Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and significantly growing undergraduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around five core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. Fifth, you must be easy to do business with. All our recommended actions for increasing undergraduate enrollment revolve around these core beliefs:
1. Invest in Branding: Babson has positioned itself as THE college for entrepreneurship, American University as THE supplier of “wonks” to the political and governmental establishment, Drexel as THE university that mandates coop experience, and so on. Investing in a strong brand can lift a college from obscurity to national prominence. Brand your college.
2. Make the First Impressions Count: Fortify every touch point – including websites, social media, open houses, information sessions, grounds, classrooms, tours, and admissions office décor. Claim your Google page one rankings and elevate your search engine snippets. Make your facilities and grounds beautiful because beauty engenders confidence.
3. Define a Distinctive Hook: Become a niche college. Declare a hook like: offering a graduate-in-four-years guarantee (e.g. Randolph-Macon College), a job placement guarantee (e.g. Capitol Technology University) or a tuition lock (e.g. Assumption College). Parents and students are attracted to colleges willing to stand behind their commitments.
4. Sharpen Your Academic Offerings: If you are a niche college, offer an inch-wide, mile-deep portfolio of programs. If you are a broad based educator, offer a large variety of majors and minors.
5. Create an Optimal Website Presence: Make it beautiful. Invest in high-fidelity academic program pages. Make it alumni success centered. Make it outcomes centric. Make it conversion friendly. Make it search engine friendly. Make it responsive. Make it accessible. Feature institutional reputation points. Showcase groups of students in social settings. Celebrate campus life.
6. Lower Admissions Barriers: Offer competitive scholarships and financial aid. Offer early decision and early admissions programs. Offer job guarantees for job placement. Offer 4-year graduation guarantees.
7. Activate an Effective Marketing Air Game: Understand target audiences. Create psychographic and demographic personas. Fortify academic program pages. Deploy smart paid and SEO strategies. Conduct email marketing. Activate traditional media and PR. Deploy both traditional admissions funnel and inverted admissions funnel strategies.
8. Communicate with Influencers: Because students are heavily influenced by their peers, parents, teachers, college counselors in high schools, and principals. Ensure you proactively communicate with influencers.
9. Mobilize a Strong Boots-on-the-Ground Game Plan: Foster relationships with high schools. Encourage campus visits. Provide virtual tours. Attend industry conferences and events where prospects might be competing in competitions.
10. Create Feeders: Offer summer camps and pre-college programs. Cultivate relationships with attendees and their families.
11. Follow-up on a Timely Basis: Activate a personalized contact strategy system by a partially automated comm-plan.
12. Respond to Trends: Adapt and refine your strategies based on the evolving landscape of education and the preferences of your target audience.
Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and growing online student enrollment for dozens of colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around six core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. Fifth, you must be easy to do business with. Sixth, you must be supportive and understanding of life constraints of online students. All our recommended actions for increasing online enrollment revolve around these core beliefs:
1. Offer Online Degrees in Ideal Formats and Starts: Offer your online programs in formats that are convenient for working professionals. Online students prefer frequent starts for courses, ideally every 8 to 12 weeks, and need the flexibility to pause and restart without penalty.
2. Create a Legendary Online Learning Experience: For online programs, student experience wholly depends on the quality of your teaching materials and ease-of-use of your learning platform. Invest in online instructional design and let word of mouth spread your reputation.
3. Create an Optimal Website Presence: Make it beautiful. Make it alumni success centered. Make it conversion friendly. Make it search engine friendly. Make it responsive. And make it accessible.
4. Lower Admissions Barriers: Don’t require standardized tests. Accept prior learning and work experience credits. Offer flexible payment options, scholarships, or discounts to make your courses more affordable and appealing to a wider audience
5. Activate an Effective Marketing Air Game: Understand target audiences. Create psychographic and demographic personas. Fortify online program pages. Deploy smart paid and SEO strategies. Conduct email marketing. Activate traditional media and PR. Deploy both traditional admissions funnel and inverted admissions funnel strategies.
6. Communicate with Influencers: Because online students are heavily influenced by the opinions of their social network of peers, co-workers and friends, remember to reach out to corporate HR departments, trade associations, and senior managers who manage working professionals in need of a degree to advance their careers.
7. Mobilize a Strong Boots-on-the-Ground Game Plan: Hold open houses and webinars. Attend industry conferences and events. Leverage partnerships with community colleges and employers.
8. Follow-up on a Timely Basis: Activate a personalized contact strategy system by a partially automated comm-plan.
9. Respond to Trends: Adapt and refine your strategies based on the evolving landscape of online education and the preferences of your target audience.
In the age of Google and AI, a manufacturing and industrial marketing strategy is incomplete without a blogging strategy. We will first share several good reasons why manufacturers must include blogging in their marketing mix.
Why manufacturers should blog?
