Tocquigny

Online marketing is becoming an increasingly popular method for marketing higher education programs. However, as more and more schools have moved to offering their programs online and shifted their budgets to this new medium, the landscape has become fiercely competitive. Here are 10 ways that your school can cut through the clutter and cost-effectively generate students online.

1. Know Your Students.
   As with all marketing endeavors, start with your end customer — the student. Who are they? What do they look like? Develop detailed “personas” of your target audience. It should be narrower than “17-year-old high school student looking for a college.” Do your students skew male or female? Do you have older, nontraditional students? Why do students choose your school over others? What qualities are they seeking in a school? If you do not readily know what makes your students different from your competitors, you should do research (i.e., focus groups) and find out this information. Then, tailor your creative messaging to cater to each of these prospective student groups.

2. Speak to Your Benefits & Differentiators.
   Your online advertising creative should speak, as specifically as possible, to the benefits and differentiators of your institution. Benefits might be things like “pursue your dreams,” “get a job upon graduation,” and “take classes online or offline.” Differentiators might be things like your esteemed faculty or programs, your campus experience, or your alumni network. Make sure to customize the benefits message for each of your targeted personas. For example, the idea of “flexibility” can mean two different things to two different audience segments: an older student may be looking for the “flexibility” to pursue a degree and continue working, while a younger student may be more interested in the “flexibility” to take classes online.

3. Employ a Strong Call to Action.
   Online, by nature, is a direct-response advertising medium. The goal of your campaign should be to identify prospective students. Choosing a school takes time, consideration, and thought — or commonly referred to in advertising as a “long decision cycle.” The job of your ads should be to identify prospects who are interested. Generally, this involves filling out a form for more information. You should not try to tell people everything there is to know about your school in a banner ad. Nor should you necessarily try to convince them to attend your school. Rather, your online advertising campaign should seek to do one thing: identify these “hand-raisers” and qualify them as potential leads.

4. Use Offers Wisely.
   If you can employ an offer strategy, for example, a waived application fee, a free demo, or a voucher at the school bookstore, you will see more prospective student forms completed. Be careful, though, when using offers. If you try to use something frivolous like a keychain or a T-shirt, chances are you will get a large number of unqualified prospects. Quality, as well as quantity, should be factored in to the process. Offers can be used to pull prospective students throughout the entire conversion cycle; in other words, you can offer something to prospects to encourage them to fill out a form, something to recruits to encourage them to apply, something to applicants to encourage them to enroll, and something to current students to encourage them to re-enroll each semester. Test and track the results of different offers, but only use them where your campaign needs it most to improve conversion rates.

5. Use Landing Pages.
   Many schools still spend thousands of dollars marketing online to drive people to their school’s home page. This is a huge mistake. Dropping a prospective student onto your home page means that they need to then navigate through your website to find the program that interests them and then find a way to contact you. In many cases, the prospect will give up after they discover that this information is not readily available. Therefore, you should employ the online marketing best practice of using “landing pages.” These are short, customized pages that provide a brief overview of your program and offer a form for more information. The emphasis here is on “short” — only collect the information that you need to follow up with a prospective student. Other things to include on a landing page: your school’s phone number, a list of degree programs, FAQs. Use multiple landing pages for different target audiences. For example, you might drive people interested in your bachelor’s degree program to one page and those interested in your master’s degree programs to another page.

6. Track Your ROI.
   You should be counting not only the number of prospective students coming from your landing pages, but also the number of applications completed and students enrolled. And you should be able to tell exactly what website media placement and advertisement was responsible for generating each and every student enrolled. Advertising agencies employ tools like Atlas Media Console or DoubleClick DART to track impressions, clicks, leads, and sales. The tricky part is combining this “front-end” advertising information with your “back-end” student database information to determine what sites and what ad placements are generating students for the lowest cost per student. It is easier said than done, but it is essential to any successful online advertising campaign.

7. Model Your Results Before (and After) Advertising Online.
   Do you know exactly how many impressions you’ll need to have delivered before you can generate 100 students? How much do you need to spend before you have 100 leads? What is your average conversion rate from prospect to student? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you probably shouldn’t be spending your money online. Each and every campaign should be modeled for each step in the conversion process. You will need to make some assumptions for click rates and conversion rates; these may come from your own internal knowledge or past experience or from industry benchmarks. Word to the wise: Be conservative. These models will be useful when you go approach the school board and ask for a budget increase to market your programs. The result should be your ability to demonstrate that “dollars in” one end of the funnel equals “students out” the other end. Many schools receive a rude awakening when they spend money online and realize that it is costing them $10K or $20K per student recruited. (These are industry norms!) Your board could be fine with these numbers, or they could cost you your job. Without the metrics to prove it, you are ultimately flying blind.

8. Use Multiple Advertising Channels.
   “Online” advertising can mean many different things. You should leverage all media options available and track what is working most effectively. Of course, there are display ads (“banners”), which can work well if done correctly. Rich media can be a great way to add interactivity to the standard html or flash banner ad. Email ads are useful to reach a targeted (opt-in) list of prospects. Paid search advertising is often cited as one of the most cost-efficient means of reaching students online because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Some campaigns can be geo-targeted in order to concentrate on a specific local area or region. And finally, many schools find that “lead generators” are a good source of leads. “Lead generators” are media providers that sell prospective students on a “cost-per-lead” basis — for example, $50 per lead. They take the risk on placing the ads online themselves and then deliver these leads to you. A word of caution: not all “lead generators” are created equal — the quality of leads generated can vary dramatically between providers. And keep in mind that many of the “lead generator” sites are selling the same leads to all of your competitors at the same time. Bottom line: The only way to know for sure which ad channels are working is to track and measure your ROI (see Tip #6).

9. Map Out Your Communication Plan.
   Every piece of correspondence is critical in converting prospective students into actual students. Create a visual diagram that maps out each touch point with a prospect (ex. your website, your call center, your information packages, your follow-up emails). The entire experience should be consistent — with the same look & feel and a similar message along the way. If your key differentiator is “quality,” then your brochures should say it, your phone sales team should echo it, and your emails should reinforce it. Also, there should be strict benchmarks and systems in place for following up with prospective students. For example, every new lead coming in the door should be called within 24 hours. They should receive an auto-response email with more information. Two days later, they should get an information packet and a phone call from an admissions counselor, and so on. Having adequate tracking systems in place to manage and benchmark these communications activities are critical to any successful online effort.

10. Know Your Students.
    Yes, this is the same as Tip #1. But the point is that you should be continually learning from your online advertising efforts and optimizing campaigns accordingly. If you are properly tracking and mining your data, then you will be learning a great deal about your students. When do they enroll? How long does it take them to make a decision to submit an application? What geographic regions are they from? What websites do they visit most? What keywords do they search for? What parts of your website interest them the most? Where are they dropping out of the process? What are the major “sticking points” that are preventing them from becoming students? Once you know these things, you can refine your “personas” and tailor your messaging accordingly. The end result will be better forecasting models, a lower cost per student, and ultimately, a more satisfied board.