A research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education shows that stiff rivalry between private schools can boost student achievements and bring down costs. Such findings explain why the education sector is a highly competitive industry, since the challenge is in attracting students. Now that people are more aware of marketing channels, digital marketing for education institutions therefore should be well thought of especially in relation to strategies in targeting the desired audience.
Moreover, digital marketing campaigns must be balanced and able to cut through all the noise by making a distinction from other institutions, but for all the right reasons.
Plan Marketing Campaigns by Prioritizing Marketing Channels
Since there are several marketing channels available such as digital advertising, social media, organic engine search pages, web content, affiliate marketing, email lists, pay-per-click ads and online public relations, it;s important to prioritize their use to avoid thin-spreading of marketing campaigns. What must be achieved instead is an equal presence across all important channels in order to be more effective.
That way, all promotional activities can effectively reach the right audience in the right way and at the most opportune time. Doing so requires assessing information about the digital spaces students and parents frequently visit, and the activities they usually engage in.
A private school may have a large Facebook account but if the target audience is more into posting tweets in Twitter, or watching streamed YouTube and Twitch videos, or sharing photos in Instagram, these social media channels should have priority over other channels like email listings, pay-per-click ads and online public relations,
Building a Persona of the Students Being Targeted by the Education Institution
When planning a private school’s digital marketing campaign, it’s also important to establish the type of students being targeted by the private school. It’s not enough to launch campaigns targeting students in general as the message must be directed to a specific persona of students.
To do this, it’s necessary to establish the ages or the age bracket of the students that the private school is looking to attract. The school may also want to entice students coming from specific locations, or in locations where the population of students are largely interested in the courses offered by the university or college. Other important aspects considered when building the persona of the target students are the audience who expect to gain the experience and benefits being offered by the private education institution. The more in-depth the persona established as the type of students that the school wants to attract, the fuller the messages and content used in the marketing campaigns.
Marketing campaigns that reflect every want and desire of the students have greater chances of standing out from the campaigns of competitors and heighten possibilities of capturing a larger number of enrollees,
Still, to ensure such results, it would be best to entrust the digital marketing campaigns to an expert with proven skills in search engine optimization (SEO). Increasing the private education institution’s visibility in the digital space will enable the promotional and marketing content, reach target student audience not only in social media sites, but also those who seek information from the school’s website by way of organic searches.
SEO companies, has consistently proven that its digital marketing team understands SEO better than their competitors. The SEO experts of this Arizona-based company segregate their SEO strategies into volume keywords, competition-specific keywords, current high performing URLs, legitimate backlinks, assertive targeting and retargeting of the established persona of audience.