While a blog does require some time and effort, it is well worthwhile for these five reasons:
1. Provides the fresh content that Google and Bing rewards with page one rankings.
2. Significantly cheaper than annually paying third parties for links.
3. Conveys subject matter expertise, which buyers reward.
4. Builds topic authority, which Google and Bing reward with higher rankings.
5. Expands website real estate which grows your brand impressions and reach in the age of Google, Bing and AI.
Best practices in industrial blogging
Next, we’ll share eleven best practices we’ve seen work for many industrial companies.
1. Goals: Could be a combination of communicating subject matter expertise, reputation building or humanizing your company.
2. Name: A good blog name should be memorable and help your SEO objectives.
3. Design: Make it consistent with your website design and ensure it resonates with the target audiences.
4. Target Audience: Speak to engineers, buyers, partners and talent you are trying to attract.
5. Keyword Focus: Know the keywords you want to be ranked for and choose them carefully around your highest margin products and services.
6. Content Focus: Every post should be focused on one or two related keywords. Link back to your products and services. Here is a short list of ideas for blog content:
Interview of customers, subject matter experts, or employees with specialized know-how
A story about how you solved a challenging problem for a customer
Trends you are seeing in your industry
Industry best practices
Feature a partner
Interesting events you are planning to attend or just attended
An infographic you created or found that is worth sharing with your customers
A video you produced about your product working in the field
A how-to-story
A planning checklist
7. Voice: Be positive, real, helpful, accessible, insightful, professional and knowledgeable. Avoid jargon.
8. Length: Limit the length of blog post to less than 500 words. Break a blog post into two if necessary. Occasionally, you could write a mega blog post. Google loves and rewards both kinds.
9. Engagement: If you have the time to respond, encourage questions and comments on the blog.
10. Reach: Share your blog posts on your company’s official social media channels. Boost posts to expand reach.
11. Metrics: Measure the number of views, shares, likes and rankings.
Until your team develops its own blogging muscle, an agency partner with talented brand journalists can be a vital resource. They can help offload some writing, coach your team, SEO-optimize and promote your blog posts.
Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and significantly growing graduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Following are some of the most successful strategies that our university clients have activated to unleash enrollment growth in the past two decades:
1. Invest in branding. In the sea of sameness, brands win. When the University of Delaware College of Business and Economics wished to create a rising tide for its vast portfolio of graduate business programs, Elliance crafted and paid off their new brand line “Opportunity, Inc.” It worked and attracted students from across the region, nation and the globe.
2. Bake research about student behavior and what they value into website, microsites, landing pages and ad creative. When we reflected GMAC research findings into Carnegie Mellon’s MS in information systems management program microsite and ad creative, its applications grew by 118 percent within one year.
3. Tell a better story. Romance prospects and show that the value of the degree exceeds its cost. Carnegie Mellon MSE degree was ranked on Google page one for every conceivable keyword, but its enrollment was still anemic. With a photoshoot of rock star students, and new copy that emphasized value of the degree, the enrollment took off without additional marketing.
4. Fish where the fish are. Since digital now leads traditional media, promote your program on digital channels like web, Google, social and Wikipedia. When we helped William Woods transition its marketing budget from all traditional to primarily digital, its graduate enrollment grew by 25 percent and online enrollment doubled in just two years.
5. Pursue right-fit. Hunt like sharks and don’t feed like whales. Create personas with their unique motivations, be it career development, salary bump or living more meaningful lives. Increase your presence across their unique student journeys. We helped Carlow University achieve the highest enrollment in a decade by creating marketing that resonated with their right-fit ambitious underdog students at each stage of their student journey.
6. Persuade influencers. It is well known that the recommendations of bosses carry an extraordinary weight in the enrollment decisions of their followers. When William Woods graduate educational program leaders fostered conversations with their 600+ alumni principals, school superintendents and education district leaders, the teachers signed up in droves for their MEd and EdD degrees.
7. Dominate Google page one because if your program can’t be found, it can’t be in the consideration set. Tune social to amplify storytelling. This is the secret of success of each and every one of our clients. For example, with top Google rankings, Pepperdine graduate business programs grew dramatically and Carnegie Mellon MS in Product Management enrollment grew 12X in 4 years.
8. Optimize follow up strategies. Unlike undergraduate programs, graduate students expect the program directors and faculty to reach out and discuss the passion of students for their program.
9. A/B test your way to success. Effective A/B testing lets you quickly determine the difference between winning and losing messages, ad channels and geographies. Armed with these insights, we encourage our client to feed the winners and starve the losers. For Manchester Business School, we targeted 20 cities and deployed rapid A/B testing which quickly revealed that only 3 cities were converting. We pulled the budgets from the 17 non-performing cities and applied that to the 3 top converting cities. Their inquiries and applications grew rapidly.
