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Organic rankings are trusted more, clicked more and convert three-folds better than paid ads. This is precisely why smart colleges and universities take the long view. They develop a plan that goes after the lowest hanging fruit first (local rankings), then harder-to-achieve rankings (regional), and finally the hardest-to-achieve national, international and reputation rankings. They follow the age-old wisdom: slow and steady wins the race.Organic rankings are trusted more, clicked more and convert three-folds better than paid ads. This is precisely why smart colleges and universities take the long view. They develop a plan that goes after the lowest hanging fruit first (local rankings), then harder-to-achieve rankings (regional), and finally the hardest-to-achieve national, international and reputation rankings. They follow the age-old wisdom: slow and steady wins the race.
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Higher education enrollment marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Continual monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and optimizing are necessary ingredients for successful higher education enrollment campaigns. They are critical in building a qualified prospect list that is responsive to nurturing — from lead to application, and ultimately, to enrollment. As a higher education leader, you’ll want to know which key factors will provide your marketing team with the guidance and clarity they need. While there is an array of technical details, metrics, and data points every month, focusing on these five factors will help keep your marketing team on track. 1) Prioritize your most important performance metrics. To keep the most impactful measures as a top priority, be clear about your north star metric and communicate that often and consistently to your marketing team. For most colleges and universities, the goal of digital marketing is lead generation. While metrics such as impressions, clicks, click through rates, and bounce rates are informative and … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing
At Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based digital and paid marketing agency, we create unique landing pages for each of our higher education marketing clients as part of our paid digital campaigns. Along with distinctive elements for each landing page which give it an individual flavor, there are common features which consistently work very well in attracting and engaging prospective students. Here are some best practices that we follow when creating these higher education paid landing pages for our clients: Clear and Concise Argument Construction: The argument construction for each landing page depends on the client’s situation and target audience. We consider who we are trying to attract, such as undergraduate students, adult students, first generation students, or graduate students, etc. A one size fits all approach does not work. Examples of landing pages from 3 of our clients which show how different audiences are addressed: Maker Culture at Capitol Technology University: The culture at Capitol Technology University is focused on providing a … Continue reading
This checklist is designed for new deans sizing up a marketing department and prospective vice presidents for marketing as they evaluate a new job opportunity or performance of their marketing department. 1. What’s Your Brand? In the sea of sameness, brands win. A brand is the sum of all experiences. It attaches a memorable idea to your school. It creates expectations and a core promise while creating strong to impenetrable differentiation in the marketplace. Can you articulate your brand and its core promise? Do you speak with your distinctive brand voice, striking different notes for each segment of students, alumni, donors, partners and influencers? Are your website, social media, print materials, brand anthem video, and campaigns curated with the same brand voice? What is the meaningful societal cause your brand stands for? 2. What are the First Impressions of Your School? First impressions matter. What message is conveyed by your architecture, entrance, grounds, signage, classrooms, admission office décor? Do your key … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing
Experience tells us that great beginnings matter for these reasons: a clear purpose calms the winds of change seeing (our future) becomes believing strong messages invite loyalists trust takes root The number and variety of decisions, opportunities and challenges that come with assuming leadership of a major law school require a steady hand. Below, we’ve put together 10 strategic considerations for your first 100 days to help you navigate from analysis to synthesis. 1. Establish A Strategic Vision Start by defining a unique vision that will galvanize the faculty, staff, alumni and partners. Establish a few major priorities that will make your school a school of consequence. Then devote most of your efforts to those few major things that make a school prosper. Priorities could include things like becoming an innovator, positioning the school as a thought-leader in both established and emerging spaces, and championing a meaningful societal cause that is rooted in your school’s strengths. 2. Assemble Your Team … Continue reading
