15 Ways Educational Institutes Can Leverage Digital Marketing Effectively

The Indian education sector has been transforming in the last few years, thanks to Government reforms, increasing interest and investment from private players, and the global EdTech revolution. The sector has become very competitive and the students more aspirational and demanding. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the once highly successful offline marketing channels like newspaper ads and insertions, Out of Home (OOH), walk-ins, and information kiosks have become ineffective.

Through this article, the author tries to present 15 Ways Educational Institutes Can Leverage Digital Marketing Effectively.

1. Build your unique digital presence

One of the most critical starting points to build your unique digital presence is a functional website. The website should reflect the details of the institute, courses offered, industry and employer connect, and placement-related information. Educational institutions should strictly avoid copycat designs and content as search engines penalize the same and may even block the website. Based on the type of content to be shared, keywords can be crafted, maintaining a balance between generic and branded keywords.

Once a functional website is up and running, unique and uniform social media handles and pages that complement the website should be created.

A Google My Business page is essential to ensure a seamless experience for the visitors to locate the institute, contact for any queries, readily visit the website, and most importantly, share feedback of their knowledge. Its utilization is essential in an organic setup.

Once you have established a basic digital presence, it is also vital to digitize offline marketing and communication collaterals and make them available on your website. Digital brochure downloadable after an information form is a great idea to build a credible database of interested candidates and to engage with them through targeted communication.

2. Optimize for mobile and various browsers

Due to the availability of affordable smartphones and internet data, most people access the internet and consume content through smartphones. The mobile screentime, especially for the millennials, is continuously increasing. Educational institutes would do well to make their website mobile responsive (both android and iOS) and compatible with different devices like desktops, laptops, tablets, and browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer/Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari etc.

3. Identify your target audience

Once you have established your unique digital presence, it's time to identify your target audience. An educational institute's direct target audience may be students or working professionals in a certain age group, based on a particular location or speaking a specific language. The indirect audience may be influencers and opinion-makers like teachers and parents. While it may not be possible to directly utilize a tool to target your audience in an organic setup, other indirect steps can help achieve this objective.

Google Analytics provides a great amount of assistance in this as it shares feedback on content engagement and thereby displays the audience's demographics. This acts as a feedback loop to further work on the campaign and edit it as per requirement. Once the target audience has been identified, focused engagement can be initiated by selecting the most relevant platform and paid campaigns.

4. Choose your platforms wisely

Based on the target audience identified in the previous step, an assessment of their presence and time spent on different platforms must be done. As the time, money, and other resources that educational institutes have are limited, careful selection of the platforms saves the scarce resources and ensures a high return on time and money investment. The following points are to be kept in mind while choosing the platforms for channelizing resources:

• Platforms where the target audience is present and spends significant time
• Platforms where the influencers and opinion-makers are present and spend considerable time
• Online communities where the target audience is likely to participate and engage

For educational institutions offering undergraduate courses, Facebook and Instagram are most effective. For institutions offering professional courses, LinkedIn and Twitter should also be included.

5. Do technical and on-page SEO

Technical and on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something educational institutes cannot afford to neglect. It pays to invest time and resources in SEO, and search engines reward technically strong and efficiently optimized websites by listing them in top search results. The following points are to be kept in mind while doing SEO for your website:

• Effectively craft headlines, website descriptions, and meta descriptions. They should be based on detailed research and not on the preference and liking of owners and managers of the institute.
• Ensure each page, and each course has a unique title that can readily be displayed when a relevant search is done
• Maintain a fine balance between generic and exclusive(branded) keywords
• Images and videos must be optimized for size to ensure a fast page load speed. Describe the pictures and videos both on the page and the code.
• Provide all relevant information through Google my business feature to boost the SEO ranking
• The website should be well-linked (internal linking) for better navigation and UI experience. Broken links to be identified and corrected
• Strict adherence to search engine policies of copyright, plagiarism, and trademarks

6. Setup and maintain a dedicated blog

A well-managed blog on an educational institute's website supplements the website and its other social media pages. Students spend considerable time researching institutes and courses before making application decisions. Most of them have multiple queries and confusions about the course, its prospects, and employment potential. A detailed blog helps potential students to educate themselves, clear doubts, and make an informed decisions. Suggested topics for blogs for educational institutions.

• Frequently asked questions about the institute and the course
• Industry landscape and the employment outlook
• Course overview by the faculty/teacher
• Present and future career progression opportunities that the course offers
• Experience of an existing student of a course
• Experience of alumni or industry leaders
• Expectation and advice from Human Resource (HR) managers

?7. Setup a Chatbot for 24x7 engagement

Digital presence has blurred the boundaries for searching, enquiring, and engaging with educational institutes. Potential students search and enquire at their preferred time and convenience and do not have the patience to wait for the 9 to 5 helpdesk executive to answer their queries. Since most questions are factual and routine, a chatbot on the website can easily replace a human helpdesk executive. Common queries can also be taken through the chatbot and may be answered by the helpdesk executive based on their availability.