10. Simplify application, acceptance and financial assistance forms and processes. You should be easy to do business with and your processes should not be an obstacle course. We’ve helped streamline processes for each and every one of our clients improving their applications yield and reducing their melt.
11. Engage alumni by featuring them and telling their stories of achievements. It will inspire confidence in prospective students. Prospective students connect with the alumni seeking their counsel and advice on whether they should enroll. We use this heuristic for all our higher education clients.
12. Forge partnerships with employers because they are not only harvesting grounds for new students, but also for projects and research initiatives. When we created corporate relations microsites and brochures for several Carnegie Mellon masters programs, they were handsomely rewarded with increased corporate engagement and sponsorships.
13. Cultivate feeders like undergrad programs and employers. When we encouraged a number of program chairs to cement ties with various national and international undergrad programs and HR/training manager at corporations, their enrollment grew dramatically.
14. Offer new flavored, distinct degrees instead of creating new commodity, me-too programs. Distinct degrees always sell better. When Duquesne University launched its MBA in Sustainability, it gave us the fertile soil to secure dominant positions on Google page one. Enrollment grew 3X and application selectivity dropped from 90% to 10%.
Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has increased and significantly grown graduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around four core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. All our recommended actions revolve around these core beliefs:
1. Know that you become the story you choose to tell. It’s how institutions make meaning from the arc of their history, and operate with a sense of destiny to create purpose that propels them into the future. This story is what students and employers buy into. You must articulate your story so it’ll appeal to your right-fit students.
2. Celebrate students, not the institution, as the real heroes of your story. The best programs realize that students, alumni and faculty — not the institution — are the real heroes of a program’s story. Celebrate their journeys and the consequential problems of humanity they are solving.
3. Prove your brand claims. Buyers are both intelligent and skeptical. Persuade them by providing proofs in the form of stories, stats and third-party validations. Gather them and go long on proofs and short on claims in your messaging.
4. Romance prospects with high-fidelity websites story landing pages. Higher-fidelity academic and story landing pages attract higher quality students. They are the “money pages” used by value-minded prospects to make their program choices. Build them with the right balance of persuasion architecture, science of conversions, and beauty. Assure the prospects that the value of their degree far exceeds its cost. Inform, persuade, engage, inspire, delight and convert prospects.
5. Pursue right-fit students. Invert the admissions funnel by marketing your students and alumni heroes to attract more like-minded prospects. This will create admission pipes, not funnels. Expect these right-fit students to go on to become engaged citizens, brand ambassadors, recruiters, partners and donors. Hunt like sharks; don’t feed like whales.
6. Surround and engage prospects and influencers where they hang out. Fish where the fish are. Allocate marketing investments in digital channels where students roam. Invest marketing dollars in digital channels where influencers live.
7. Deploy A/B testing and AI smarts in targeting. In your paid advertising, use methodologies like micro-segmentation, look-alikes, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups to generate high-quality right-fit leads.
8. Claim your thought leadership. Weaponize your content based on your program’s natural wellspring of ideas, innovation and thought leadership with a thoughtful search engine optimization strategy, keywords and social sharing. Insist that each and every piece of content your department produces is “juiced” with keywords, so your program can secure its rightful Google page 1 rankings. Don’t surrender top search rankings for your program to competitors and lead aggregators.
9. Measure what matters. As management guru Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Create a culture of disciplined accountability with a shared dashboard of key performance indicators. Define a set of essential metrics that truly matter. Gather them and be decisive in taking action based on data.
10. Reinforce integrated marketing with boots-on-the-ground efforts. Boots-on-the-ground efforts include forging partnerships with undergraduate programs, stimulating alumni networks, cultivating relationships with corporations, giving webinars, attending industry conferences, nurture feeders, follow-up with prospects on a timely basis, and a whole lot more. When integrated marketing and boots-on-the-ground efforts mutually enhance each other, they liberate fresh new growth. It takes a combination of air game and ground game to grow graduate enrollment.
A breed of automated website builder platforms have recently emerged in the market. At first glance, they are attractive because content marketers without any coding and programming knowledge can build a website quickly. However, the websites they generate are cookie-cutter, bloated, not SEO friendly, and not ADA compliant. They may be okay for frugal small business and non-mission-critical websites, but they don’t stand a chance at becoming engines for liberating revenue for fast-growing small, medium and enterprise companies. Mission-critical websites need custom argument construction on key pages, lightening speed, SEO friendliness, and ADA compliance.
