Some of these include like College of Arts and Rugby College of Engineering
Technology (Aghdaie and Alimardani 2015).
Key collaborations:
The Coventry University has collaborations with Associations of Commonwealth
Universities, Universities UK and University Alliance (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Competitive analysis:
Northumbria University is the biggest rival university of Coventry. This University was
founded and established in 1880 in England at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This University is in the
Universities field. It generates more revenues than Coventry by $272.6M (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Advance Education Gateway (AEG) is Coventry’s other competitor university. This
university was established and founded in 2012. It is headquartered in London, England. It

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operates in the Colleges industry. The number of employees in the university is slightly less than
it is in Coventry. The number of employees is 79. The revenue generated by this University is
$10.1M (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Goal performance:
Sell: The Board reports a surplus of £16.6m for the year 2018 (Coventry.ac.uk 2019). This is
mainly due to a combination of targeted investment in activities such as new activities and
targeted growth in areas like tuition fee income. These results will help to deliver the corporate
plans in the future. This increased surplus is a result of an increase in in revenues from tuition
fees. The main resource of income include tuition fees, education contracts, funding body grants,
investment income, research contracts and grants, donations and endowments (Coventry.ac.uk
2019).
Speak: They are getting closer to the international students with their innovation to provide them
world-class facilities in study and related thing. For an example, state-of-the-art campus was
built at a cost of £33m to bring innovation to its education model and provide both staffs and
students with a cutting-edge environment for learning (Coventry.ac.uk 2019). The work has
begun on the future hi0tec facilities. Library is under upgrades. IT infrastructure is undergoing
modernisation. Approximately about £4m is being invested in improving the network and
making it fit for the years to come (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Serve: They serve in various ways like developing digital skills, accomplishing industry
collaborations at the international level, spin-out success, graduation day, sharing scientific
expertise, entrepreneurial focus and a global stage for innovation (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).

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Save: Currently, Coventry does not have any robust digital marketing strategy in place. Notably,
traditional advertising cost is higher than print advertising (Frandsen, Thow and Ferguson 2016).
Cost can significantly be reduced with the digital marketing.
Sizzle: The Coventry University London currently has no active online marketing strategies. The
popularity of the university can be increased with effective usage of social media platform to
reach to more international students.
Customer insight:
Coventry University London get the insights of its customers and attract them for
becoming a part of this university in numerous ways. This includes but not limited to collecting
data of aspirants visiting to its official website and enquiring about the courses and many other
related thing, and from its strategic alliances with other universities (Finne and Grönroos 2017).
E marketplace SWOT:
The Coventry University London wants to reach to more prospective international
students by means of digital marketing through LinkedIn as the chosen social media platform.
LinkedIn can create both opportunities and challenges for the university. These are as listed
under (Kladou and Mavragani 2015);
Strengths:
 Provides a strong network of professionals belonging to different professional streams
 Creates strong traffic with “influencer blog” written around the world by professional
leaders
 LinkedIn attained financial stability after being acquired by Microsoft

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 Strategic acquisitions have helped LinkedIn to enhance its business
 It has a diversified range of revenue streams
Weaknesses:
 Facebook’s popularity
 Lawsuit on the violation of data privacy
Opportunities:
 Growing presence in mobile phones
 Social recruiting
 Increasing user engagement
Threats:
 Intense competition from online recruitment site like monster.com and Facebook
 Internet privacy issues
Brand perception:
It holds a good reputation among the international students. This is evidenced in some of
its great achievements. The Times and Sunday Times both rewarded Coventry as the University
of the Year 2019 for Student Experience (Coventry.ac.uk 2019). In the year 2017, the university
secured 1st rank in terms of overseas student experience (Coventry.ac.uk 2019). In the similar
year, it stood at the second position in terms of Teaching Excellence (TEF) in the United
Kingdom. Coventry ranks 13th in the list of top UK universities (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Internal capabilities and resources:

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Human resources are the main asset to this university. These are faculties taking care of
different subjects, and of course the students both domestic and international. Some of the
faculty members are also the part of the research team. In doing so they are enhancing their
knowledge of a subject and also benefitting their followers. The management team at Coventry
invests much on improving the infrastructure to provide an enhanced learning experience to the
students and growing opportunities to the faculties (Coventry.ac.uk 2019).
Part B: TWO SMART long term social media marketing objectives
Five Ss objectives:
Sell: Providing in-demand courses only. Keeping the fess as low possible to create higher
attractiveness than other universities. Advertising the infrastructure in an effective manner,
highlighting alumni and great achievements, and promoting the growing opportunities for both
the faculties and international students.
Serve: The service will get better with improved research and development works on different
subjects. This will help to attract quality, skilled and experienced faculties. Hence, more
prospects for the students. Collaborating with across the nation industry to be able to design
courses as per their requirement of professionals for various job domains.
Sizzle: This will be achieved by providing new offers, new propositions and new experiences
online. At the same time, it is required to appear familiar.
Speak: Creating a two-way dialogue by means of web interactions such as surveys, informally
monitoring chat rooms and conducting formal surveys to facilitate online market research.

