Institutes of higher learning have witnessed sharp decreases in applications because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now is an opportune moment for schools to audit and amend their digital marketing and recruitment marketing plans to make sure that the essential techniques for generating leads are operational and that their current methods are as efficient as possible.
There is no one easy solution to increasing enrollment numbers, but there are three key marketing strategies that every school can use to improve their chances of success. With the large number of vendors, advertising channels, and CRM solutions available, it can be difficult to create and carry out an enrollment marketing strategy that is effective and affordable.
But it doesn’t have to be.
When it comes to generating leads as part of a student enrollment strategy in higher education, there are three primary digital engagement pathways. These enrollment strategies are three core lead generation strategies by which a college or university can attract new prospective students and convert them into leads for graduate, online, or degree completion programs:
- Launch paid digital advertising campaigns and capture leads on dedicated landing pages.
- Optimize your school’s website to better convert organic and direct traffic.
- Establish a content marketing strategy to attract top of the funnel traffic to your school’s website. Enhanced targeting and lead conversion will make enrollment growth even more pronounced.
If your school is implementing the three lead generation strategies mentioned, you can be confident that you will attract the students your school needs.
Let’s take a look at seven different lead generation enrollment strategies!
1. Refine Your Value Proposition for Students
You need to start by improving your value proposition and messaging. With the recession and an uncertain economic future, many students have put their educational plans on hold. In a time when the college degree is constantly being questioned, it is important for higher education institutions to demonstrate the value of their degree and help students see how it can be useful in the real world. Career viability has always been important, but now it is vital.
Now is the time to focus on what makes your school unique and create content that demonstrates to students that their chosen path will lead to a rewarding future. In addition to simply telling students that they will be successful, you need to show them evidence that supports your claim. Here are a few ideas on how to get the message out:
- Create an infographic outlining your school’s career counseling resources
- Create videos of alumni talking about their career successes
- Create social media stories in which alumni and student share their successes
- Create blog articles featuring student wins
- Refer the reader to statistics backing up the above messaging for your programs and degrees
It is crucial that you have a clear understanding of how your students fare after graduation. Therefore, you should make it a priority to reach out to your alumni network and get feedback from them. Your marketing efforts should be focused on highlighting the value that students get from attending your school.
What are the things that students care about most and how can you change your value proposition and messaging to reflect this?
2. Lead Generation with Paid Digital Ad Campaigns
You can generate leads by directing targeted users to a landing page through paid advertising or by paid directory listings.
You can create digital ad campaigns to attract an audience for your business school using platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Marketing your school using services such as these is known as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. You can also place ads on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Degree aggregator sites such as Poets & Quants or College Confidential offer yet another avenue to increase your school’s exposure to prospective students. Selecting the right platform and targeting the right audience can be a complex process.
Regardless of how you generate leads, you’ll need to funnel those leads to a landing page designed specifically for the audience you’re attempting to attract. The purpose of a landing page is to promote a single program or a group of related degrees, with the goal of encouraging the reader to take a specific action. For that reason, a landing page designed to entice undergraduate students will be totally different than that intended for graduate applicants, and neither of those landing pages will be suitable for an institution providing trade degrees.
The landing page is a page that is not connected to the rest of your school’s website and its only purpose is to make users fill out a form. The landing page is designed to be like your school’s main website, but it does not have any links that users can follow to the rest of the website. The single call to action (fill out a form) and the paucity of any links leading away from the landing page will hopefully prevent the prospect from “wandering away”. The landing page should be easily scanned by the human eye and should have minimal copy which distracts from the desired call to action.
If a prospective student provides their email and phone number in the form , you can (and should) follow up with them via email, text, or phone call.
But, what about those prospects who don’t complete the form?
Keep Prospective Students Engaged with Retargeting & Remarketing Ad Campaigns
You will have many prospects who visit your school’s site but who don’t take the next step and visit the school or talk to someone about applying to become a student. This creates an opportunity to add them to a list of similar prospects, targeting each prospect with ads specifically attuned to the level of interest they have expressed in your school.
This is done by using a retargeting pixel on your landing page, which allows you to target those who didn’t convert the first time. This second campaign can show ads on a variety of digital channels, like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and search engines. The prospect has already expressed an interest in your institution, and the second campaign keeps your brand at the forefront of their mind.
If you finely tune your original audience targeting to people seeking a degree, your retargeting pool will be highly targeted as well. Although retargeting campaigns are an additional advertising expense, their highly targeted audience more than justifies that expense.
If you want your retargeting and remarketing campaigns to be successful, you need to make sure your landing pages are optimized and focused on lead capture. For example, If someone has spent time looking at your MBA page, it’s likely that they are interested in graduate business programs. You can keep your program at the front of their mind by including them in MBA-specific retargeting efforts.
3. Capture Organic and Direct Website Traffic
What are the best ways to engage users who have arrived to your college or university website after using a search engine such as Google or Bing or those that simply typed your school’s internet address into their browser?
Before anything else, you need to optimize your website pages to show up in organic search results. However, once a user arrives on your website, you want to keep them there long enough to convert, no matter how they got there. It’s crucial to have a good understanding of the customer journey.