For mission-critical websites, Elliance has created Smart Page Builder to create custom websites that are easy to manage and operate by non-technical content marketers. Our Smart Page Builder:
revolutionizes website development by providing an intuitive interface that allows content marketers with varying technical skills to create and customize web pages easily.
streamlines the website development process and reduces the need for coding knowledge.
democratizes website creation and empowers individuals and businesses to quickly build professional-looking websites without relying on dedicated developers, fostering efficiency and creativity in the web development landscape.
enables content marketers to construct custom arguments on different pages of the website, including the ability to construct new pages with LEGO-like building blocks such as:
multi-column copy blocks
reusable, shared content blocks
product/service cards
related products/services
carousels
accordions
tabs
photo and video galleries
quotes and testimonials
tagged content, news, events and people feeds
forms and form embeds
callouts
and a whole lot more
empowers content marketers to manage secure access using ACLs, create workflows, preview before publish, review audit trails and roll-back changes.
creates SEO friendly websites that are light in code and load fast on smart phones, tablets and desktops alike.
creates ADA compliant websites.
Interested in building a mission-critical manufacturing website with our Smart Page Builder that’ll liberate corporate growth? Let’s talk.
To combat shrinkage in college-bound high school students, higher education enrollment marketing professionals are developing strategies for winning an outsized share of the online, adult, graduate and international student markets. In other blog posts, I’ve shared our playbooks for increasing and significantly growing adult, graduate and international students enrollment. In this blog post, I’ll address strategies for recruiting online students.
In growing enrollment for online programs for the past 25 years for numerous colleges and universities, we have learned three things: First, students can’t buy your programs or buy-into your college unless they can find you on Google page one or are referred by satisfied peers and friends; Second, you must build student support and flexibility into every aspect of your online offerings; Third, someone on your team must play the role of chief experience officer who views the entire student experience from their perspective.
To succeed, higher education institutions must deploy a unique balance of the marketing air-game, boots-on-the-ground game and follow-up contact strategies.
ASSESS THE SITUATION
Appraise the college’s situation by immersing yourself in the college data and touch points:
Asses your brand. Are you a local brand, regional brand, state brand, super-regional brand or a national brand. Your brand elasticity will determine how far from your campus locations you can realistically recruit from. A strong brand platform will also attract right-fit students who will stay and finish their degree.
Evaluate your online enrollment data. Is the majority of your online enrolled students coming from within 100 miles of your campus locations? Study admissions funnel data carefully. Which part of the funnel is facing the biggest loss and melt?
Know your signature online programs, portfolio online programs, and remaining online offerings. Know the online programs that are oversubscribed, undersubscribed and at-risk. Why? Because you won’t be able to spread your budgets evenly across all programs. You must play favorites and you’ll have to create smart portfolio groupings.
Assess your website and perform an SEO audit. Leads from your website will out-convert the paid leads by 3-folds. Google page 1 is destiny.
Benchmark cross-app competitors. Know who is ahead of you and who is behind you.
Define right-fit students. These are the kind of students you want more of. There might be different definitions of right-fit amongst women, men, military/veterans, working professionals, Hispanics, African Americans, and others.
Know your referral rate. Referrals produce some of the best quality leads. The best colleges graduate happy students who become the largest source of future students. Satisfied graduates bring trust and credibility which helps prospects cut through the clutter of choices and marketing.
Understand what your prospects value the most about the institution (brand, salary bump, job placement, peers, alumni,, faculty thought leadership, etc.). Don’t operate blindly.
Allocate competitive marketing budgets. Most non-profit colleges and universities are investing between 2% and 5% of their total revenue on marketing, when they ought to be investing at least 10%. Small and medium sized colleges are increasingly competing against a growing club of for-profit colleges and public universities that are investing more than 20% of their revenue or greater than $100M in marketing.
Perform SWOT. Face reality head-on.
PLAN: BEFORE YOU START OFFERING ONLINE DEGREE PROGRAMS
1. Acknowledge the Psychic Battle of Hope and Doubt
Even though online education has become more mainstream, online students are typically working professionals who wrestle with competing forces.
On one side of this timeless battle, the chariots of hope gallop forward. Ambition simmers in them. Stars are lining up. The online students are ready to make the leap.
On the other side, the demons of doubt rise in them: Am I too old? Have I been out of school too long? Am I qualified? Will I be able to keep up? Can I get there? Can I afford it? Will I be able to balance my family life, job and college? Will I fail?
It’s against this backdrop that colleges offer online programs and online degree completion programs.
2. Offer Online Degrees in Ideal Formats
Offer your online programs in formats that are convenient for working professionals. Most adults prefer asynchronous formats so they can pace themselves. If your programs are synchronous, offer them in the evenings and weekends. Give a technology orientation seminar so students are able to be effective from the very start.
3. Offer Adult Programs in Ideal Starts
Online students like frequent starts for courses, ideally every 8 to 12 weeks, and need the flexibility to pause and restart without penalty.
4. Invest in Online Learning Platform and Online Instructional Design
For online programs, student experience wholly depends on the quality of your teaching materials and ease-of-use of your learning platform. Don’t cut corners.
