Digital Marketing For School & College, 2021

Your school or college wants to attract the brightest students but wait, every education sector does that, right. Now, it has become a hot topic as every education sector is aggressively advertising its campuses, degree programs, and online learning programs which means it’s really tough to stand out to prospective students.

To that, the Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in forcing the education sectors to enforce new modes of advertising their learning programs and reach maximum students.

One more thing to note: Communication and marketing strategies that used to work for your school or college, might not be applicable in 2021.

The main reason for this could be the change of marketing strategies and their way of execution. All you need is the best online strategies and tips and adapt them to meet your expectations as per the current scenario. 

Nowadays, lots of research are done when it comes to selecting the right school or college, as education is a huge investment. And if your school or college doesn’t have a marketing plan, not to worry, you’re not alone in the race.

Without a proper online marketing strategy, it’s hard to pull together and work towards a common goal. A perfect digital marketing strategy gives the required structure to your team in order to achieve amazing results for your education sector.

Make sure the marketing programs involved must present your school as the unique environment it is. In this way, it will gradually increase interest in your school and attract more potential students.

Keep reading to learn about the best education marketing strategy and how to execute them with success. This can help you a lot in promoting your education business.

What is a Digital Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is basically a list of strategies for how your marketing team will work and achieve your school’s objectives. It’s about proper planning and execution of school marketing ideas and objectives with necessary steps that will help you achieve your goals.

Do you realize how competitive the education sector is in today’s world? So, it’s really necessary to start with an effective marketing campaign to be in the race.

Nowadays, the audience is more aware of different marketing channels, that’s the reason the education sector provides some tough competition in attracting students

When it comes to effective marketing strategies for schools, you need to focus on the basic needs of your education sector. Whether you own a school or college, you should be perfectly targeted and more thoughtful more than ever before.

You must be able to execute balanced and smart marketing plans for schools that can set your institution apart from others for all the right reasons. Now, you may think about how and where to start?

Here, are 6 steps you need to follow for the best marketing strategies for your education sector.

1.     Create a perfect Search Engine Strategy

There are mainly three elements for every school or college’s  search engine strategy:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Online Review Management
  • Paid Per Click Advertising (PPC)

Implementation of these strategies totally depends on your education sector’s long or short-term goal. Whether to invest in one, two, or all three of these essential search engine strategies, you have to decide accordingly and then proceed.

Search engine optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization includes keyword research and implementation for your website’s meta description, title tags, on-page content, and even creating a good blog. Results are often not instant as paid ads, many school marketers postpone SEO applications.

It takes months to reap the benefits out of an SEO strategy, as it depends on Google to crawl and recrawl site pages.

However, SEO has the main role to play in your school’s survival in the digital world. More than 90% of the searches are done online and decisions are made according to that.

So, if you want your college or school’s website’s to be found online and attract more students, then you need to invest in marketing strategies to increase student enrollment.

That’s the reason many schools and colleges partner with Tachomind’s SEO experts to help them craft a search engine strategy that works.

Students, nowadays use search engines to find the school that meets their expectations. So, it’s important for your school or college’s website to appear on the first page of search results for the particular keywords they are using.

It’s a fact that, if students do not find your school on the first page, you could lose the best applicants to other schools with similar strategies just because they outrank you. Reach prospective students by improving your ranking in the search engine result pages.

Online Review Management

There’s a saying, “ First Impression is the last impression”. Supporting this statement it’s clear that, online reviews are the first impression for your school or college. If your school does not have a good review, then it’s difficult to earn a click-through to your website. 

These reviews have a huge impact on your school’s website traffic even before the pandemic. And even after a year of relying on reviews for everything, they’re kept as a high priority.

Paid Per Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC ads are one of the most important digital marketing tools to help generate more website traffic and awareness for your school. If you want to rank your school high in Google and you don’t have that much time to develop your SEO strategy then, you can also opt for a paid ad strategy.

