Top 5 Higher Ed Digital Marketing Strategies for 2023
2023 is underway and the word “recession” is on everybody’s mind. Driven by this economic climate and accelerated by technological advancements, a slew of new higher education marketing challenges are emerging.
Prospective students expect more assurances from academic programs. Ranking with SEO has become tougher. PPC marketing has become more competitive. And everybody is using responsive ads and remarketing, which means your institution needs to get with the program or get left behind.
Check out this short list of digital marketing strategies for 2023 higher ed marketing, and then check with your marketing team to make sure you’re putting your marketing budget to good use.
1. Showcase Current Careers Data in Your Program Marketing
Today’s prospective students want assurance that your program will deliver results. They’re not going to invest thousands of dollars on education unless they are absolutely sure that investment will pay off.
They want to know, for sure, that:
- Job demand exists
- The job they can get will pay enough to justify the investment in education
- Your program delivers the credentials they need to get the job they want
In short, they want assurances that your program will deliver the skills and credentials needed to build the career they want. And nobody can blame them in this economy!
In the past, updating program pages with careers data required a lot of time and effort. You know how long it takes your institution to create and approve new content, and schools are afraid of anything that isn’t evergreen or makes any sort of “promises,” especially in the arena of salary or job demand, right?
Fortunately, there are now affordable plugins that empower higher ed institutions to extract careers data from reliable data sources such as Lightcast (previously EMSI-Burning Glass). These plugins select careers data for occupations correlated with your academic programs and present that information on your website at a fraction of the cost and time previously required.
Check out our two plugins: Program Marketing Essentials and Career Profiles Pro to see what we’re talking about.
2. Responsive Ads are a Must
Responsive ads are exactly what they sound like; they respond to the differing constraints, allowing you to provide ads that fit just about every device and every browser. This is important because it removes barriers, dramatically expanding your reach. And it’s relatively simple and inexpensive to implement. Basically, you enter multiple headlines, descriptions, and images into Google Display Network, and then Google Display automatically varies the presentation of the ads to fit the needs of the platform or device.
We’ve been testing student enrollment marketing campaigns for 15 years, and responsive ads get vastly higher impression volumes and click-through rates than static ads. Find a vendor that will configure your responsive ads to make your budget go further, reach more prospective students and lower your cost-per-click.
3. Use Remarketing Ads to Bring Students Back
How often does a prospective student decide to enroll on their very first visit to your academic site? Any higher ed marketing expert knows that statistic is very low.
Remarketing ads follow site visitors, reminding them of the opportunity to enroll in your program.
Google has supported Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) since 2013, and there’s a good reason why. In a nutshell, remarketing works. You’ve seen remarketing ads, even if you didn’t know what the term was to describe them. You look at some boots on a website, and then later you see those same boots advertised to you when browsing another page. That’s a remarketing ad!
For recruiting, just buying a generic keyword like “accounting master’s degree” would be too expensive for most schools. But the cost becomes very reasonable when you target individuals who have already visited your accounting program page. A small amount of ad spend now delivers valuable results, and repeat visitors are more likely to enroll.
Combining Custom Intent Audiences, a Google tool that allows control over who sees your ads, and RLSA takes your spend to a whole new level. You can now target an audience of individuals on the Google Display Network who — based on their search history — you predict to be likely to convert.
4. Use Personalized Drip Email Campaigns
Experience shows that students are more likely to enroll if they feel an emotional connection with a program or institution. How can you make that happen? When a prospective student visits your program page simply provide a Request Info button that collects their email address. Then use that information to engage with them through a drip email campaign that provides information specific to that program.
You can take this further by tracking visitor behavior via Google analytics and providing the appropriate message at the right time. This increases the chances that prospective students will feel welcomed by the program contact, and that emotional connection may be exactly what they need to feel comfortable committing.
To solidify the connection with a prospect just include career information, discussed above, in these campaigns. You’ll be speaking their language.
5. Win the Coveted Featured Snippet Box on Google Searches
In 2022, over 57% of mobile phone users and 53% of desktop users ended their Google searches on the very first search-results page.
Why? Because they found the answer they wanted in Google’s Featured Snippet Box. That’s the section at the top of a Google search page (just under the paid ads) that showcases questions and answers, plus links to the page where Google found (and extracted) the snippet.
So… how do you win that coveted spot? By developing content that provides answers to high-volume search queries and contains frequently searched keywords. Strategic content creation, teamed with PPC marketing, makes it more likely that you will show up on the first page of search results. That’s how you win Featured Snippet Box.
Invisible Us offers 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.