ACTIVATE MARKETING “AIR GAME”
WEBSITE: THE ULTIMATE CONVERSION MACHINE
Your website is one of the most important touch points for online prospects because it is the #1 lead and application generation tool for online programs. You’ll be judged and evaluated by its quality and beauty.
Inform it by market research insights. Since most online students are working professionals who are paying tuition from their own pockets, they value flexibility and tuition freezes.
Invest in high-fidelity academic program pages. Program pages, what we call “money pages” on a college website, are where many college decisions are made and college preferences are created. Even though the colleges are asking students to pony up fees that are close to the price of expensive cars, it’s rare to find the level of romance and presentation that even economy car companies put into their entry-level model pages. Instead of settling with bland program pages packed with facts, the VPs of Enrollment Marketing must create program pages that romance prospects and their families. They must feature stories of enrolled students, faculty, facilities, studios, and centers of excellence where the students’ minds will be shaped and skills will be developed. They must paint pictures of exciting opportunities that await them after graduation and offer stories of alumni as demonstrable proof of their program’s distinction.
Make it beautiful. Romance prospects. Merchandise hope.
Make it search engine friendly. Inform it with a Keyword Lexicon. Bake best practices in search engine optimization (SEO) into all aspects of it. Ensure that your online academic program pages, faculty and the university magazine stories are all ranked on Google page one.
Spotlight online enrolled students, alumni and alumni chapters in the institutional website, brochures, and social media. If students can’t see others like themselves there, they simply won’t show interest. They also rely heavily on word-of-mouth from friends. Craft brand messaging and content that is inclusive of people of different races, socio-economic status, career stages and faiths.
Prominently feature institutional reputation points because students use them as short-cuts.
Feature proof points of your commitment to various student profiles. For instance, working professionals would like to know that you have the support system in place for them. Similarly, African American and Hispanic students don’t wish to stand out like sore thumbs and want to know if the college has the support infrastructure for them to graduate on time.
Create customized admissions, financial aid and scholarships sections for adult students that address their unique needs.
Be prepared to create an online admissions microsite. If your design template and CMS constraints don’t let you mirror the website user experience with your target audience, be prepared to create a new admissions microsites.
Track website performance. Carefully track prospect journey and conversion performance. Adjust it until it starts performing optimally.
PAID ADVERTISING: HUNT LIKE SHARKS. DON’T FEED LIKE WHALES.
Search, Social and Media Advertising paid platforms are all powered by algorithms that maximize their own profits with little regard for a marketer’s investments. To offset the algorithm’s greedy tendency, use sensible campaign management techniques to tune, optimize and micro-manage various aspects of the campaigns.
Deploy new paid advertising methodologies based on what the right-fit students value, micro-segments, look-alikes, A/B testing, geo-targeting, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups.
Use the latest best practices to create high-converting digital ad creative. Run A/B tests to feed the champs and starve the chumps.
Direct prospects to brand-infused, high-fidelity, story landing pages. Infuse brand, ROI, cogent argument construction, differentiators, calls-to-action, ROI stats and facts into the creative. Again, run A/B tests with copy and images to feed the winners and starve the losers.
Choose the ad platforms wisely. Not all paid channels perform equally. Google generates solid leads for most pre-professional online degrees. Online students convert best on Facebook/Instagram and YouTube, but not on Snapchat and Tik Tok.
Carefully track prospect journey and campaign performance so you can determine the right keywords, the right messaging, the right platforms, and the right landing pages. More importantly, so you can answer the pivotal question: where should you invest your precious marketing dollars in the next 12 months.
Use sensible campaign management techniques such as budget optimization, bid management, keyword management, audience optimization and judicious management of algorithmic recommendations.
ACTIVATE INBOUND/SEO MARKETING: GET FOUND ON GOOGLE/BING PAGE ONE.
Mobilize search engine optimization (SEO) and your content marketing engine to dominate search engines. Remember four things.
First, research shows that when colleges “get found” via organic Google page one results, prospects trust them more. Google page one organic results command over 90% of click share, and generate close to two-thirds of inquiries. Organic inquiries tend to form long-term relationships with the universities and they tend to melt away at a reduced rate.
Second, leads generated from Google organic rankings tend to be like-minded and outperform paid advertising leads by three-folds.
Third, the best prospects prefer to “discover” the college of their choice through “accidental finds” on Google page one and word-of-mouth on social media.
Fourth, SEO marketing is a long game. It takes several months to achieve local and regional rankings, and often a year or more to achieve national and international rankings.
In light of these, we recommend that the college:
Develop smart foundational SEO. Establish a multi-year rankings plan for securing Google/Bing page one rankings.
Start by creating a Keyword Lexicon with keyword clusters, frequently asked questions, and natural language queries. Ensure it include keyword buckets for academic programs, thought leadership, brand, geographic, decisioning, and reputation. Also ensure that the keywords span the entire student decision journey, all the way from awareness, to consideration, to decision and beyond.
