Elevating Enrollment: Boosting Higher Education Sales through effective marketing

Just like any other business, schools and companies providing education products and services need marketing. As someone involved in the business of selling education, it has been a journey of trial and error for me, to finally understanding the ropes of the game. Marketing in the education world means understanding your audience, setting clear goals, and being organized and persistent. Here's a breakdown of what I have learned during my learning journey for effective and affordable education marketing.

?What is Education Marketing?

Education marketing is using different types of marketing mediums to help schools and education companies achieve their marketing, business development, branding and sales goals. These goals can be anything from increased enrollment to lead generation to thought leadership or brand solidity.

Choosing schools or products is a big decision, especially for higher education or graduate studies. We are talking about changing lives, shaping, reshaping entire careers here. Consumers in education take their time to decide, weighing their options carefully. So, it's crucial to plan your education marketing strategy carefully.

Why is Marketing Important for Education?

Building Trust: If people don't know about you, they won't trust you. Education marketing helps build brand recognition and trust over time, leading people to seek out information about your institution even without coming across your marketing content directly. Publishing useful, high quality content will help you position yourself as a leader in the education industry. In marketing, the sort of trust that ensues from this translates into less marketing investments and will make all marketing efforts down the line more effective.

Building Relationships: Your marketing shows off the stories of the people within your organization. Sharing your values and stories helps build a relationship with your audience, leading to brand loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations.

Generating Organic Traffic: Organic traffic often is the result from ranking well in search engine algorithms. One of the best ways to achieve this is by churning out content that is useful, addresses pain points, high-quality, and has enough authority to be cited on other well-traveled sites in backlinks.

For example, if you’re marketing your school’s online courses, and search engines are seeing users read the majority of the page while staying on the page for extended times, revisit it multiple times, cite it in other places, your position among schools providing that service is going to rise and more and more people will find your page on their own as they search for remote learning options. Remember, the best place to hide a body is the 02nd page of Google and this is one of those things that will keep you on the first page.

Establishing Thought Leadership: The higher the quality of your content, more people lay eyes on your content, the more you will become a resource that they turn to when they have questions related to your industry. Consistently publishing quality content can make you an authority in your field, attracting people who turn to you for information. This doesn’t happen overnight so brace yourselves for a consistent ride.

Achieving Cost-Effectiveness: The better researched, more balanced, more insightful your marketing materials are, the more likely you can improve your ROI and see lasting results for your business. A well-planned marketing strategy can pay for itself and more. It's better to invest time and resources in a solid strategy than to rush with a weak campaign.

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Trends in Education Marketing

Higher Education & vocational training: Differentiating by showcasing campus amenities, academic excellence, partnerships, accreditations, and alumni success helps, especially when it comes to vocational studies. Limiting the number of your enrolments and establishing criteria for enrolments, making enrolments a tad challenging not only raises its value in the eyes of the consumers, but also guarantees better results of the students (by increasing entry criteria for students ensures that you will get the crème-de-la-crème of the student base), thereby enhancing the credibility of the institution with stellar pass rates

Corporate Training: Convincing decision makers at companies that the training they offer can have a company-wide benefit that lasts, in the form of increased productivity, reduced inefficiencies, better customer service, staff rapport, internal communication or other gains is what usually converts to a sale. I have found that a great pricing strategy also helps in establishing value in the eyes of the corporate, automatically increasing your demand

Lifelong Learning: Marketing campaigns that emphasize the quality of their course catalog, their flexible or asynchronous course formats and online course options, and the overall convenience and effectiveness of their programs, to attract learners who want to enhance their knowledge or professional capability but may already be absorbed in their careers or private lives helps.

Effective Education Marketing Strategies

?Engage Through Social Media: Use social media to grow a following and build relationships with your audience. This can be done either through influencers or by tapping into existing followings.

Your own existing students: These are the underestimated brand ambassadors and marketing assets that we often overlook. Encourage them to post about their education journey on social media. Selfies, pictures, that picture of the time they had an ice cream fight, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure that they tag your institution accounts as they post

Ensuring enhanced customer experience: How responsive are your customer engagement teams? Are the students receiving enough information from you to make an informed decision? And once they've made a decision, is enrolment a hassle? Ensure that the customer experience is smooth sailing all the way with effective communication, well trained sales staff and aftercare and marketing will do itself as your customers will sing your praise from the rooftops!

?Include Digital Advertising: Most people are online, and students are more so. This is why targeted digital ads, social media, and website content are essential. And its not enough to target the students. Their parents too are potentials when it comes to digital advertising

Responsive Website: This is a no brainer. Research the current search trends in education and optimize your website with the relevant keywords. Optimize your website for mobile use because most people browse on tablets or phones. You don’t want to lose those leads just because your website was built on a rigid framework that can’t adapt to mobile formatting.

Allow Online Reviews: Positive reviews build credibility. More than half of consumers read at least four reviews before deciding. It’s gotten to the point where a lack of reviews might even signal lack of credibility to consumers, so I’d recommend leaving your reviews on display while you monitor them diligently as well. ?

Create Engaging Videos: The overwhelming majority of online traffic now flows to video. ?Producing videos in-house or with a marketing agency ensures powerful communication

Choosing an Education Marketing Agency

?Set Objectives: Define your goals to communicate expectations clearly. Without a sense of where you want to end up, you’re liable to wander the marketing wilderness for a while, on your own dime, without making much progress.

Create a Budget: Determine how much you're willing to invest. This will help you align with your goals and tells you and your marketing agency what kind of ROI you’ll need to see to make your marketing activities sustainable.

Research Agencies: Look for positive reviews and case studies. Do they have impressive results and do their goals align with yours? Be critical when evaluating agencies’ self-marketing and don’t be afraid to cross them off your list if something seems off.

Prepare Questions: Write down questions to ask during meetings to get all the information you need to make an informed decision

Have Meetings: Meet potential partners, assess industry knowledge, and evaluate confidence and expertise. Do they know your industry? Do they have education marketing ideas that would translate to your goals? Are they confident without promising too much? Trust your gut and take time to debrief afterward.

Set Expectations: Clearly communicate campaign parameters and responsibilities. Define what work you’d like to see done, what timetable you’re using, delegate tasks to their team or yours, and set a schedule for regular campaign updates, status reports, etc.

Onboard the Agency: Initiate the partnership and dive into strategy details.

Education marketing is a dynamic and multifaceted journey, and understanding the evolving landscape is the key to success. By embracing digital tools, prioritizing personalized communication, and staying attuned to the needs of learners, institutions can navigate the ever-changing seas of education marketing. Let's set our sails to a future where education is not just offered but passionately embraced! ????

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