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The purpose of this paper is to develop a digital marketing capability maturity model (CMM) as a guiding framework in support of increasing international student recruitment to the public universities in Saudi Arabia (SAPUs).

The CMM was constructed by comparing the common practices of Web 2.0 usage for international student recruitment from five SAPUs and from five Scottish universities. The stages of the awareness, interest, desire and action (AIDA) marketing model were used to guide the analysis of the data and used as the business processes for the CMM.

All SAPUs use Web 2.0 for the recruitment of international students focusing on awareness and interest, but the content often lacks consistency and depth. Scottish universities use Web 2.0 across all stages of the AIDA model, and the content often has greater consistency and depth.

The analysis draws on published content from a small sample of SAPUs and Scottish universities but did not solicit the views of the staff about the content's effectiveness.

This study extends the knowledge about the strategic use of Web 2.0 in SAPUs for addressing international student recruitment marketing challenges.

Increasing the international student population at SAPUs is one strategy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's 2030 vision to reduce its dependency on oil exports.

This study applies the AIDA model to develop a CMM for the use of Web 2.0 in SAPUs explicitly for international student recruitment.