4 Ways Digital Marketing Gets College Applications
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insights from 61,900+ hours of higher education marketing experience
Digital marketing is one of the newest and most effective ways to engage prospective students.
It gives you a huge range of options to approach a computer-savvy generation of eager learners, all of whom want to find the college or university that’s right for them.
Fortunately, it’s never been easier to use Internet marketing to get the prospects you need. You just need to know where to start.
Attract more students with college marketing solutions.
1. Inform your prospects with content marketing
Content marketing is famous for informing readers quickly and easily. And all you need to start a content marketing campaign is a website!
“Content” is an umbrella term that relates to anything you write or create on your site. That includes your blog, article pages, graphics, downloads, and other elements of your site.
The best place to start using content is with a blog. Blogs are excellent ways for you to show prospective students that you’re up-to-date on current events that matter to them. It can also attract a consistent readership so you can enjoy a steady stream of traffic to your site.
Content can also include articles that you write on your site. These articles should tell potential students something specific about your college or college life in general. It can be your pricing for room and board, meal plan options, how your scheduling system works, or how to deal with a disagreeable roommate — all of those subjects are fair game.
Graphics are a fun way to engage prospects as well. Graphics can mean something as small as your school’s logo to a huge infographic that offers data about your students. Either way, you’re making your website more interesting and engaging.
Last, you can create downloadable content. These downloads should offer lots of valuable information — like how someone can apply for financial aid through your college — and you can ask users to give you their email address in exchange. That way, you can follow up with them after they’ve read your download.
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2. Attract new site traffic with SEO and PPC
Now that you have all of this new content on your site, it’s time for you to get some website traffic.
The best way to do this is with a search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click advertising (PPC) campaign — or both!
SEO is the process of improving your site to ensure search engines can read, understand, and index it easily.
SEO can take a while to produce results, but it consistently rewards those who use it well. In SEO terms, a few hours of work today can yield years of positive returns.
PPC involves paying for advertising space on a popular website (like Google or Facebook) and showing ads to people who are most likely to apply to your college. PPC is much faster than SEO, but it charges you a small amount of money for every person who clicks to your site. Still, it’s an effective way to get attention and draw new visitors to your website.
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3. Keep in touch with social media
When you’re online, it’s critical for you to have a social media presence.
That presence can be on any number of different social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or even Snapchat.
These networks let you maintain a steady conversation with people who may want to apply to your college. It’s also an open line of communication with people who have questions and want a more personable response than an article page on your website.
You can also use your social media page to promote your website (and the content on it) to get more visitors on your site.
Sharing your site on social media comes with the added bonus of viral potential. When you share something great with the people who follow you, they could share it to their followers, and then their followers could share it. That creates a runaway effect that builds brand awareness and generates site traffic.
4. Engage prospects with email marketing
Now that you’ve used your website, search engines, and social media to your advantage, it’s time to use email.
Email marketing has an outstanding reputation, and it’s one of the simplest and most affordable ways to get new applications from students.
The idea is that you build a list of email recipients and send them information based on what they like. You can do both of those things by allowing prospects to sign up for your email list from any page on your site.
That way, your prospects have willingly given you their email addresses (and their permission to email them), and you know what caught their attention.
If someone signed up on a page about your sports teams, for example, you can send them emails about athletics at your college. And if they signed up on a page about your engineering department, you can send them information on your engineering program.
As as you follow up with these prospects, you can encourage them to return to your site and submit an application.
Best of all, you can automate this entire process to make it almost effortless on your part. All you need to do is write the emails, set up the system, and watch the applications come!
Want to speak with an expert? Call us at 888-601-5359
WebFX is a full-service Internet marketing firm
At WebFX, we know that the more qualified applications your college or university receives, the better. That’s why we offer content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and more all at one education marketing agency! If you want to reach new prospective students, we have all the tools and skills you need to do so.
Contact us today, or give us a call at 888-601-5359 to create an Internet marketing plan for your college!
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