How Do Colleges Use The Web To Market Their Service

The pandemic'southward impact continues to be felt in 2021, with postsecondary enrollment numbers at the lowest this spring.  The National Pupil Clearinghouse Inquiry Centre constitute that community higher enrollment brutal by xi.3% and that overall postsecondary enrollment declined by iv.2%.

These declines at universities, colleges, and other tertiary institutions are putting more pressure on higher education marketers to increment enrollment numbers.

To jump-get-go interest in their courses and degree programs, many bookish institutions are focusing on restructuring and improving their digital marketing strategies. If you're a college education marketer seeking to increase enrollment this year, let's explore ten higher education marketing strategies that you can implement right now.

1. Refine Your Value Proffer for Students

Showtime and foremost, you demand to work on your value proposition and messaging. As students accept grappled with the recession and an uncertain economic future, they've put their educational plans on hold. At a fourth dimension when the college caste is constantly being questioned, higher instruction institutions demand to demonstrate the value of their degree and help students understand it in real-world applications. Career viability has always been important, now it'south vital.

Now is the time to hone your value proffer and create content that shows students that their chosen path will pb to a promising future. Beyond but telling students that they'll exist successful, you demand to evidence them. That means creating testimonials, case studies, and bankroll up statements with data. Here are a few ideas on how to get the message out:

• Create videos of your past alumni discussing their career successes
• Share alumni and pupil success stories on social media
• Publish blog articles that feature student wins
• Back up all messaging in plan and degree content with hard data

If you don't have insight into how your students are succeeding afterwards graduation, then that needs to be a superlative priority. Leverage your alumni network and hear what they have to say. Communicating the value students received from your school needs to be the cardinal focus of your marketing campaigns.

Acquire more most what students care about most, and how to refine your value proposition and messaging.

ii. Leverage High-Profile Endorsements

You can make utilize of high-contour endorsements to promote your school. This is very similar to influencer marketing. Since almost institutions have famous alumni, marketers can mention these famous graduates in ads and content. These famous alumni can also exist contacted to endorse the institution on boob tube or in online ads.

Several studies have shown that prospective students put trust in an academic establishment'due south alumni employment track record. Featuring your alumni successes and current achievements, either on your website or social media platforms, can be a great way to attract both new and electric current students.

Higher education marketers can besides utilise high-profile students every bit "social media ambassadors" and influencers. This will help to increase the reach of your schoolhouse on social channels. Flagler College has a YouTube channel, which showcases its student ambassadors and what they're doing. Information technology's a great case of organic content that creates itself.

3. Showcase Campus Life Through Social Media Marketing

To connect with prospective students, colleges and universities need to leverage social media platforms. According to Emarsys, at that place are currently more 3.1 billion users on social media platforms. This effigy equals about 42% of the earth's population. Recent research from eMarketer revealed that United states of america teens adopt using Instagram and Facebook, followed by Snapchat. A small, only growing, percentage are also starting to use the new platform TikTok.

Take a look at Stanford University's and Texas A&One thousand Academy's Instagram pages. They both give prospective students a peek into life on campus. They showcase sporting events, student achievements, campus grounds, and student life and community. This helps prospective students envision what life volition be like at that school, making them more likely to enroll.

Now, let'south highlight some of the constructive social media marketing strategies yous can leverage to meliorate enrollment.

Use Dedicated Hashtags

In a study past Gartner, it was revealed that more than than 80% of millennials are influenced past user-generated content. By using dedicated hashtags on social media, your institution can leverage social proof to build its social media make. Current students tin use hashtags to showcase their life on campus and alumni tin can fifty-fifty use hashtags to prove their appreciation to the institution that helped them succeed. You can also create and promote hashtags for departments and events as well.

The University of Michigan started the Hashtag #MYUMICH on Instagram and even used information technology to host a competition that yielded massive results and new enrollees.

Build a Social Media Directory

On your website, create a directory with quick links to social media accounts used by your school'due south different departments, schools, and administration. It's an instant manner for students to keep up-to-date. NYU has had a lot of success with this strategy.

