Reaching out to prospective students and their parents can be difficult for marketers and for admissions teams due to increased institutional competition, reduced budgets, and competing priorities.
Traditional methods of outreach are less effective than they used to be. For that reason, schools need to adjust their marketing efforts to be more effective. Institutes need to reach out to prospective students and parents online. Increasingly, they are to be found on Google, social media, and on forums and blogs related to higher education, where it is more convenient to compare institutions’ programs and find admission information.
Why Inbound Marketing is Helpful for Higher Education
Inbound marketing for higher education targets those that have already indicated an interest in enrolling in an institute to further their education. They may have expressed that interest by simply visiting various schools’ websites, by searching for program information on a search engine, etc. That interest is noted by the respective website or search engine, and allows follow up messaging by the school to further their interest. It is both more effective and less costly than traditional outbound marketing tactics, such as billboards and radio or television ads.
Most customers today do not want to be distracted by advertisements. Some web browsers automatically block ads, and many users have added ad-blockers to their mobile devices or desktop computers.
Traditional outbound marketing methods, such as billboards, cold calls, ad campaigns, etc., rely on interrupting people’s day-to-day lives. In contrast, inbound marketing strategies make it easier for online searchers to find and come to you.
This shift in strategy is due to the fact that people now mostly search for products and find solutions to their problems online.
Inbound marketing is a methodology that allows you to create content that is optimized for search engines or social media. Low cost, highly targeted ads attract prospective students and their parents to that content as they begin evaluating degree and training programs, making it much more likely prospective students will favor your school as they move through the consideration process.
If you’re good at inbound marketing, your school’s ads will catch your prospects eye early and your web site’s content will come up high in search results when students look for answers related to what your college or university offers. You’re able to introduce prospects to your school seamlessly, offering them a glimpse of the experiences your school offers.
The Student’s Journey to Higher Education
If you want your content to be more effective, make sure it aligns with your prospects’ buyer’s journey. This is the process a buyer goes through when moving toward a purchase.
Here’s how the buyer’s journey works for your students and their families when searching for colleges and universities online:
- Awareness stage: Your prospective students have a problem they want to solve, so they search for possible solutions. How can I get a better job? Will a degree help?
- Consideration stage: Prospects begin researching schools and know which they want to consider. They are researching all the differences among their viable options (available programs, costs, location, etc.).
- Decision stage: Prospects have narrowed down their options and decide how they’d like to proceed.
A successful inbound marketing campaign for your college or university will ensure that your school is considered an option during the early stages of the buyer’s journey. The goal of this campaign is to educate potential students on the benefits of your school and to build trust in your institution at the same time.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing for Your Institution
In today’s world, students and parents are better able to find information about academic institutions. Prospects are conducting research on Google, Facebook, and YouTube. What this means is that more and more consumers are using the internet to find out about products before they buy them.
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that helps you anticipate and answer questions prospective students are asking online. Learning those questions can be beneficial for school marketeers and communications directors, as it can help them understand what potential students are interested in. The results of that understanding are not only good for developing a valuable relationship with students and their parents, but they also provide quantifiable results that show your overall marketing success.
The inbound methodology has different stages, each with its own tools to help you build meaningful relationships with prospective students and their families.
The best way to focus your school’s marketing efforts is to create an accurate student persona. This is a generic representation of who your ideal student (or family) is and what motivates them. If you’re not familiar with student personas, this guide can steer you in the right direction.
After the initial attraction stage, prospects are then engaged with personalized content. There are a few ways to increase interaction with your audience during the online sales process, such as having special offers, calls-to-action, and form submissions. Stated differently, the school tries to get the prospective student’s attention and interest by offering rewards for engaging with the school online.
If someone has a question, a call-to-action could lead that person to a blog post responding to that question, or it might direct them to a form highlighting an upcoming school event. When you manage to make a smooth transition from attracting the prospect’s attention to actually engaging their interest, it creates trust and builds your school’s worth in their minds. In turn, this encourages the student or parent to want to learn more about your school.
The last phase of the inbound methodology is designed to make customers happy. This stage of marketing includes surveys to study customer trends, social media monitoring to see what customers are saying online, and engagement in social media communities. At this point, you have established trust with a prospective student by providing a solution to a problem. After you’ve targeted your prospects with social content, you can create content that allows them to promote your services, and keep the process going.
In general, inbound marketing is focused on the customer, or in this case, the student. If you want to build a trusting relationship with your potential customers, try answering their questions online in a helpful way. By providing valuable content and information, you’ll strengthen your brand in the process. Consider making more use of inbound marketing. Many institutions have found it helpful in rewriting their entire marketing playbook.
Create Inbound Marketing Content to Attract Prospective Students
Now that you are aware of the content production, and development of your buyer’s persona, let’s examine how to generate content that your prospective students and their families will find advantageous.