It can immediately land you at the top of the first page. Talking about an effective paid ad strategy for your school, we can help you in this regard!

Paid Per Click Advertising, PPC ads are another way as to how to market the education sector. Normally, PPC advertisements are displayed at the top of the search results.

These ads are also activated by keywords like SEO. You need to use long-tail keywords and due to lack of competition,  it will result in drawing incredible traffic to your website. Once you choose the keywords for your ad, you offer a particular amount for your placement.

The amount that you offered is the maximum bid for your website placement. Even though it is the actual price willing to pay per click or the cost-per-click (CPC), but you can change your maximum bid at any time.

Selecting long-tail keywords is one of the best ways to lower your cost per click (CPC). There is less competition for long-tail keywords because there are few people bidding for these keywords.

Attract more students by drawing the attention of prospective students interested in your school.

It’s great for your school or college as you can control your budget as per your requirements.  If you want to spend $3,000 on a PPC campaign then, you are free to set that much amount without paying for any extra charges.

PPC is an ideal way to drive the right traffic to your school’s website. It will ultimately lead you to gain valuable leads and turn them into students at your school or college.

2. Organize an Effective Email Campaign

For every school professionals, the academic year 2020-21 has been the busiest due to major changes taking place in today’s world. If you want to get time back in your day, while improving your email marketing strategy, then email marketing is the best way to start. 

An email marketing strategy commonly referred to as or “automated emails” is a staple of a school’s improved marketing campaign.

Email marketing includes a set of emails that are automatically sent based on the subscriber’s preferences, behavior, and contact information. For instance, an email workflow can be activated by a particular contact submitting a form and even completed by using a parent’s enrollment year.

This set of email workflow can help you to save time and increase mail engagement. Other benefits of email marketing include:

  • It creates a path for newly enrolled students
  • Support to prospective students who recently inquired
  • Onboard new staff and faculty
  • Remind the group of members regarding upcoming events and deadlines
  • Encourage various events

Nowadays, many schools and colleges are implementing effective marketing techniques and growing their education industry.

3. Start with a Blog referring importance of your  school or college

A blog is a perfect way to share necessary advice, tell stories that aren’t being told anywhere else, build leadership thoughts. It also helps in creating strong content, raises the voice of your community, and improves your organic performance in search.

Like all other marketing strategies, a blog mentioning the specialty and features of your school can be very helpful.  School blog can add an extra benefit to your website and it’s a great place to start for schools and colleges looking to have control of their online storytelling.

But before you start with a school Blog, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Where will be the content of our blog be live?
  • Who is our main target audience?
  • What will our editing process look like?
  • What will be the main topics for our blog content?
  • Who will be executing our blog content?
  • Do we have enough resources to post our blog consistently, at least once a week?

4. Hold an active presence on social media

If your school has not yet invested in social media marketing, this is the right time. People of almost every age including your prospective students spend a lot of time on social media.

A meaningful social media strategy implemented in your eCommerce marketing strategy can improve your enrollment to the next level.  It is a smart and affordable way to begin your school website.

Social media is a most beneficial online marketing tool because:

  • The average cost-per-click is lower than that of search ads
  • You can increase your reach with a variety of marketing campaigns
  • You can find a variety of ad formats to experiment with

But, yes, execution must be done correctly.

However, if you’ve invested in social media marketing in the past and it was a failure, then, it could have been an issue with your audience, creativity, ad content, or even goal.

Social media play a vital role in back-to-school marketing campaigns. Nowadays, everyone is on social media including people of all ages and out of them, there could be your students as well. This platform can help to directly get in touch with the students.

There are various social media platforms that can enable you to connect with students interested in your school or college. These platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and Pinterest.

Social media platforms offer various opportunities for schools and colleges to raise awareness regarding their school programs and other achievements. These sites enable prospective students to get an overall idea of being in a school or college.

These act as a great platform to post photos of your students while performing any programs or activities. Never use old photos as stock photos won’t give your school an authentic feeling. Make sure to use photos of students who are currently at that school.

