Having launched NIIT’s e-learning and Career Building Solutions, Chief Marketing Officer Mohit Hira’s focus is now taking the Cloud Campus programming to the next level.
What are the marketing activities that you undertake to build your brand?
Our marketing strategy is in a constant state of evolution as we measure leads, enquiries and enrolments from all the major measurable media. We leverage digital, print, television, radio, outdoor and events. Beyond just advertising, there are other tasks that Marketing does: we interact regularly with students (our core target audience) through formal and informal research and this helps us keep abreast of trends.
What are the key insights behind your marketing activities?
Difficult to answer this in one simple way here, but I can share what we did before and during the launch of our Cloud Campus programme a few months ago. A 12-city research earlier this year, involving close to 10,000 students, threw up several insights on their approach to career choices, IT training and, specifically, NIIT. A major learning we then built upon was that students (Class XII passouts, and early college) look for a far higher level of flexibility and freedom in their approach to education.
This was an invaluable piece of learning, because it was also timed with the launch of a new delivery platform that was being built on the Cloud and would allow faculty and students to work in a digital, collaborative ecosystem. So, paradoxical as it may seem, we set out to pull students into the classroom only to push them out to cafes, terraces, parks, trains, etc., where they could study at their convenience. And thus was born India’s first Cloud Campus with our flagship GNIIT programme being its face in a new avatar.
What is the best medium to reach out to your target audience? And why?
We deal with two very distinct and critical segments: students and their parents. The former are consumers, the latter customers – one does the course, another pays for it. But youth are far more independent and vocal today than their parents were earlier; they have more career choices, their attitude to life is a lot more casual, often with a mistaken sense of confidence. The parent, however, is more worried and better disposed towards NIIT. Yet, they consume media very differently: youngsters live life on the mobile and the browser – teenagers have become screenagers – whereas their parents still read newspapers and watch TV. Our media mix tries to address both segments with a set of lead-generating online campaigns and a credible series of print ads as well as air cover via TV. So, there is no single best medium. A couple of years ago, we moved a large share of our budgets online and did generate leads more cost-effectively. But, in the process of being visible in a relatively invisible medium, we lost touch with parents and had to re-address them this year. The strategy appears to be paying off where print and TV help GNIIT enter the consideration set, web leads drive enquiries and social media helps us engage prospects as well as get real-time feedback from current students.
How are you using digital and social media to promote your brand?
As I’ve mentioned, we are a large online spender with focus on lead generation, not just for our IT training segment but also IFBI- our banking and finance training programmes. In fact, Imperia is one business unit that moved totally online a few years ago, to generate leads for its executive management programmes. On social media, we’re active on Facebook with a small (about 35,000 fan base) but very involved community. On social media, the focus is not on promoting, but on listening to and talking to consumers and prospects. Today, we see the student community posting updates on the brand independently and building our equity proactively.
What does the e-learning market look like today?
The e-learning market is in a stage of evolution: pure-play e-learning is likely to take off slower than blended learning because classroom teaching is still not as expensive as it is in the West, where e-learning is a more accepted form of training. However, with the launch of the Cloud Campus, and blended learning, we are pretty sure that this will be the next wave. Having pioneered several new initiatives in training in the last 30 years, you could say that this is the latest innovation we have.
How do you see this market growing in the next few years?
Difficult to answer this one as the numbers are all over the place.
How can marketers maximise the impact of their digital marketing campaign?
If marketers stop viewing digital as niche and give it the pride of place it deserves, it’ll make a big difference. For a minute, leave the numbers aside because there is plenty of debate on the actual number of online users – from 50 million to 100 million. The fact is that no other medium allows a marketer to customise his communication and be flexible as digital does. It allows us to hear what users are feeling in real time and if we can allocate resources, it is bound to work. The problem is that agencies and publishers started out by overpromising on numbers and then under-delivered; as a result, advertisers first became sceptical and then started seeing the medium as a cheap, leadgeneration source. If advertisers really integrate digital into their marketing campaigns – and, at NIIT, we do this religiously – the impact is obvious. In fact, we held a workshop for all our agencies – creative, media and digital – to get everyone on the same plane and think of the NIIT brand as one unified team. That’s how the GNIIT Cloud Campus campaign has worked so well and travelled across media in the last few months.
What is your biggest challenge today?
The biggest challenge is the mindset youngsters have. They believe that they don’t necessarily need training and that “kucch na kucch toh ho jaayega” because there are many more options available today not just in formal education (private engineering colleges) but also non-formal vocations. Everyone wants a cushy job but few are prepared to train for it and crack the interview process...at one level we have to evangelise training, be it for IT or BFSI and at another level drive home the urgency so that a prolonged decision-making cycle is shortened. It’s a good challenge to have and we’re at an interesting transition point.
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