Ten Digital Marketing Techniques for Postsecondary Education:
A digital revolution is taking place in higher education. The days of gorgeous college catalogs and mass-produced direct mail are coming to an end. Because today's potential students are digital natives, universities need to rethink their long-standing marketing tactics. Equipped with the ability to conduct extensive research online, prospective students are delving deeply into your school and have access to nearly all the information they require to make an informed decision. Colleges and universities need to adopt a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to interact with leads, convert them into applicants, and eventually help them become college students.What is Digital Marketing, and How Does Higher Education Affect It?
Using digital tools and platforms to recruit and retain students, cultivate relationships, and increase enrollment and engagement is known as digital marketing for colleges and universities. It makes it possible to efficiently and economically reach particular audiences with personalized, creative, and targeted messaging. Students nowadays learn online. You may interact with them on the platforms they use most frequently if you have a strong online presence. To effectively reach target groups, marketing tactics for higher education need to extend beyond print advertising. Students have strong ideas about what aspects impact their choice of college, according to research from bestcolleges.com. These variables include campus safety (33%), diversity of student population (23%), location (47%), and general student quality of life (38%). (Refer to source) However, just 27% of students polled for the 2021 E-Expectations Trend Report stated they would reply to letters or pamphlets sent by direct mail.
How then do aspiring students find out about the universities they wish to attend?
Students are using digital channels more and more to explore and interact with colleges as a result of the growth of social media and online platforms.Four Fundamentals of Successful Digital Marketing in Higher Education:
Personalized Marketing:
You can reach the appropriate students at the right time with the correct message when you have an effective marketing strategy in place. Additionally, even though prospective students are your main target audience, it's important to reach out to parents and other influential people like guidance counselors. Two-thirds of students reported that their parents had some involvement in their college search, according to the E-Expectations Trend Report.Interesting Content:
Draw interest, grab attention, and establish a relationship with your organization. A dry brochure will not do. Provide content that highlights student events and campus culture on blogs, social media platforms, YouTube videos, and Instagram stories.Emphasize Your Advantages:
Being distinct from the competition is made easier with a great web presence. Use digital marketing to highlight the programs, staff, and student experience that set your university or college apart and make it desirable.Obtain Measurable Outcomes:
Being a university, you understand the need for measurability. Digital marketing delivers quantifiable outcomes that enable educational institutions to assess the success of their outreach initiatives and make data-driven decisions, much like student achievement tracking does by providing actual data to illustrate students' abilities. With digital marketing, you can observe what is and is not effective.Ten Digital Marketing Techniques for Postsecondary Education:
1. Make Your Website More Optimized:
A website that is both mobile-friendly and easy to use is essential for a happy learning environment. Aside from their parents, students claim that a college website is the most reliable source. Improve your content and website to appear higher in search results. The program pages have to be simple to locate and straightforward to traverse.2. Make use of SEO (search engine optimization):
Use search engine optimization to keep your website at the top of the list of results. Enhancing your website's position for relevant terms in search results is known as SEO. Strong SEO is essential for schools and universities because it guarantees that prospective students who are actively looking up the institutions online will find their websites quickly. This raises the number of qualified applications as well as website traffic and brand exposure.3. Research on Keywords:
Finding the terms and phrases that potential students use online to look for schools and institutions is known as keyword research. EAB, the old Education Advisory Board, provided the following statistics on student search queries: 82% of students look for institutions based on their academic offerings, for example, "undergraduate computer science programs." "The best" appears in 57% of student searches, such as "the best college for marine biology."