How to do insightful higher education market research in B2B

Key takeaways: B2B higher education market research is for institutions looking to keep growing – whether the goal is to enroll more adult learners or strike business partnerships. This guide explores the different types of higher education market research projects in B2B and shares best practices to get high quality, reliable data.

Why B2B higher education market research matters

Working professionals present a growing revenue opportunity for higher education institutions, while there are also partnership opportunities with the companies they work for.

Adult learners provide 42% of higher education revenue, according to 2022 research from the Education Advisory Board (EAB). Most want to advance in their current career, change jobs, increase their salary, or stay up-to-date in their field.

In its New Blueprint for Graduate Growth, EAB associate director Logan Morris explains the impact of declining revenue attributed to prospective students from high school. Increasingly, higher education institutions are targeting working professionals – often, that involves targeting their businesses.

There is plenty of competition to enroll adult learners seeking further education, though, particularly given the continued rise of EdTech platforms and other course providers. B2B higher education market research can help institutions find and demonstrate their competitive advantage.

But B2B higher education market research is broader than this. For example:

• Business partnerships are lucrative opportunities for the higher education sector – insights inform sales and marketing strategies to secure these. Corporate partners of the University of Oxford include Google, JP Morgan, WPP, Meta, and many more.
• And on the other side of the equation, B2B higher education market research is also for the companies looking to partner with colleges, such as EdTech platforms. EY has partnered with the University of Virginia to develop a virtual HR assistant tailored to education, according to EdTech funders Emerge.

To explore such opportunities or learn how to tailor sales and marketing strategies accordingly, B2B rather than B2C market research is the logical choice.

That’s because many B2C market research companies’ higher education research focuses on young students with little, if any, career history. Not adult learners, nor businesses buying education services, and so on. For example, their services will include undergraduate student satisfaction surveys.

Moreover, B2C market research is ill-equipped to provide actionable insights into the potential for higher education institutions to strike B2B partnerships.

How to do higher education market research in B2B

Here are some of the main methodologies – we’ll share examples of the use cases for B2B education market research studies:

• Market segmentation strategy
• Brand development
• Perception tracking
• Buying process research
• Product development
• Thought leadership

#1 Market segmentation strategy

B2B market segmentation involves analyzing your target market and dividing it into different groups of clients with comparable traits. We’ve written previously about how to conduct a B2B market segmentation.

It usually requires quantitative research. This provides statistically robust, relevant data to validate the groups, but lacks explanations around why these prospects fall into such segments. More on this shortly.

Market segmentation studies help you target potential clients in these groups with more accuracy. For example – segmented campaigns get 101% more clicks and 14% more opens than non-segmented ones because the messages resonate more, according to MailChimp.

The qualitative version is buyer persona research. Buyer persona research is very popular in B2B higher education and we have conducted these studies for several institutions.

It helps identify the groups’ wants, needs, pain points, attitudes, and so on, further supporting a sales or marketing campaign. According to Hubspot, designing websites with buyer personas in mind makes them 2-5 times more effective, important for a B2B ecommerce strategy.

Here’s how to conduct B2B buyer persona research.

#2 Brand development

Targeted higher education market research can inform your institution’s brand development initiatives. Building a strong brand in B2B has several advantages, including:

• Making you a trusted choice for businesses
• Building preference and loyalty
• Simplifying decisions for buyers
• Providing competitive differentiation 
• Allowing you to charge businesses a premium

One of the most common types of brand development studies in B2B involves marcomms research.

Marcomms research helps you find the best message to interest your audience and the right channel to use. Through comparative analysis, you can also test several marketing communications, analyzing which one has the better performance and the reasons why.

#3 Perception tracking

Higher education institutions have a significant profile. Brand tracking research analyzes perceptions among your target audience, including: 

• How these have changed over time
• how they compare to those of competitors

There’s also an internal version of brand tracking – employee satisfaction research, which provides insights that can help you retain talent and attract the best new staff members. 

#4 Buying process research

The buying process for education in B2B is very different to B2C, particularly when looking to strike a business partnership.