Characteristic Your School's Social Life

Featuring educatee activities on your social media channels is a great way to help prospective students visualize a social life on your campus and feel a sense of community.

Feature Achievements on Your Social Media Platform

Showcase your educatee and faculty strengths and achievements on your social platform. This helps them visualize the successes that they can attain at your school. If they know that students have a potent support network and are achieving success subsequently graduation, they'll be more motivated to enroll.

Showcase Your Cute Campus

If you lot accept a beautiful campus, and so evidence it off on your social media. Take photographs of public spaces like lawns, outdoor study areas, and beautiful buildings. The campus surround plays a key role in shaping students' lives, and information technology's especially of import in their decision-making procedure.

If yous're looking for inspiration for your social media marketing strategy, check out our article "Social Media Marketing for Colleges: Acquire from the Best." In information technology, we share tips and inspiration from universities that have engaging and effective social media strategies.

Get more insights on college teaching social media strategy in our article "How Social Media and College Students Are Evolving."

four. Improve Conversions with Responsive Chatbots

More than threescore% of prospective students expect to get a response from an academic institution within the same day of filling out a form. According to Migrate, colleges and universities are 10 times more probable to decrease their chances of a follow-up contact if they fail to reply to prospects' inquiries within but 5 minutes.

To ensure that prospective students receive a quick response, you could use chatbots. By using chatbots, admissions representatives would be able to reply to ofttimes asked questions promptly. So, if necessary, the conversation can exist transferred to a human representative who tin can provide a more personalized response.

Georgia Country University adult the outset university chatbot, popularly referred to as "Pounce." With information technology, the university recorded 90% student engagement and students got their questions answered inside seven seconds, thanks for Pounce'due south quick response fourth dimension powered by bogus intelligence (AI).

Learn more about chatbots in our commodity "How Chatbots Are Useful in Higher Education Marketing."

5. Connect with Live Streaming and Video Ads

Higher education marketers can brand use of video chat for Snapchat, Facebook Live, Periscope for Twitter, and Instagram Stories to market their institutions. You can live stream classes, events, or even Q&A sessions. Live streaming is very effective among Generation Z and can exist an effective fashion to develop stiff relationships with prospects.

Studies revealed that the human brain processes videos nearly 60,000 times faster than text. This makes college education marketing via video ads very effective. Facebook has more than than one billion active users, and its newsfeed is ideal for video ads. Enquiry from databox suggests that video ads outperform prototype ads and event in higher appointment and clicks. Video content requires users to spend more time processing the information that they're viewing before they continue their scroll, which results in higher click-through rates. Higher education marketers who are looking for the all-time advert channels should consider Facebook video ads.

6. Increase Organic Traffic Through SEO

Simply having a website is not enough anymore. If people can't notice it when they conduct a search, you won't accept whatever visitors. You lot must amend your website's search engine rankings if you want to ensure a consistent volume of website traffic. Several reports show that more 90% of people utilise a search engine when seeking data on the web.

Here are some common SEO strategies that higher teaching marketers can prefer this year:

Focus on Less Competitive Long-tail Keywords

Keywords are crucial to any SEO campaign. Colleges and universities must conduct research to determine the best keywords to optimize for, which should and then be strategically integrated into web content for effective organic search rankings.

Larn more almost keywords in my commodity "What Are SEO Keywords: Definitive Guide for SEO Keywords."

Create Loftier-quality Content

If y'all want to rank for specific keywords, you need to have content and web pages that discuss that topic. Higher education institutions must ensure that the content they feature on their website is well-written and relevant. Think about the questions that prospective students accept and what information they are seeking. Create helpful content that answers these questions and it will help you rank well in organic search results.

A popular type of content that higher education marketers can comprise in their content marketing strategies is a weblog. In the next department, I share more information on how to develop an effective blog.

Utilise Enticing Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Colleges and universities should utilise relevant and enticing meta descriptions to attract prospective students to their website. When a prospective educatee is looking at their search results, the page title and meta clarification tin assist convince them to click on your link.

Read our Ultimate SEO Guide for Colleges and Universities.

