As someone working in higher education, you understand the importance of staying current on current marketing trends; however, it can be easy to get caught up in them and overlook what works best for your institution.
Email remains one of the most effective higher education marketing strategies, providing campus-wide campaigns as well as targeted, personalized messages tailored specifically for each recipient.
1. Use Social Media
Social media provides higher education institutions with an excellent opportunity to engage potential students and alumni, communicate important updates and events, as well as remind people about upcoming ones.
Reaching out to current students and alumni allows colleges and universities to build stronger connections between current students and alumni, which helps retain more of them and fosters community building as they build their global reputations.
To maximize social media in higher education, it’s essential to develop an effective plan. Doing so will allow you to attract and retain more students, engage with alumni and increase donations.
Step one in developing an effective higher education marketing strategy is setting a goal. Establish measurable KPIs that reflect those objectives, so you can easily track progress towards them and find which strategies are the most suitable fit for your institution.
2. Create Personalized Email Campaigns
Customized email campaigns are an effective way to build relationships with prospective and current students. They can help promote school-wide activities, promote networking opportunities and drive participation rates higher.
Sending emails that demonstrate that your school values its relationship with its recipient and is here to offer support is an effective way of keeping subscribers engaged in your content and interested.
Personalization techniques such as sending emails from a real person, using custom fields, and dynamic content are easy and effective ways to develop successful higher education marketing campaigns.
Segmenting your list is key when marketing higher education via email marketing, as each subscriber may have differing interests in school, income levels and educational goals. Utilizing an ESP’s list segmentation feature can enable you to personalize email messages specifically tailored for each student so that your content resonates with them and their needs, leading to higher open rates and click-through rates.
3. Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
Your website is an essential marketing asset that allows you to reach and engage your target audience with your brand. Potential students will visit it first when researching your institution, making it a key component of a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Higher education institutions must create mobile-friendly websites in order to ensure their web presence is responsive and user-friendly on both desktops and hand-held devices. A mobile website will increase lead generation, conversions and sales for your institution.
Responsive higher education web design is an innovative technique that allows websites to adapt their appearance and layout depending on the screen size of any device they’re being viewed on, making navigation simpler for visitors using handheld devices. By eliminating the need for separate mobile websites, this approach makes mobile users’ lives simpler while helping your visitors easily explore your site on handheld devices.
Google has long stressed the significance of having a mobile-friendly website; in fact, mobile friendliness is a core component of their search engine algorithm. Google offers a free test to evaluate whether or not your website meets this standard and how fast it loads across various devices.
4. Hire a Digital Marketing Agency
To execute successful higher education marketing strategies, it’s crucial to engage a digital marketing agency. They will assist in finding an approach tailored to targeting your audience while maximising budgetary expenditure.
They will also collaborate with you to craft a tailored plan tailored specifically to the needs of your institution, so you can maximize returns on your investments.
Experienced digital marketing agencies know the nuances of the higher education market.
They understand the ways to connect with prospective students from the moment they show interest in your school and can do this by targeting highly segmented groups across social media and other online platforms – this approach can be particularly effective at drawing in new pupils.
5. Leverage Livestreaming
Livestreaming can be an excellent way for universities and prospective students to share information and connect, such as sharing videos from your campus, events or Q&A sessions.
Livestreaming can easily fit into any existing marketing strategy or be supplemented with other tactics to boost results and build relationships with both current and potential students, while increasing brand recognition.
Livestreaming has come a long way over time. Now available on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, livestreaming allows companies to broadcast everything from large events to smaller workshops live. In order to maximize its potential as an effective media tool it’s important to choose an appropriate streaming platform and understand how your target audience uses it; testing is also recommended before going live to ensure smooth performance and efficiency.
6. Use Influencers
Influencer marketing is an effective higher education marketing strategy as it allows your institution to connect more directly with its target audience. Influencer campaigns can generate positive awareness about your institution while also drawing in new students.
Your current students can become influencers by sharing their experience at your university through video content. Day-in-the-life vlogs can demonstrate what it’s like studying at your institution and give prospective students an idea of what life at your university would be like.
Influencers can help your school promote its programs and campus offerings while building trust with their audience and encouraging them to apply.
If you plan on working with influencers, be sure to have an official written contract in place that addresses remuneration considerations, social media analytics and how the influencer plans to use their content to promote your school.
7. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Universities need a content marketing strategy that attracts prospective students. This may involve creating blog posts, videos, and other forms of content to educate prospective students about studying at specific universities.
Higher education marketing strategies must also consider a diverse audience that includes students, alumni, parents and potential stakeholders – each having specific needs, questions and expectations that need to be taken into account when creating successful strategies.
Success for higher ed digital marketing strategies lies in meeting audience needs by creating engaging content tailored specifically for each audience segment. This may include recruiting contributors from various areas within a university who understand each one.
8. Leverage Your Alumni Network
University and college alumni networks can be powerful allies when building relationships. Sponsoring events, becoming a regular presence on campus and reaching out to students who might be interested in your business are all effective methods of building these connections.
An alumni network offers more than just fundraising potential; it can also serve as a resource for networking and mentorship purposes as well as connecting you to professionals and partners necessary for business survival.
As part of your university marketing, storytelling should be used effectively. For instance, sharing an alumni’s success through education could make a lasting impression with prospective students and create positive associations for your institution. If that’s something your university could benefit from doing more of on its website and social media channels.
Your audience should feel more at home with your institution and more donors will likely come through as a result of increased brand visibility and reputation.
9. Utilize a Content Management System
Content Management Systems (CMSs) provide marketers with an easier way to create, edit, and publish website content while protecting against hackers and data loss. Many CMSs also come equipped with security features designed specifically to keep hackers at bay.
An ideal CMS will also come equipped with advanced capabilities like analytics and personalization, which enables you to tailor content specifically to the audience – an essential ingredient of marketing success.
Find a content management system with user permissions so you can control who can access and edit which content, to prevent copyright issues from spreading across platforms and avoid duplicating posts on multiple channels.
Content management systems offer another significant benefit by enabling multiple people to collaborate simultaneously on a page or experience. That means your marketing team, IT professionals and developers can all collaborate simultaneously on building the content that drives your site.