If you’re seeking to recruit graduate students or adult learners, you need to understand their customer journey and their content needs. For example, prospective graduate students don’t want information about your campus and student activities. Some things they may want to know include:
- Degree or program information
- Research opportunities in their chosen field
- Time requirement to complete their degree
- Available remote study opportunities
- Facilities available to advance their studies
- Facility qualifications
- The availability of scholarships or internships
It is important to have a clear call to action, such as an information request form, on your degree or program pages. However, it is also important to have a clear pathway to other relevant information for users who might want to learn more before taking their next step toward enrollment.
The goal of having a website visitor is to have them request further information, or to actually start their application. Your website should have a clear information architecture to direct prospects to your program and degree pages. By aligning your content with their interests, you are more likely to succeed in getting them to convert. You may need extra engagement strategies for more passive visitors on program pages.
Using Personalized Calls to Action to Drive Conversion
Optimized your program pages by using a pop-up to encourage users to take the next step. This could be as simple as a lead generation form or it could include a downloadable career guide or webinar invite.
Engagement methods that provide an incentive can drive up your response rate, especially on mobile devices. These incentives typically result in a 2-4% conversion rate.
You can also provide other avenues to contact your school, such as providing a phone number to schedule a call with an admissions counselor. This will help you to get more information about your school’s programs out to prospective students.
4. Niche Blogs Can Be Used to Drive Organic Traffic
If a university or college isn’t blogging, it could be sacrificing a massive opportunity to reach potential students. Blogging is a key part of many content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, and can be an extremely powerful tool for higher education marketers. Blogs that are successful can bring in a large number of visitors and have their content seen by a massive audience. The same way that companies which blog can generate 60% – 80% more leads than those which don’t, the same can be said of universities and colleges which don’t blog – they could be missing out on a huge opportunity to reach potential students.
Though blogs are a great way for higher education institutes to show off their brand, it’s important that the content of the blog still speaks to prospective and current students. Further, videos and podcasts are well documented ways to keep interested prospects returning to your site. Keep this in mind when making your content strategy.
Here are some examples of how blog posts can help academic institutions reach a broader audience:
Admission Blog
The admission process can be confusing and intimidating for incoming students. They likely have many questions—as do their parents. A blog focused on admissions can be used as an opportunity to address commonly asked questions and to quell any concerns. Consider including some questions, comments, and experiences from those students and their parents.
Encourage Different Departments to Set Up Niche Blogs
Have your university’s departments or colleges create blogs hi-lighting their activities. Groundbreaking research projects or presentations by the College of Engineering or the Drama Department’s achievements may make great posts for your blog. Similarly, your college’s new apprenticeship training program for plumbers may make an interesting post.
Guest Posts
In many cases, representatives of academic institutions can reach a larger audience (or one which is more targeted) by offering to appear as a guest at a podcast or provide a post which can be incorporated in a blog maintained online by someone with a large online following. Podcast guests and posts from academic institutions are frequently welcomed by bloggers, as academic representatives lend credibility to blogs dealing with related subject matter.
5. Create a Website that is Mobile-Friendly
Prospective students often begin their search for a college or university online, and the main homepage of a university is often the first place they visit. It is important for websites to have effective user interface, one that performs well on both desktop and mobile devices. This is particularly true for users who access your web site on their mobile device during free moments during the day, then dive more deeply into their research while at home. This is particularly important to Generation Z, who are now the target demographic of most colleges and universities.
Simply having a web site optimized for desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile devices isn’t enough. Search engines use page speed as a factor to determine a website’s page rank. They know that users don’t want to visit websites that are slow to load. If your website is slow to load, it will negatively impact your search rankings.
6. Using Email Marketing to Increase Interest
Despite claims from some marketers that email marketing is obsolete, it is still a useful tool, with many institutions adopting it. According to Statista, more than 70% of students said they’d rather get information from colleges and universities via email than direct mail. However, with cold emailing, the odds are stacked against you as most emails sent to prospective students will go directly to their spam folder.
How can higher education marketers make sure their emails don’t go to spam?
Send Personalized Content
If you want to improve user experience and engagement rate, send targeted, personalized emails to leads after they have indicated an interest in your institution. This is supported by data from Econsultancy, which found that 74% of marketers believe targeted personalization is one of the best ways to improve user experience.
Optimize Your Email Program with AI
There are some specialized tools that help higher marketers identify when it would be the best time to send an email to anyone they have sent one to in the past. Rarely will a prospect respond after reading a single email from your institution. You should plan on developing and using an email series; a pre-written and scheduled series of emails designed to guide prospects and grow their interest in your school.
7. Increase Brand Awareness Using Display Advertising
Banner ads that are placed on high traffic websites or through the Google Display Network are about 35% more effective than conventional highway billboards. They can help colleges and universities increase their reach by targeting prospective students based on their search histories. Keep in mind that these ads are not personal to the prospect, and they may not be focused specifically on the prospect’s interest. Banner ads typically allow you to specify the days and times they will appear however, as well as you to limit the geographic reach of the ad. As a result, this type of advertising tends to be good to build your school’s brand awareness, driving generic traffic to your web site.
Start Increasing Enrollment Today
Differentiate yourself from other universities by implementing these 7 marketing strategies. You’ll be able to increase student enrollment and build stronger relationships with current and prospective students. If you need help, the digital marketing professionals at Nutcracker Marketing can assist you. Schedule a free consultation today.
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