Optimize all your online academic program pages. Ensure that the information that appears on search engine results is persuasive, aspirational and inviting.
Because rankings weaken over time and search engines reward fresh content, marketers must create a continuous stream of high quality, trusted and relevant content (such as articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers, thought leadership articles, social posts, quizzes, games, etc.) and ignite it via promotion and conversation-starters to encourage peer-to-peer sharing. We call this the inverted admissions funnel strategy, which attracts and converts like-minded prospects.
Monitor your search engine rankings and traffic to identify which pieces of content are performing well and adjust your emphasis accordingly.
CONDUCT EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Email marketing is most effective with house lists, and as joint marketing campaign with related niche organizations; purchased lists convert poorly. Carefully track prospect journey and campaign performance.
COMMUNICATE WITH INFLUENCERS
Instead of making a shortlist of colleges on their own, online students are heavily influenced by the opinions of their social network of peers, co-workers and friends.
Instead of investing most of their marketing dollars on targeting students directly, reach out to corporate HR departments, trade associations, and senior managers who manage working professionals in need of a degree to advance their careers. This creates a stereophonic set of messages that surround and engage an online prospect with what’s distinctive about a college.
INFLUENCE RANKING AND RATING AGENCIES
Although colleges have an ambivalent relationship with college rankings, prospective students tend to gravitate towards the best ranked colleges they can afford to attend. Smart colleges routinely influence these ratings by creating committees that proactively affect ranking factors such as peer perception, student satisfaction, student placement rates, and salary data.
Each of these paid, earned and owned media strategies are good alone, but better together.
MOBILIZE BOOTS ON THE “GROUND GAME”
Recruit Online Student Ambassadors. Ask them to share their positive experiences and insights with their friends. Ask them to welcome new students.
Facilitate Student Visits and Tours. College visits are moments of truth. Face-to-face interactions during college visits, alumni outreach, and admitted student days improve the number of high-quality leads and admissions yield. Students remember a college that reaches out to them in a timely, caring, personal and organized manner. Successful colleges work very hard in casting and directing volunteers, tour guides, work study and junior staff — ensuring the talking points, presentations, touch points and tour details are all curated and orchestrated perfectly. God is in the details.
Befriend Community Colleges. The more the number of community colleges you build partnerships with, the higher your enrollment will be.
Cultivate Relationships with Corporate HR and Training Directors. Corporations hope to retain employees by fostering their intellectual development. Corporate training programs are one means of doing that, but encouraging employees to get their next degree is the other means.
Cultivate Strong Relationship with Surrounding Communities. Become known as the friendly online education provider in your region. The goodwill generated will pay off handsomely.
DEPLOY “FOLLOW-UP” CONTACT STRATEGIES
All your marketing investments will be wasted unless you build a solid follow-up system for inquiries and applications.
Follow-up with inquiries on a timely basis. Respond quickly. Keep it human. Recruit friends and colleagues to become secret shoppers for your university — and ask them about their experience.
Deploy a personalized contact strategy for every stage of the admissions funnel to maximize yield. Know what prospects and influencers need at every stage of the admissions funnel, and meet their needs. Pay as much attention to admission yield communications and follow-up processes as you do to lead-generation and lead-nurturing communications. Offset reduced contact with stealth applicants by stepping up the game at each touch point.
Deploy a unique contact strategy for applications to prevent melt. The application is the new lead. Treat admitted students with the same care as you treat leads. Deploy drip campaigns, accepted student days, early orientation, and welcome reception.
Deploy a unique contact strategy for applications to prevent melt. The application is the new lead. Treat admitted students with the same care as you treat leads. Deploy drip campaigns, accepted student days, early orientation, and welcome reception.
Make it easy for them to succeed. Designate counselors and coaches who assist with registration, scheduling, waiting lists as well as transportation, work-school balance, health issues, and psychological support.
Remember two things. First, a broken inquiry and application follow-up process reflects poorly on the entire brand. Second, don’t let automation get in the way of personalized and timely follow-up because there are no short-cuts for old-fashioned, human-centered relationship building.
As a leading social media agency for colleges, universities and higher education institutions, we are frequently asked to share our best practices. This is part of a series of posts to explain how social media audit can serve their interests.
A social media audit involves a comprehensive review of a higher education brand’s primary social media presence, activities, and performance. The goal is to assess the effectiveness of the current strategy and identify areas for improvement. This typically includes social media channels of the institution, schools, departments, alumni and centers of excellence. It excludes social media channels of athletics, labs, clubs and organizations, special events, and special initiatives.
After gaining access to institution’s social media management software, we conduct a twelve-point social media audit to assess the following:
1. Profile Information Audit Assess all official social media profiles to ensure accurate and consistent information is presented, including logos and colors, profile pictures, cover photos, about information, and contact details.
