As the technology is fast changing the marketing strategies have also evolved to a structured form over the years and even faster pace on the emergence of internet.
Earlier colleges and institutes did not have a marketing strategy at all. Because the people from the same country or the local areas would opt to study in a nearby college.
But now the situation is different. People have chances to travel to countries abroad wherever the best education is provided in the respective subject. Mostly these students avail scholarships or get financial aids from the banks to seek better education. These opportunities increased the number of students seeking international education and eventually led to a competition among the educationists themselves to extend their reach among students all over the world.
From a student’s point of view, he has to choose from the best listed colleges worldwide depending on the quality of education, faculty, location of the college, fees, financial aids, language, accreditation etc.
However, things are different from a college perspective. How does a college appear in the students hit list? Even if the college owns a world recognized accreditation or a superb faculty or good education system or placement assistance, it may not pop up in the students hit list. Even advertising in the local newspapers might not serve the real purpose and wouldn’t reach the target audience.
This article emphasizes need of digital advertising for higher education marketing.
Understanding your visibility in search engines
If the college is an online degree provider make a search in google or any other search engine platform to see your position. You will be surprised to see so many other colleges owning the top positions. Most probably you might be on the far end of the pages listed. Then how could you expect the student to find you from the endless list? This will give you an idea of your competitors and where you stand among them, in the same domain. Now proving yourself among the list competitors is a tedious task and takes pretty long time but never think its impossible.
Likewise, this phenomenon has to be performed by every education provider irrespective your domain.
Its not the factors like good faulty or accreditation or placement assistance support that puts you in the top positions. Rather its factors like search visibility, good website, Search engine Optimization etc that makes you discoverable among the target audience. Proper understanding of search engines is a must and let’s discuss how these activities can be achieved in the next article. Stay tuned.
Understanding your target audience
Where do you really target the students from? Are you also targeting an international market? How do you make out you are in top positions in a search engine result of another country while you are in another? The geographic targeting is important.
I’m sure you don’t want to target the people above 70 years of age over the internet for education. But you must be visible maximum among the age group of 16-60. This is also achievable in digital marketing. From this you would have understood that demographic targeting is also important.
Its also important to analyse the behaviour of the target audience and is called as behavioural marketing. Likewise, all dimensions like age, sex, locality, browser, keywords etc have to analysed in digital marketing.
How to improve your visibility among students
The search visibility of a course or college can be improved b following different digital marketing strategies. Some of which are SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, YouTube marketing, Display Networks, Affiliate Networks etc. We will cover this in Successful Digital Marketing Strategy For Higher Education-Part 2.
You will become astonished to learn that you are being searched for in the world market. You will become stunned when you see students from all over the world representing your campus. Finally your brand will be recognized worldwide. Finally, students will flow in, due to the brand name.
Trust a digital marketing agency
Who can perform these activities for you? The answer is simple-Digital Marketing Agency. They will comprise of experienced marketing strategists who can develop a proper working strategy for your business. Some strategies suits one particular college while some others don’t. All are totally related to business requirements. Their experience and advice is inevitable in the industry and working together with them helps grab a pace in the world’s higher education market.
What’s the issue if you perform it yourself?
Unwanted spend over useless platforms and websites is a common mistake committed by all digital marketers. Also,subsequent data analysis has to be performed if a proper marketing strategy has to be achieved and would even require need of Big Data. These tasks are tedious for a college and can be performed well only by digital marketers in collaboration with data analysts. So why not leave the task to them.
Stay tuned for the next article where we write on successful digital marketing strategy of our clients.
