Your school’s website is your largest online asset. For most prospects, it’s their first stop along your digital highway. But it’s a two-way street. A place where prospective students and parents find all manner of valuable information about your school and application process. Don’t forget to make sure you’re getting valuable information about your website visitors in return.
Our Social Media Benchmark 2015 Report found that the nonprofit / education sector leads the pack in the size of their social media communities. Since everyone is on some networks already, social media is a natural platform to communicate with students and parents. It’s a real time channel with maximum reach.
As an education marketer, you’re well aware of the successes and advantages of inbound marketing. It’s easy to spend so much time immersed in the new opportunities inbound is bringing. Which makes it easy to forget that key stakeholders at your school don’t always share same perspective. Administrators and staff may never have heard of inbound marketing, or may be afraid of change—making it tough to get their support.
You’ve created awesome content. You have students, alumni, and faculty all contributing. Is anyone reading it? Can anyone find it? The Internet is a crowded and noisy place. With all your effort in creating outstanding content, don’t let it go to waste. Don’t overlook search engine optimization (SEO).
Nearly 80% of alumni feel positively about their alma maters. That doesn’t translate to 80% of your alumni making donations to the school, but according to the same study — nearly half of non-donors do want to find ways to get more involved with their schools. Are you using this fully to your advantage?
Your school’s blogs are the catalyst of your inbound marketing strategy. Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to see positive results from their marketing efforts.
As education marketers, you’re more than a collateral factory for the Admissions department. But do they know that?
How frustrated do you get when you can’t find the information you’re looking for on a website? Contrast that with time spent on a website where content you’re most interested in “magically” appears just where and when you want. We’ll bet you find the latter a more pleasing and powerful experience that you’ll remember long after you left the site.
What are kids looking at when they spend hours a day on their phones? As an education marketer – you want to make sure some of that attention is coming your school’s way. With the wealth of school content available to students, you can be sure some schools are getting prospective students’ time, so some of it should be yours, right?
Once upon a time, students applying to colleges waited for relevant materials to arrive in their inboxes. Schools sent out viewbooks, pamphlets, and newsletters to prospective students to drive applications and enrollment—and it worked.
Getting a prospective student’s contact information is not an invitation to immediately send an email telling them to “Apply Now.” Rather, think of their initial interest, and the fact that they volunteered their personal information, as a window to start a conversation.
According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 37% of U.S. adult internet users between 18–29 years old use Twitter. This is up from 31% the year before. On average.
If social media teams at universities want to target the college demographic, they need to start by understanding and adapting to students’ social media habits. Universities are lucky to already have a built-in community — and Twitter is a great place for them to inform and engage with students, prospective students, alumnae/i, and faculty.