2. Platform Presence Audit We identify all social media platforms where the brand has a presence. This includes major platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.
3. Content Audit We evaluate the type, frequency, and quality of content posted on each platform. We assess whether the content aligns with the brand’s goals and resonates with the target audience.
4. Engagement Metrics Audit We analyze engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, X-reposts, and other interactions. We assess the level of audience engagement and identify successful and underperforming content.
5. Promotions Audit We analyze the content promotions the brand is running to ensure they are aligned with institutional goals.
6. Editorial Calendar Audit We review and evaluate the existing content schedule and plans outlined in the editorial calendar for social media marketing to ensure institutional objectives are being met over a longer time horizon.
7. Hashtag Usage Audit We review the use of hashtags across platforms. We assess the effectiveness of branded and domain related hashtags and occasionally identify opportunities for new ones.
8. Brand Consistency Audit We ensure a consistent brand identity is applied across all platforms. We check if branding elements such as logos, colors, and brand promise and position are used uniformly.
9. Metrics & KPIs Audit We evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with the brand’s goals. This may include metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement rates, and conversion rates.
10. Competitor Benchmarks Audit We compare the brand’s social media followers and volume metrics with that of key competitors. We identify areas where the brand excels and areas where it can improve based on peer benchmarks.
11. Followers Audit We analyze the demographic information of the audience on each platform, including age, gender, location, and other relevant details. We examine the growth or decline in followers/fans on each platform. We evaluate the demographics and interests of the audience to guide tailoring of future content and engagement strategies.
12. Sentiment Audit This is included by special request only. We evaluate and analyze the sentiments expressed by the audience toward the college brand or its academic offerings on various social media platforms. The goal is to gauge the overall sentiment—whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral—associated with the brand.
What’s typically excluded is evaluation of the performance of paid social advertising campaigns, including ad spend, reach, click-through rates, conversions, and ROI.
A social media audit provides valuable insights that can improve the effectiveness of your institutional social media strategy. It is typically conducted every few years to adapt to changes in the social media landscape and the brand’s goals.
The most effective college enrollment marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a set of techniques college marketers employ to secure page one rankings on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Choosing the right set of keywords and creating content infused with those keywords is how college marketers achieve coveted page one rankings for their programs and schools.
Elliance works with higher education marketers to not only map the right set of keywords across the prospective student journey, but also to optimize their website and social media to secure Google page one rankings for those keywords. We undertake this task regardless of whether the objective is to increase enrollment for undergraduate, graduate, online, adult, or international students.
To make a college decision, prospective students and their families move through a logical set of steps. At each stage of their journey, students and families use a unique set of keywords on Google and Bing to search for information.
AWARENESS
Smart colleges know that the student search begins long before they are ready to go to college, so they continuously promote themselves by sharing stories of innovation, and offering summer camps, pre-college programs and community-oriented programs. As teenagers enter high school, students and families start looking for colleges with more intentionality. People who are believers in college education begin thinking about the majors they might want to explore. Taking into consideration their kids strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, they educate themselves by exploring potential degree options and the career paths they open. On the other end of the spectrum, the college skeptics turn to keywords like “is college worth it?”, “is a college degree worth it?”, and “Is getting a degree in <major> worth it?” to look at alternative pathways.
CONSIDERATION
Next college-bound families move to the consideration stage where they look for institutions offering majors and degrees of interest. They start using keywords like “best colleges for <major>”, “starting salaries for <major> majors”, “colleges near me that offer <major>”, “<major> programs in <my region>” and more.
PREFERENCE
Next they reach the decision or preference stage where they look for “<college> reviews”, “<major> program reviews”, “<college> rankings”, “<college> tours”, etc.
PURCHASE (OR DECISION)
Finally, they make their purchase decision, finalizing financial aid terms and making a deposit. During this phase, students and families tend to search for keywords such as “accepted student portal for <college>”, “how to make a deposit at <college>”.
Once they have been accepted, they are subjected to a different set of “pick us, not them” and “melt prevention” strategies.
Understanding student and parent personas and behaviors underpins our marketing approach. We apply this strategic thinking to promote all majors, programs and schools to bolster enrollment. This disciplined approach turns skeptical college administrators into believers and transforms them into legendary leaders.
As one of the top website design and web development agencies for manufacturing, our talented team has been creating trusted website and e-commerce design and development experiences for Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Chemicals, Construction & Engineering, Electronics, Energy, Food & Beverage, Furniture, Industrials, Metals & Mining, Oil & Gas, Retail & Consumer Goods, Tooling, Textiles & Apparel, Transportation Equipment, Wood & Paper Products companies. Here are responses to some of their frequently asked question (FAQs):
What are the essential features for a successful manufacturing website?