7. Drive Organic Traffic Using Niche Blogs

Blogs are a crucial component of many content marketing and SEO strategies, and they can be a powerful tool for higher education marketers. Successful blogs can receive a large amount of traffic and the posts tin achieve a massive audition. Just as companies that web log consistently generate 88% more leads than companies that don't, much of the same tin can be said of higher education institutions that keep tranquility.

Blogs give higher education institutes an opportunity to showcase their make and connect with students. When developing your content strategy, think nearly how you tin can relate to prospective and current students.

Hither are some examples of how web log posts tin help academic institutions attain a broader audition:

Access Blog

Navigating the admission process can be confusing and intimidating for incoming students. They likely accept many questions—as exercise their parents. Create a web log solely focused on admissions and employ information technology every bit an opportunity to address commonly asked questions and to quell any concerns.

Niche Blogs for Different Departments

Different departments or colleges within your academy can launch blogs to showcase their activities. For example, the College of Engineering may want to highlight groundbreaking research projects or their presentations at national conferences. The College of Agricultural Sciences could blog about community projects that they're involved in, such every bit local simple school gardens they maintain or their extension programs.

Invitee Posts

Not only can college education institutes write for their own blog, merely colleges and universities can also submit guest posts to other loftier-traffic blogs to reach a larger or more targeted audience. Due to the nature of the content and the school's reputation, it is easier for most academic institutions to get their guest posts accepted past blogs.

8. Design Mobile-Friendly Websites

Prospective students brainstorm their search for a higher or university online and the first place they visit is often a academy's chief homepage. Websites should accept effective UX and perform well on both desktop and mobile devices. Users should be able to easily access your content at dwelling and on-the-become, delivering a mobile-friendly feel is crucial. This is particularly important to Generation Z, who is at present the target demographic of near colleges and universities.

That's exactly what Southern Virginia University is doing with its mobile-responsive website that displays well on both desktop laptops and cell phones.

Page speed is a factor that most search engines use to decide a website's folio rank. Search engines, similar Google, strive to deliver the all-time results possible. They know that their users don't desire to visit websites that are wearisome to load or accept a poor user experience (UX). If your website is slow to load, it will negatively bear upon your search rankings.

9. Communicate with Email Marketing

Some marketers take neglected email marketing, challenge that it is obsolete. This is far from the truth. Electronic mail marketing is even so very useful and several institutions have begun to adopt this strategy. According to Statista, more than seventy% of students said they'd rather get data from colleges and universities via electronic mail versus direct mail. However, with cold emailing, the odds are stacked against you as about emails sent to prospective students volition go directly to their spam folder.

So how can higher education marketers ensure that their emails won't go to spam?

Send Personalized Content

Send personalized, segmented, and relevant emails to leads. This has become a proven way to increase your engagement rate and meliorate overall deliverability. According to a written report from Econsultancy, 74% of marketers confirmed that targeted personalization is one of the best means to improve user experience and heave date rate.

Optimize Your Electronic mail Plan with AI

There are some specialized tools that help college educational activity marketers identify the best fourth dimension to send an email to anyone they have sent an e-mail to in the by. Popular e-mail marketing tools like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and ConvertKit offer these capabilities.

x. Increase Brand Awareness Using Brandish Advertising

Digital display advertisements are about 35% more effective than billboards and they tin help colleges and universities increase their reach. Banner ads tin be placed on high-traffic websites or through the Google Display Network to target prospective students based on their search histories Besides compelling text, banner ads should also include videos, GIFs, and photographs that are probable to attract prospective enrollees.

Here's an example of Cardiff Academy'south imprint ad displayed in the sidebar of an educational blog.

First Increasing Enrollment Today

College education marketers are always faced with lots of challenges—especially how to increase student enrollment. If these nine marketing strategies are properly leveraged, they volition differentiate y'all from other universities, helping you to build stronger relationships with current and prospective enrollees. If your marketing strategies need a refresh, the digital marketing professionals at Key can help. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

Source: https://www.cardinaldigitalmarketing.com/blog/10-higher-education-marketing-strategies-that-boost-enrollment/

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