Connection That Builds Community through Education

Emma Prineas, Marketing Director,Navitas Skilled Futures

Emma Prineas, Marketing Director,Navitas Skilled Futures

Emma Prineas is the marketing director at Navitas Skilled Futures, bringing over 20 years of global marketing experience to the role. With a background in tourism and a passion for refugee advocacy, she leads community-driven campaigns that promote accessible, outcomes-focused education for multicultural and multilingual adult learners across Australia.

From Global Tourism to Purposeful Education

I have been a career marketer for 20+ years, mostly focusing on the tourism and leisure sectors. After spending time working in Europe, the Caribbean and Sri Lanka, I returned home and led the marketing teams in some of the largest tour operators in Australia.

At the same time, my time spent overseas led me to locations where I saw firsthand the heartbreaking challenges that globally displaced people are facing and when I returned to Australia, I started volunteering with asylum seeker and refugee charities. When this role at NSF came up, combining my dedication to supporting this cohort with my marketing experience, I jumped at the chance to work in a field I was so passionate about.

Reaching Diverse Learners with Inclusive Strategy

NSF delivers government-funded programs, so all courses are free to the enrolled participants and highly accessible to the community. Our cohorts are typically from the CALD community and so our marketing strategy is around reaching the community where they are (and in their own language) and motivating them to feel empowered to co-create their future, their way, with education as the tool to do so.

Reaching CALD cohorts has been challenging in terms of both channel and messaging. In terms of reaching the market, we work both with specialist engagement agencies and with both national and local inlanguage media partners, with tightly segmented audiences, in locations where the channel demands a high level of trust. Messaging needs to be contextual and specialized to the specific, sometimes harrowing, circumstances that an individual within a cohort may be facing.

“Great marketing is about empathy and clarity especially when empowering people from diverse backgrounds. Our work at Navitas Skilled Futures is about meeting learners where they are and helping them realize education as the bridge to opportunity”

We address these challenges by working in close collaboration with the communities that we serve. We are in constant dialogue with our students, adjusting our media and messaging to meet their specific needs and addressing the challenges, pain points and motivations of new arrivals, depending on their journey to Australia.

We have a layered marketing approach, with a test-and-learn protocol, that allows us to keep stability in our digital marketing, using tested methods, while dipping our toes into new channels each month.

Our goal is one of constant incremental improvement.We have created a marketing ecosystem with a specific strategy that also allows us to take manageable risks and review results, changing direction when we see strong returns.

Guidance for Marketers in Education and Training

Three things I can suggest: - Know your market. The best marketers I know are able to keep an external view of their strategy and brand, rather than become too internally focused. Truly, no one in your market is as invested in your brand as you think that they are and we have to be comfortable to own that level of insignificance in order to stand back and have a true understanding of the market and essential strategies.

- Become fiscally literate. Whether you are in a specialist role or a generalist role, get comfortable with financial and analytical literacy in the workplace. If you are able to speak the language of finance and provide data to support your planning, then you will be more likely to convince your C-Suite of your strategies

- Be holistic. A lot of teams and a lot of roles are now migrating into specialist positions. Even if you are hired as a specialist, try to take a more holistic view of the marketing delivery and the part you play in it. For example, if you are in a paid media role, consider the wider customer experience, consider the full engagement journey. It has been an unfortunate frequent experience of mine that, on coming into new roles,I find very basic issues that have huge and wider impacts on marketing outcomes. By doing a little extra digging in the drivers behind your analytics, you may find that a small fix could make a huge difference.