Featured Snippets are the highlighted results at the top of a Google Search Results page. Also known as position “zero”, they appear above the first organic result. Google displays these results when they determine that this format will help the user more easily discover what they’re looking for. Featured Snippets can show up as a list, a paragraph, a table and a video. At Elliance, a higher education SEO and digital marketing agency, we have been helping clients get top rankings for over 20 years. As we work to boost rankings for our higher education marketing clients, we aim our efforts to get strong featured snippet rankings for our clients. There have been some remarkable results that we’ve noticed in cases where we’ve achieved featured snippet rankings. Benefits of Ranking on Featured Snippet Results Higher clickthrough rates: Research shows that people click more on featured snippet results. According to Search Engine Watch featured snippets account for 35% of all clicks. FirstPageSage.com … Continue reading
This blog post about how to recruit and enroll adult students was partly inspired by our work with forward thinking clients like Kathy Groves and Emily Horstman at William Woods University, Jacqui Spicer and DaRon Hairston at Baker College, Mollie Cecere at Carlow University, Brad Sims and Dianne O’Neill at Capitol Technology University, and Karen Nichols when she was at Limestone University. Adult students are a very special breed of people. Life changed course and they couldn’t complete college, or they now see the realities of working life their younger selves couldn’t see before. Thus begins a new internal battle. PLAN: BEFORE YOU START OFFERING ADULT EDUCATION PROGRAMS 1. Acknowledge the Psychic Battle of Hope and Doubt On one side of this timeless battle, the chariots of hope gallop forward. Ambition simmers in them. Stars are lining up. The adults students are ready to make the leap. On the other side, the demons of doubt rise: Am I too old? … Continue reading
Third in a three-part blog series on a concept that the author R. Todd Erkel calls “the battle for meaning.” We will look at the evolution of higher education marketing and its relationship to code, content, Google’s algorithm, and page one organic search results. The Battle for Meaning in the Age of Name-Image-Likeness Once upon a time in higher education brand marketing, colleges and universities believed that their brand position, legacy, and equity would be adequately protected by something as benign as their brand standards manual. Then came the U.S. Supreme Court ruling (NCAA v. Alston) on July 1, 2021, and the era of Name-Image-Likeness. Seemingly overnight, changes in federal and state law hit colleges and universities generally, and higher education brand marketing specifically, with the speed and impact of a wayward comet. In parts one and two of this blog series, we looked at how the “battle for meaning” played out in the context of public health and vaccination, … Continue reading
ChatGPT, the latest AI tool, has taken the world by storm. Should under-staffed and under-resourced marketing teams use it? And can it make marketing teams more productive? Before I answer that, let’s just review how this artificial intelligence (AI) tool works. How ChatGPT Works ChatGPT does not have a mind of its own, nor does it have its own thoughts. Instead, its responses are based on the collective memory of humanity, embedded in billions of web documents – imbued with the entire spectrum of humanity’s truthful, partially true, baseless, misinformed, racist and sexist points of views. Based on existing written sentence and document structure patterns, it completes or predicts word and sentence combinations weaving them together into authoritative-sounding, smooth, somewhat verbose and human-like answers. Next, an army of human reviewers — with their unique personal biases — manually fine-tune the responses by ranking for quality. Using ChatGPT For Marketing Let’s examine how chatGPT fares in various components of marketing: S T … Continue reading
This guide was written to help under-resourced, small to medium colleges and universities who can’t compete in the marketing arms race and yet need to out-wit and out-smart the deep-pocketed Goliaths. We call them small giants. As one of the leading higher education marketing agencies, we learned the strategies and tactics presented here from serving several small giants of higher education. We salute them. Higher education marketing is a sacred art for a noble cause. Its primary goal is to grow enrollment, endowment and reputation for colleges and universities. Colleges are literally spending billions on marketing and advertising. The first threat that private and public colleges faced was from t he meteoric rise of for-profit colleges who invest more than 20% of their revenue (equating to hundreds of millions of dollars) on marketing. The next threat has arisen from within their own ranks. Now there are more than twenty private and public universities that are investing over $100 million in … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing