Personae Marketing Part IV: Where Are Prospective Students Looking for Information About Your Programs?
Once you’ve determined who your target audience is, what they want, and how to speak their language, you need to figure out where they look for information about your programs.
Staying Current
Remember when billboards used to be the gold standard for university advertising? Flyers? Brochures? Ah, the good old days of traditional marketing. Now they’re as antiquated as VHS videotapes.
I mean, sure, you probably have invested in a billboard or two, they still are great for building your brand. But today’s students are looking elsewhere—on their phones and laptops. You know—screens. The things we’re all trying to be less addicted to.
But here’s the thing: your target audience lives on their screens. That’s where they search for everything. Here’s some recent data:
- Gen Z-ers spend a shocking nine hours a day on screens
- Millennials clock in at about 5.7 hours a day on their phones alone (and then often work jobs where they are on screens as well)
- Marketing to Boomers? They average five hours a day on their phones, so don’t buy into the ideas that direct mail is still where it’s at. Sure, you’ll want to continue direct mail to this audience, but you won’t want to neglect online marketing.
The truth is the world has gone online. In fact, 31% of Americans report being online “almost constantly” And if you aren’t marketing to them where they’re looking, you’re going to miss out. Your competition is doing it—you can count on that.
Digital Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing
The following are stats on digital search engine usage. This might help you if your college is behind the times and still thinks traditional marketing is the way to go.
- Almost 30% of web traffic is generated via online search usage, meaning the time spent on websites was initiated by a search on a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, etc.
- 81% of adult online searches are looking for a product or service.
- Both organic and paid search matter. As of 2022 statistics, 68% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic (40%) and paid search (28%).
- Organic search results are the unpaid results that appear on a search engine results page after a query
- Paid search results are the website traffic coming from search engines as a result of paid ads
All of these statistics point to the same conclusion: your target audience is searching online.
The Internet is a Big Place
Now, it’s one thing to realize that your target audience is out there scouring the internet for information about colleges and universities. Before you can do anything else, you have to get your team onboard with the idea of investing in digital marketing and establishing a great digital presence instead of throwing your marketing dollars away on traditional marketing efforts. But once you win that battle, you have a new, bigger problem to solve.
How are you going to show up in the places your prospective students are searching? How do you get in front of them?
Search Results
The internet is vast. Competition for top search results is stiff. If you’re new to this space, you probably have no idea how to help your program show up anywhere close to the top search results.
And yes, your position in search results matters. Like really, really matters. Here’s why.
- Somewhere between 71-92% of clicks happen on the first search results page. In fact, even your position on the first page of search results matters because a recent study of a billion search results pages shows:
- Only a fraction of people continue on to the second page of search results. The second page typically captures only 6% of clicks.
You need to show up on the first page of search results if you want your program to be found. That’s why so many higher ed institutions are investing heavily the following things:
- Website content and SEO (to improve search rankings)
- Paid ads (to show up in ads on search result pages)
So here’s one piece of the puzzle you need to solve: you need to find out if your program pages are showing up in search results, and for what keywords.
Then you need to figure out what keywords your target audience is using when searching for a program like yours. You can determine this by looking at the following:
- Google Analytics reports of keywords used to find your pages
- Search engine marketing analysis tools that will analyze the keywords competitive programs are ranking for
- Common sense
- Testing, tweaking and testing again
A solid SEO plan is essential for organic search ranking and to support paid ad campaigns such as Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. This is how you form and test hypotheses about where your target audience is searching for programs like yours and how to get your message in front of them.
Social Media
But search is not all you need to think about. You also need to think about another place your target audience is probably hanging out, and that’s social media. Since your audience is spending time on social media, you need to show up there, too.
The Behemoth: Facebook
With over 2.91 billion monthly active users (2022), Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform. Approximately 23.8% of Facebook users are 18-24 years of age, which is likely your target audience if your program is an undergrad program.
Marketing to career changers? Facebook is still a popular place.
- 82% of college graduates are on Facebook.
- The typical Facebook user spends, on average, 34 minutes a day on Facebook.
Fun experiment: If your target audience is composed primarily of male grad students, Facebook might be especially fertile ground. Why? Because:
- The largest demographic group of Facebook users is between the ages of 25 and 35 years.
- The gender breakdown of Facebook users skews male. 56% male versus 44% female.