A chatbot is also an effective tool to collect and organize contact databases that may be used for more direct interactions. Chatbot, while serving as the first POC for queries, increases dwell time on the website and the engagement of visitors.

?8. Leverage strengths of other platforms

While your unique digital presence enhances the visibility and engagement of your website, there are platforms like dedicated blogs, websites, and aggregators where potential students search and compare courses and institutions. Your brand's presence on such influential platforms boosts SEO ranking as search engines consider this a measure of authenticity. Backlinks and crosslinks of your website with these credible platforms ensure a higher ranking of your institute. The absence of backlinks on your website may prompt visitors to jump to other websites for more information.

In addition to backlinks, institutes may explore paid search and display ads on these platforms to get the attention of users and searchers.

?9. Use short videos for virality

With the reduced attention span and less time availability, videos are fast taking the place of lengthy, time-consuming texts. Short videos have more attention-catching, engagement, and stickiness potential when compared to written text. Short videos ranging from 30 seconds to 120 seconds are very effective in reaching out and engaging with potential audiences. Suggested short videos for educational institutes

• Video about the industry with some industry experts
• Course video with the faculty and existing student
• Campus tour with an influencer
• Placement and employment potential with the HR manager of a company
• Success story of a recent pass out

?10. Organize live events

Live events are becoming a new medium of connecting and engaging with potential students. All social media platforms provide the facility of quick setup and host live events. Additionally, they provide tools to promote (both paid and unpaid) the events and measure effectiveness through analytics. Facebook live, Insta Live, and YouTube are being extensively used by educational institutions. Suggested topics for live events are:

• Course information session
• Counseling and admission session
• Ask me anything session
• Live digital poll and insights discussion with the audience

?11. Engage through influencers

Influencers and opinion makers have far more influence on potential students than anyone else. With millennials spending more and more time on mobile and social media, their chance of interacting and engaging with influencers is very high.

Industry partners, mentors, successful alumni, current students, users of certain products and services are trustworthy influencers and would positively influence the potential students while making a decision. Identification and engagement with influencers can pay in both the short and long term.

12. Motivate users to generate and share content

While engaging audiences to write content may seem difficult, we may start rolling the ball by initiating the conversation and developing various communities where visitors may join and share their views. The possibility of virality of the content is very high in campaigns where users share and generate content. Short insta videos, FB reels, and WhatsApp videos can be leveraged for the same.

13. Paid Ad placement

Paid ads may also prove to be effective in reaching out and engaging with the target group. Most of the platforms provide features for product listing, service offering, and advertisement for web users. They also offer tools for segmenting and targeting users and flexibility in terms of campaign duration and budget. Educational institutes may choose between search, display, and video ads based on their strategy for brand building, admission planning, and budget availability. Google analytics provides functionality to analyze the effectiveness of paid campaigns. A balanced combination of SEO and paid ads can work wonders for educational institutions.

Image reference: Google images?

14. Track, measure, and modify campaigns

Digital marketing is very dynamic and needs to be managed proactively to get the best results. Digital marketing initiatives are experimental and different campaigns give different results. There are analytical tools available that help track and measure the efficiency and effectiveness of each digital marketing initiative. A proactive digital marketing manager is the one who tracks, measures, and modifies the strategy based on the outcomes and learnings.

Image reference: Google images?

Google analytics, social media listening, and benchmarking with a competitor (through tools like www.semrush.com) are standard practices that organizations and brands across industries use. Educational institutions should also use these strategies and tools to make the most of their digital marketing investments.

15. Make of the most of available digital marketing talent

While digital marketing gives higher reach and engagement, which translates to more business, it also requires considerable cost and effort. Digital marketing is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing effort to stay connected with potential customers and stay ahead of the competition. Digital marketing is also a professional practice and cannot be left to conventional marketing experts present in the organization. It requires trained and experienced professionals across the entry to senior level.

While getting the senior and middle managers in digital marketing function comes at a premium, entry-level talent for routine creation and monitoring tasks can be leveraged from the growing community of digital marketing professionals, interns, and freelancers. Educational institutes may engage these professionals for a fraction of the cost. These professionals, in turn, get projects, mentors, and endorsements critical for their professional success.

Conclusion

Digital Marketing is an effective medium to reach the target audience, create brand awareness and build continuous engagement across industries and brands. Educational institutes realize the importance of digital marketing in building their brands, attracting potential students, and continuously engaging with industry and other stakeholders. Though all the institutes aspire to have a strong, effective, and engaging digital presence, only a handful are able to leverage the power of digital marketing to the fullest.

The above list of 15 Ways Educational Institutes Can Leverage Digital Marketing Effectively is indicative and not exhaustive. As each educational institute is unique in terms of its identity and offerings, the tools indicated in this article, if used strategically and systematically along with other marketing channels, will ensure a higher return on investment for the educational institutes.

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