ABSTRACT
Universities use various digital and traditional marketing communication tools for higher education recruitment strategies. This chapter provides insights into how Lebanese university-bound students that belong to the digital generation search for higher education institutions.
This descriptive study involved a survey of 222 randomly selected tertiary-bound students from two public and three private schools in Beirut. The results indicate that the university website is the most popular first choice for collecting information about higher education institutions by tertiary-bound digital natives in Lebanon, followed by word of mouth (wom) and campus visits. The study also reveals that a relatively high percentage of today’s university-bound students would not enroll in a higher education institution before they talk with a former student, visit the campus and access the university website.
Based on the results, the authors developed: (1) a preliminary framework which outlines the digital and traditional marketing channels on which institutions should invest their advertising and promotion budget to create awareness and engage as many university-bound students as possible and (2) three research hypotheses for which future research should empirically test and validate the proposed framework.