5. Develop a Link Building Strategy

Link Building must be included as your fundamental criteria while performing an effective SEO strategy for your school.

Nowadays, the quality of a web page is not only limited to good content. Normal time spent on your website by a visitor mainly depends on suitable backlinks present on your website.

Google provides its users with the best possible results so that they can rank credibly high. By obtaining the links from reliable sites, you build your own ranking power over time.

An ideal way to create links is to produce content. Once you publish powerful content, other website owners can directly link to it as a resource in their own content.

If your content is good enough, then they include it on their own site and give the backlink to your page as a source. This will make search engines display your website as trustworthy to other authority sites. It will positively impact your website ranking and promote your industry to interested viewers.

Assume that your website is lacking in backlinks, then, the user can skip your website and jump to another website for more information.

However, by providing various backlinks for accessing other related information on your website, user engagement is maintained, as they navigate through your website in a long run.

So, including a lot of backlinks can help you increase your website visitors.

6. Go Live and attract more visitors

Live video is one of the most common algorithms used in every social network. This trend is very famous among students of every age on social media. Making live video streaming is effective in gathering the attention of prospective students.

Video is the best way to reach more audiences than any other form of content. So start with integrating it into your school marketing campaigns for your website, email, and social media.

You can include tactics like hosting a live Q&A session and address FAQs regarding the admission and application process.  You can ask your students, faculty, and alumni to share their perspectives and feel better about your institution and the courses available.

This way you will be able to connect with more prospective students and enroll them in your school or college.

Why Digital Marketing is important for School or College?

Online marketing has already shown its remarkable benefits in almost every business and employment sector. However, it is necessary for some other sectors and education is one among them.

Moreover, the education system is undergoing variable changes and it leads to the rapid increase of the internet. There is no doubt that Digital Marketing has a lot more related to education.

Besides that, it helps to connect with both students and parents. Now, let’s check out the Importance of Digital Marketing In the Education Sector:

1. Digital Presence

As we have already mentioned, online presence is very crucial for every sector. When it comes to schools and colleges it is mandatory, due to the usage of the internet by students.

Students need to find your school or college’s website with proper information regarding your school or college while searching online.

2. Solving Issues

Online marketing is very helpful for educators and students by providing access to various informative websites to clear their doubts. This is the reason for the hike in the Importance of digital marketing in school or college.

Educators can make the best out by teaching methods more interactive and clearly delivers messages to their students. Not only teachers but students find it useful as they receive important manuals and improve their learning skills.

3. Spread of useful Information

As it is common among all the students, and their parents who are researching online and making decisions. Here, the role of digital marketing plays a vital role by helping them to get precise information.

Social media and websites are very beneficial to draw attention and spread information. This part can be done easily by online marketing.

4. Quick Reviews and Feedbacks

In today’s situation, parents do not prefer the old kind of parent-teacher meeting and other related stuff, as even parents are too busy and may be unable to attend meetings.

That’s the reason online meetings help them to give quick feedback and reports about the school or college.  Moreover, all the reviews are handled by Digital Marketing features like responsive websites and live chatbots.

 5. Parent & Student Satisfaction

It’s a perfect platform where both students and parents are satisfied as they get to learn through online teaching methods. But covering online classes is not that easy, as it requires perfect execution of applications and modules.

Moreover, it is important to connect maximum students and parents. Here comes online marketing, through which, educational institutions can reach new potential students. Due to the huge benefits of Digital marketing in the education sector, it has become very crucial to implement it in your school marketing campaign.

Be ready to reach more prospective students with these school marketing strategies?

The main objective of your institution is to educate leaders of tomorrow, but for that, you must invest in today’s digital marketing strategies to attract them. Include these ideas into your existing marketing plans to increase engagement, awareness, and enrollment in your school or college.

If you wish to begin with these college marketing strategies to reach more prospective students, Tachomind can help. Contact us for more information regarding digital marketing services.

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