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Save: Savings happen through online e-mail communications, transactions to reduce staff,
postage and prints costs and web self-service.
Part C: Recommend a justified digital marketing strategy
Strategy:
STP:
Segmentation
Under demographic segmentation, international students such as millennials are the
target market. Under geographic segmentation, countries such as China, Hong Kong, India, US
and Malaysia are the target market. Students from these five countries make up to 38% of the
total enrollment of the international students in UK universities (Study in UK 2019). China will
be the top targeted destination (Study in UK 2019). Under behavioural, international students
willing to enroll for graduates and post-graduates courses are the target market.
Coventry will be positioned as the university providing innovative courses under
technically advanced infrastructure and at affordable fees structure.
Online value proposition (OVP):
OVP will be created as under (Chaffey and Smith 2017);
 Disclosing the unique benefits of the service such as competitive fees structure
 Creating an online message such as “come and enroll for the Coventry University as this
will provide you the most promising and effective opportunity to learn”
 OVP should be aimed to the targeted audience like international students

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 Benchmarking OVPs with that of the competitors such as Northumbria University
 The online value proposition should be intended at increasing engagement with the
international students through influential blogs, posts and even chats
 Using LinkedIn to be able to reach to and to connect with aspiring international students
 Gathering information from LinkedIn such as queries for a field of expertise, and utilising
this to modify and improve the offerings
Sequence:
Credibility can be created by providing information of value such as for international
students it is the course details, fees structure, visa availing process, food, and lodging etc. This
can also be developed delivering the committed services.
LinkedIn can help to enhance the visibility of the university to its target market. It just
requires updating the university’s profile, participating in and contributing to the groups. Due to
the increasing presence of LinkedIn on mobile phones it will be lot easier to reach millennials.
(Opreana and Vinerean 2015)
Integration (consistent OVP) and database:
Integration and database are as under (Schwarzl and Grabowska 2015);
 Customer databases
 Supplier databases
 Competitors databases
 Agents and brokers databases
 Intermediary databases

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Tools:
Some of the most popular Web functionality tools include Ranorex Studio, test IO,
Coded UI Test, Selenium, Sahi and TimeShiftX. These tools will be used to testing the functions.
Databases of students, suppliers, intermediary, competitors and all could be closely
analysed to understand and meet their diverse demands. This will help delivering excellent
service to the students with a high success rate.
E-mail can be helpful in involving in a two-way dialogue with the international students.
(Schwarzl and Grabowska 2015)
Tactics:
E-marketing mix:
Product: Graduate and post-graduate courses on various subjects.
Price: The fees structure will be competitively priced for being able to create the uniqueness in
offering.
Place: International students will be targeted with this marketing plan, so that, enrollment of
international students is increased.
Promotion: LinkedIn will be used to create traffic, and engage users with influential blogs and
entertaining posts.
Details of content strategy:
The content strategy will be as under (Baltes 2015);
 Announcements of new courses

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 Announcements of new features
 Sharing quotes and insights in the form of posts
 Photos of new events for visual content
E-campaign initiative schedule:
Campaign Goal Call-To-Action (CTA) Campaign Time Frame
The purpose of this campaign
is to increase the international
presence of the Coventry
University London through
LinkedIn.
The target audience are the
International students. They
will be encouraged to be a
part of the university by
enrolling for graduates and
post-graduates courses.
Start Date:
End Date:
Pre-Campaign Promotions:
Peak Dates:
Follow-Up Posts:
Social Media Channel
(LinkedIn)
Campaign Assets Campaign Metrics
Primary Landing Page:
Web Form:
Blog Posts:
User-Generated Content:
Promotional Outreach
 Emails Collected
 Website Visits/Click-
Through
 User-Generated
Contacts
 Bloggers
 Social Media
Influencers

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Content Submissions
 Social Engagement
 Social Media Interacts
Table 1: E-campaign initiative schedule
(Source: As created by the author)
The above table gives a probable picture of the initiatives to be taken through the
LinkedIn E-campaign.
Actions:
Responsibilities and structures:
Few people will be especially dedicated to monitor and observe the university’s LinkedIn
profile to be able to create a platform of interaction with the students (Bilgihan and Bujisic
2015).
Internal resources and skills:
The marketing team in the university must engage in continuous learning to be able to
attain skills such as lead generation, inbound marketing, advertising, content strategy, SEO and
analytics (Bilgihan and Bujisic 2015).
External agencies:
This will include social media management software, agencies dedicated to social media
marketing and freelancers (Bilgihan and Bujisic 2015).
Control:
5 Ss:
 Sell: Increased enrollment by 20%

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 Serve: Increasing number of students actively using the university’s LinkedIn profile
such as to 30%
 Sizzle: Increased brad awareness, admission intent and brand favourability
 Speak: Growing e-mail coverage by 50% of the current students database
 Save: Reducing marketing cost by 15% and generating more admissions by 10%
Customer satisfaction surveys:
 By updating the status
 Creating feedback forms and surveys
 Monitoring comments
 Using social analytics
Site visitor profiling:
By using web analytics site visitor profiling can be done.
Frequency of reporting:
This should be limited to once in a month.
Process of reporting and actions:
 By identifying the amount spent
 By knowing the total reach
 By gathering new leads
 By calculating cost per lead
Conclusion

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To conclude, it can be said that the recommended LinkedIn platform for a new social
media marketing campaign should help the Coventry University in reaching to its target
audience. It is more due to the increasing presence of LinkedIn in smartphones and people trust
on this social media platform. LinkedIn is used by professionals and students across the globe. If
Coventry acts upon this designed marketing plan they should be able to attain their goals of the
campaign provided there is a fit between the resources being used.

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References
Aghdaie, M.H. and Alimardani, M., 2015. Target market selection based on market segment
evaluation: a multiple attribute decision making approach. International Journal of Operational
Research, 24(3), pp.262-278.
Baltes, L.P., 2015. Content marketing-the fundamental tool of digital marketing. Bulletin of the
Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 8(2), p.111.
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marketing: A case of online hotel booking. Electronic Commerce Research and
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Chaffey, D. and Smith, P.R., 2017. Digital marketing excellence: planning, optimizing and
integrating online marketing. Taylor & Francis.
Coventry.ac.uk 2019. [online] Coventry.ac.uk. Available at:
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