A typical B2B buying process involves more decision-makers and stages. Often, it also includes different business departments – HR, talent, marketing, finance, procurement, etc. – and at enterprises, stakeholders with varying levels of seniority.

Research into how this process works among your target audience helps you understand and anticipate decision-makers’ needs. Therefore, you can prepare for the process more effectively and better prioritize opportunities with higher chances of success.

#5 Product development

Product development research addresses a wide range of objectives – everything from informing how to tweak an offering to a go-to-market strategy in a new country.

Higher education product development research projects often focus on optimizing an existing offering with a view to increasing satisfaction, relevance, uptake, and so on. For new offerings, the broad range of aims includes:

• Optimizing an existing offering
• Researching new offering concepts
• Testing these ideas with the market
• Forecasting demand for the offering
• Optimizing the new pricing strategy
• Planning the go-to-market strategy

Often it also involves competitive landscape analysis. Competitive analysis research offers many benefits, including identifying gaps in your offering portfolio and benchmarking your performance against other institutions.

This is how to conduct B2B new product development research end-to-end.

#6 Thought leadership

This is a specialist long-form type of B2B marketing, appropriate for the engagement over broadcast style of B2B sales.

Relying on exclusive data and informed points of view, thought leadership research is particularly well suited to the academic writing style of higher education institutions.

Thought leadership engages your target audience by showcasing your institution’s expertise, differentiating it from competitors, improving its organic SEO, building credibility, and more. 

Best practices for B2B higher education market research

#1 Speak to genuine B2B decision-makers only

Be wary of most research panels. They tend to work well for B2C research and many will offer student recruitment services too.

But very few work well for B2B research. In most cases, the insights you need for your sales and marketing objectives will come from independent interviews with relatively senior decision-makers.

These individuals are not only in senior roles but usually short on time and earning well.

They aren’t research panel members because they don’t need the low remuneration (compared to their salary) and don’t have the time.

So, how do you find genuine B2B respondents for market research projects, people with an important part to play in purchase decisions?

It takes a little extra work, but the results are worth it. One option is to build a proprietary database of customers or relevant contacts if you have consent to approach them about market research.

Other alternatives we use include finding suitable interviewees via:

• LinkedIn or social media platforms
• Trade websites and publications
• Independent forums
• Industry associations and events
• Emailing and calling

Personalized outreach attempts work better than standardized messages.

#2 Provide appropriate incentives for a B2B audience

It goes without saying that participants in market research need thanking for their time. This is easier in B2C research, where there are often thousands if not millions of eligible respondents for most projects, so the financial ‘incentives’ can be quite low.

As you would expect, that’s not the case in B2B. Yet some researchers pretend it is – we once heard about another market research agency promising that 50 CMOs would take a 15- minute survey for $10 each!

It’s safe to say that the quality of data and insights wouldn’t have been something worth basing big-budget marketing and sales decisions on in that scenario. There’s no way 50 genuine CMOs would each do that kind of work for $10.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you always have to offer hundreds of dollars in incentives for B2B research. Some of the best ways to incentivize in B2B market research involve ‘soft’ rewards, for example:

• Appealing to senior decision-makers’ curiosity, suggesting interesting topics to discuss and where relevant, agreeing to share some of the final results from the research
• Outlining how – when speaking to current customers – the research will provide long-term benefits, such as service improvements
• Leveraging strong relationships where possible in other instances

If these aren’t possible, charity donations to causes supported by the interviewees are often more appropriate financial incentives in B2B.  

#3 Read between the lines for hidden insights

One of the most advanced market research techniques involves not taking all of the data at face value, but going into granular detail to find the less obvious correlations. There are different ways to do this in both quantitative and qualitative research.

In quant research, regression – a trade-off analysis technique – looks past any exaggerated claims or over-rationalization to find the true answer. For example, for a question around which criteria influence a purchase decision, regression analysis works out the statistical relative impact of different factors on their choices.

In qual research, we use projective techniques to find the emotional and subconscious influences on business decision-making. We know from years of experience that emotions play a part in B2B buying behavior, perhaps contrary to what you might think.

Experienced interviewers know how to do this. It produces more comprehensive results and therefore, recommendations from the research.