- But here’s the question: are those male Facebook users intellectuals interested in your program’s subject matter? Testing Facebook posts and Facebook paid advertisements could prove useful, right? Especially since Facebook provides handy analytics to help you determine who is responding to your posts and ads.
Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and the Like
- Approximately 35% of teens in the U.S. ranked Instagram as their most important social network. Calling all those higher education institutions marketing for undergrad programs and certificates: are you on Instagram yet?
- LinkedIn reaches a whole different audience, and career-changers are definitely part of that audience. Naturally, people who are looking to change a career are going to be on LinkedIn spiffing up their professional profiles and networking. Perhaps this is why LinkedIn is the second-most popular social media platform used by business-to-business marketers, ranking only behind Facebook.
Just as in your toolbox out in the garage, each of the above is a different tool intended to do a specific job. The more you know about your prospects the better you will be at choosing the correct tools to get the job done. Now, for the next step. . .
Retargeting - The Second Touch
Once you’ve gotten your target audience to visit your site you desperately want to keep in touch with them, right? After all, prospective students don’t usually make snap decisions about an academic program. We find they typically take six to nine months on the decision to apply to a program. That’s a long time to keep your program in the front of your prospect’s mind.
That’s where retargeting ads—those ads you see reminding you of web pages you’ve visited—come into play. They are especially effective if they tie together an outcome and your program in an appealing way.
For example, let’s pretend you are a prospective accounting program student. You’ve been thinking about getting your master’s degree in accounting for the past decade, but you just haven’t gotten around to it. Finally, last Saturday, you visited a college’s master’s of accounting program page where you found some interesting information. You’re thinking about it, but you’ve forgotten what college that was. I mean, you’ve looked at a lot of programs over the years, right? Now, an ad pops up at the top of your screen that says, “Accountants with a master’s degree make on average X amount more than accountants with a bachelor’s degree.” And there you recognize it to be one of the programs you checked out before. Hmmm, you think. Oh, yeah. That college provides that program. And that’s a lovely salary increase.
The thought sticks with you, and every once in a while you see another ad like that. Always that same program.
When you are finally ready to pursue that master’s degree, this program will feel familiar to you. And since it’s the only one that provides you with that relevant career outcomes data, you will be more likely to check it out again. In fact, maybe you’ll click on that retargeting ad as a way to get back to that program.
That’s how retargeting ads work. They establish familiarity and keep your program top of mind. They foster a relationship between your program and your target audience, making it more likely that your target audience will respond. And the right content in a retargeting ad can induce action on the part of a prospect. That’s why we’re big fans of pushing career-related data whenever possible.
...And It’s Digital Marketing for the Win
All this isn’t to say there isn’t a play for some traditional marketing. If you just want to remind locals of your presence, by all means invest in billboards and flyers. They’re not particularly great for recruiting new students, but they keep your brand top-of-mind. That can bring good things to your institution.
However, when it comes to recruiting new students most higher ed institutions are best served by exploring the terrain of digital marketing. Because of the advanced web analytics available, you can track and test the efficacy of your digital marketing efforts much more easily, accurately and reliably than traditional marketing. Instead of sticking a billboard up on a highway and hoping the applications to your program came from the students seeing that particular sign, you can see exactly where applicants came from. Did they visit the site by directly typing in the URL (link), or did they come in from an ad? Did they arrive through a search or did they funnel through several pages on the site?
Whatever you choose—digital or traditional—the important thing is to get your message in front of the people most interested in your program. That is personae-based marketing done right.
To learn more about Invisible Us and our higher education market specific tools, visit our product page. Invisible Us provides tools that simplify higher education marketing, reducing costs for colleges, universities and community colleges across the country.
Higher Ed Marketing Support Tools
Built upon 15 years of experience marketing for higher ed institutions, our Student Recruitment Suite employs a program-centric marketing approach that delivers exponentially higher matriculation rates and improves applicant quality, on average, by half a GPA point.
Program Marketing Essentials
Program Marketing Essentials delivers all the information a student needs to commit to your programs—in one place—perfectly optimized for SEO and instant enrollment.
Career Profiles Pro
Career Profiles Pro provides salary, demand and educational requirement data for careers associated with your academic programs, supplying the compelling data students need to feel confident enrolling.
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