One of the most important things you can do with your content is build trust with your readers. This will help you establish a good relationship with them and make them more likely to want to learn from you. Your admissions team should keep track of all the questions potential students ask, and then answer them thoroughly and honestly, creating one blog article for each question.
Students are likely asking questions such as:
- What are common challenges for freshmen or transfer students at your school?
- What’s the difference between your undergraduate and graduate programs?
- What are the best art schools in this state?
- What is the admissions process like?
Students and their parents are full of questions related to your school – its programs, costs, room and board while in attendance, etc. Be sure to include any information that will be helpful for students who are interested in attending your school. This can include information about admissions, choosing classes, career counseling, or anything else that will affect them.
When students look up information about your school online, one of the first questions they have is “How much does your school cost?” You want to be sure that your pricing is easy to find and understand, and that you explain how tuition and fees could change depending on the student packages your campus offers.s
In an ideal world, everything offered to students would be perfect, but that is not always the case. If you openly discuss the difficult topics that your students may be facing, they will trust that your school is prepared to help them with whatever they need. Answer potential questions from both parents and students that you hear most, and provide solutions or resources to address those questions. A few such concerns might include:
- Are academic and career counselors available?
- Do teachers and professors have office hours to help students with sticky academic problems?
- What kind of housing is available on campus? What should you do if you get a roommate you don’t like?
- Do you have any concerns or recommendations regarding off campus housing?
- What kinds of extra-curricular activities are available for students?
- Are there any opportunities for financial assistance or scholarships?
Addressing these concerns will help prospective students and their parents to learn how to deal with some of the more daunting aspects of enrolling by illustrating how they can surmount those challenges. Some of the issues above address the prospective student’s concerns, while others make families feel more comfortable and confident about sending their child to school.
After students and their families have selected a few schools, they will want to evaluate all their choices by looking at the similarities and differences between your school and the others, as well as the programs each school offers. Make sure to provide future students with an explanation of the similarities and differences between these two options so they can make an informed decision. Examples might include:
- What’s the difference between related majors as related to career opportunities?
- How do in-state and out-of-state tuition costs stack up?
- Is there any assistance available for tuition, books, or room and board?
Parents and students alike want to be able to read reviews in order to compare your school’s offerings to those of other schools. While you don’t have to go into extensive detail about your competitors, you should provide students with options and present yourself as the most authoritative voice.
“Best of” lists are a great way to get college students excited about their upcoming experience. When you market your school, you’re not just selling an education, you’re selling an experience. Type content that is labeling the “best” can help those who are looking to gain experience in specific areas. What are some topics that would help your audience start to see themselves on campus enjoying the experiences that go along with enrollment?
How to Use Search Engine Optimization to Help your Inbound Marketing Efforts Succeed
Answering your prospective students’ most pressing questions will help you rank for important keywords, without having to put too much thought into the technical aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, it’s still important to understand how to use search engines to drive traffic.
Use Effective Titles and Meta Descriptions
Well-constructed titles do two important things:
- Makes people want to click or read the content.
- Include the primary keyword you’re trying to rank for.
Develop Content based on Target Keyword Research
Semrush, Surfer SEO, and Ahrefs are all great software tools that can help you come up with target keywords for your content strategy. These keyword planning tools are designed to help you ensure that your content is aligned with what your target audience is searching for.
If your content is being indexed by search engines and appearing in search results but not receiving any clicks, Google will avoid displaying it in favor of articles that are being clicked.
Your description tag is designed to act as the block of text that shows up after the page’s title in search engine results pages.
Optimize All Images
Make sure your image file sizes are optimized to ensure that your pages load quickly.
Google Lighthouse can be used to help identify which images on a website might be causing the site to load slowly. There are services that can help you reduce the size of your media files, such as Bulk Resize Photos and Ezgif.
Include a Number of Internal Links
Include links to relevant content whenever it is appropriate, including a few links to content with strong SEO. Google will look at every page on your website and want to see that you are linking to relevant content in your articles.
The Bottom Line
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating valuable content to attract customers. They’re warm when them arrive at your doorstep, as opposed to being exposed to your ad copy by loosely targeted ads typical of billboards, broadcast, or print media. The goal of inbound marketing is to create trust between a business and their customers.
As technology advances, marketers are finding it necessary to change their methods to keep up with the times. Advertisers are taking advantage of technological advances, which has resulted in a new type of consumer who is knowledgeable about a product or service before they ever purchase it.
To succeed with this new type of customer, marketers need to adopt new strategies and utilize services that will help them keep up with the constantly changing industry. By using inbound marketing efforts, marketing and communications directors at schools can create new, trusting relationships with prospective students and families in a helpful, non-intrusive way.
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