Here are some smart features worth providing for your smart engineering-minded buyers:
Product catalog and services – as a quick reference to your offerings.
Custom solutions – to facilitate higher-margin, complex sales.
Project galleries – to showcase your solutions in action.
Markets served – to reduce their risk of buying from you.
Customer stories, testimonials and third-party validations – to reduce their risk of buying from you.
Auto-complete site search – to give quickest path to your products and services.
Faceted search – to show depth and breadth of product (and service) offerings.
Configurators – to engage your buyers.
Resource center – to provide convenient access to all your brochures and spec sheets.
Blog – to convey product and thought leadership.
Customer portal – to enable customers to find answers to routine questions about their past purchase history, warrantees, add-ons, and a whole lot more.
Multi-language support – to facilitate international and multilingual buyers.
How can we showcase our products effectively on our manufacturing website?Are there specific strategies for showcasing product specifications and technical details effectively?
Manufacturers experience one of the most complex buying (and selling) process of any industry. Committees of engineers, influencers and buyers all play a role in the purchase. Manufacturers must provide all product details and specs in both imperial and metric systems to serve the US and worldwide customers. These can either be displayed on the website pages or made available via PDF downloads.
Photos and videos of products in action or in complex use is another way to effectively send a visual signal to the buyer that you understand and can service their multi-faceted needs.
Beyond this, manufacturers must make their teams available to talk to prospective buyers to answer their questions, to discuss their design needs or to understand after-sale service. Standard practices also include showing applications of your products and services in customer settings, providing related white papers, and sharing testimonials of satisfied clients.
How can manufacturers integrate e-commerce functionality into their website?
If you offer e-commerce functionality, you must integrate it with your back-end inventory management and payment management systems using EDI. This can be done in real-time or near-real-time with caveats. Know that e-commerce projects require websites to be integrated with your back-end systems and thus cost a lot more and take much longer to implement.
How can we enhance the user experience of our manufacturing website?
Today, more than any other touch point, a website is the digital soul of a manufacturing organization. All roads lead to it. The needs of the prospective and existing buyers must come first. It behooves manufacturers to design and develop a website which is easy to use, exudes expertise and trust, and delights buyers and customers.
What role does responsive design play in the success of a manufacturing website?
Responsive websites are the ones that automatically adjust gracefully on smartphones, tablets or desktops on various popular browsers. Google rewards responsive websites with higher rankings.
What role does mobile website design play in the success of a manufacturing website?
Since half of manufacturer website users are likely coming from mobile devices, it is imperative that you design and develop your website with a mobile-first mindset.
How can we create engaging content to attract and inform visitors on our manufacturing website?
In the age of AI, many manufacturers are leaning on AI to generate robotic and inauthentic content. Resist the temptation; instead, lean on your subject matter experts to create authentic content or pair them with your content marketers to write democratized content. They are a wellspring of stories of innovation and clients successes. They are also the source of white papers and best practices that no AI engine can produce.
Should my website have a blog?
Fresh content is the lifeblood of Google and Bing. Infused with keywords, informative blog posts are one of the most effective means of securing Google and Bing page one rankings for long tail keywords. With assistance from your subject matter experts and AI tools, produce high-fidelity web stories, thought-leadership white papers and informative blog posts — and infuse them with keywords. Google and Bing page one rankings will follow.
Should manufacturers use their website to communicate sustainability and environmental efforts?
Since Millennials and Gen-Zers care deeply about corporate values, they are gravitating towards companies that embrace environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, and embody corporate social responsibility (CSR). Both emerging talent and buyers are attracted to brands which live in accordance with their core values. To create resonance, manufacturing websites must go beyond promoting their expertise and celebrate their corporate commitment to sustainability and communities. To appeal to them, manufacturing websites should consider incorporating nature-inspired organic forms, cool digital design, and interactive energy.
How can we optimize our manufacturing website for better search engine rankings?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science and art of securing Google and Bing page one rankings. Here is the recipe we follow to create predictable and enduring rankings:
Establish a multi-year SEO plan.
Create a Keyword Lexicon.
Make your website responsive, secure and fast.
Implement on-page and on-site factors.
Create content for countries of interest.
Optimize for locations and geographies you serve and wish to serve.
Build quality inbound links.
Manage social signals.
Create fresh content to secure and sustain top rankings for important keywords.
What analytic tools can help monitor and improve the performance of a manufacturer website?
Simple tools and processes yield the most effective measures of website performance. If you can learn to effectively use the free Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you’ll have accomplished more than most manufacturing marketers. Review the insights from it every month and adapt your game plan based on your learnings. Cultivate the discipline of putting lead and order source into your CRM system, and analyze what sources are working the best. Your website should be your #1 lead and new business generation tool. If you have more budgets, you can always invest in marketing automation tools like HubSpot or Pardot.
