How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of University Promotion

The article presents the authors’ methodology for assessing the effectiveness of university promotion and the results of its testing at Vladivostok State University, a major regional higher education institution. The proposed methodology takes into account the new realities and trends in the development of Russia’s advertising market and the evolution of marketing communications in higher education. The study also analyzes the specificities of university promotion, existing approaches by other authors to evaluating its effectiveness, and refines the indicators, methods, and tools for assessing effectiveness both at the institutional level and across individual media channels. The key elements of the proposed methodology include: a system of indicators for evaluating promotion effectiveness; a process for assessing university promotion effectiveness; a technology for evaluating university promotion effectiveness, which includes methods for data collection and analysis. The authors’ methodology offers several advantages compared to existing approaches: it provides a comprehensive assessment of promotion effectiveness, both at the university level and across individual media channels and academic programs, and evaluates promotion effectiveness using promotion costs (overall and by media channel), university admissions campaign results (number of applications and applicants), and field research data from first-year student surveys. The system of evaluation indicators includes three groups of metrics, enabling the development of recommendations to improve promotion efficiency, such as optimizing budget allocation across media channels, prioritizing promotional formats within each channel, and assessing the feasibility of adjusting promotion expenditures for specific academic programs. The results of testing the methodology at a major regional university served as the basis for developing a set of recommendations to enhance its promotional effectiveness. The article’s findings are relevant for university administrators, and the test results were utilized in planning the regional university’s promotional strategy for the following year.