In recent years, the landscape of marketing for higher education has changed dramatically. With the rise of digital media and the decline of traditional print media, colleges and universities must adapt their marketing strategies to stay competitive. Here are five effective marketing strategies for higher education:
1. Centralized strategy and reports
The budget is fragmented and shared across departments, a difficulty that higher education marketing frequently faces.
Even if centralization might only be feasible in some organizations, it is still possible to standardize your KPIs and evaluate the success of your campaigns in one place.
Without centralized reporting, many departments might continually employ the same ineffective approach for the simple reason that they have done so in the past.
Additionally, having a first-class business plan consultant will help you develop a comprehensive and executable plan. This will include ongoing reporting and analysis to help you track your progress and make necessary adjustments to stay on track.
2. Suitable KPIs
What you don’t measure, you can’t manage.
To draw in more students is your main objective. However, if you only focus on their financial data, you will need to be able to track the outcomes quickly enough to modify your approach. Pay close attention to the following signs:
- Call to action conversion rate. How are users interpreting your website? Fill out forms, do they? Attend virtual events? Do you register?
- Traffic sources. What countries are sending visitors to your website? Is it paid search, social media, email marketing, or organic search?
- Engagement in social networks. Is your social media plan effective? Is your audience expanding and participating?
3. Marketing automation
The gathering of comprehensive customer data can be challenging in traditional marketing. However, if marketing is automated, you can follow a new student from their initial website visit to registration.
Staff at the National College of Ireland saw a 247% increase in leads in a year after integrating software into their marketing strategy. They feel that constructing a customer profile and writing content for the primary audiences who frequent the college website immensely helped them. The number of visitors to the site and how many of them turn into leads or students can now be seen by employees.
Not only does automation apply to digital marketing. Marketers can assess the effectiveness of print letters, events, and contacts with recruiters on various media.
Your company may manage duties associated with marketing campaigns, such as email marketing, social media campaigns, and targeted advertisements, with the use of marketing automation software. Your marketing staff will have more time to devote to formulating strategies, evaluating data, and creating fresh content if these duties are automated.
Task management software can help your business manage and track tasks, projects, and goals. Using a task management system, you can ensure that all tasks are completed on time and that your team is accountable for their work. A task management system can also help you identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement in your workflow.
4. Optimizing Email Campaigns with AI
Many of your emails may be spam if your organization sends cold emails to prospective students. 76% of students prefer email to direct mail when dealing with institutions.
It might be challenging to communicate with students, so make your emails more engaging to boost your sender’s reputation and increase the likelihood that your communications will be received.
When it comes to email campaigns, there are a lot of factors to consider to ensure they’re successful. But with the help of AI and business automation, you can optimize your email campaigns and increase your chances of success.
How to boost engagement:
- Split tests of messages and their headers. Apart from other factors like subscription quality or send time, A/B testing is the only way to assess how content emails function.
- Test your email headers and content frequently to find what performs best.
- Personalization. One strategy to raise engagement and deliverability is to use personalized, segmented emails.
5. SEO
According to studies, 64% of candidates favor the texts and articles on college websites. Universities must know the best keywords to use on their websites to maximize organic search.
Find out who they are and what languages they use. To perform well in the SERPs, use long keywords.
Also, consider that data visualization tools provide an effective way to see patterns and relationships in data, which can be helpful in SEO analysis and decision-making. While there are many commercial options available, several open-source data visualization tools can also be used for SEO purposes.
