Optimize Your Marketing Strategy

Crafting a great marketing strategy for higher education student recruitment is a complex project that involves the following:

Learning about your audience
Crafting messages to meet their needs
Using online and in-person strategies to reach students through multiple channels
And, developing a timeline, plan with consistency in messaging, brand across multiple platforms

‍Review your college/department/program information, websites, and social media platforms. Information about your programs and potential grad faculty mentors should be easy to find, informative, and attractive to your target audience, including Millennials, GenZers, Working Professionals/Online Learners. However in the next year or two GenZ will become the dominant audience.

Here are the essential components of a great marketing strategy:

With a solid understanding of higher ed trends and developing the recruitment strategy, you’re ready to devise a marketing plan for your college or program. Review your marketing platforms to ensure that messaging and branding are cohesive with the plan you intend to implement. Let’s get started with some key questions:

Who is your target audience?

Understanding the generation: According to Best Colleges Rankings 56% of graduate students are under 30. You’ve probably read a lot about Generation Z’s desire for authenticity, the need for authentic messaging when trying to reach them, and the idea that, as a university, your marketing must appeal to them through your uniqueness, your originality — your realness. Gen Z grew up on the Internet, in a digital jungle constantly advertising and marketing to them from seemingly all angles. This has made them a savvy and suspicious demographic.

What is the cornerstone of your marketing plan?

Craft Your Authentic Brand Message and Value Proposition

Your brand messaging must describe the type of experience each student will have if they decide to attend your program.

Gen Z grew up on the Internet, in a digital jungle constantly advertising and marketing to them from seemingly all angles. Authenticity in your marketing — cultivating a “be you, be real, be here” sense of belonging with your prospective students — is crucial to attracting students who will thrive on your campus and help you meet your enrollment goals.

What you get: Students who truly belong at your university. Students who will retain. Students who will thrive. Your program has its own unique story,

What are your KPIs for engagement?

Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Measuring Success.

Developing some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be useful. These KPIs may include everything from inquiry conversion, application, acceptance, and yield rates to diversity indexes, cost per enrollment figures, retention and graduation rates, alumni engagement, and return on investment (ROI).

How do you track, evaluate, and measure the performance of your comprehensive recruitment marketing strategy?
How do you measure behavioral engagement with your website and digital assets?

What you get: Performance indicators and metrics that align with your goals and priorities. Regularly monitoring and analyzing your KPIs can provide valuable insights to refine your student recruitment strategies and drive success.

Platforms to Market Your Brand

Every social media post, video, or page on your website should be designed to capture attention quickly and resonate with prospective students.

Integrating captive content into a multi-layer platform will ensure higher traffic to capture your audience:

— Website
— Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok)
— Email
— Direct mail (snail mail)
— Phone calls/texting

Your Website

Implementing a quality web content management system (CMS) designed specifically for colleges and universities can eliminate many of your school’s digital marketing challenges. Implement the following:

Dynamic and current content

Videos embedded into your website help prospective students visualize certain aspects of college and university life.
Content that directly addresses their concerns—such as video campus tours, “day in the life” student segments, or deep dives into financial aid and funding options—will appeal to the widest audiences.
Your web content should also take a variety of formats:
- Blog posts/spotlights about student life – student and departmental work and community spaces (labs, studios, communal student spaces, etc.)
- Interactive webinars about unique programs
- Video/storytelling by graduates who have found success in their careers – include faculty and alumni
- Eye-catching visual media such as infographics and explainer videos to communicate statistics that make your school stand out

A CMS that allows non-technical users to update content on the website

Recommendation: WordPress when considering a new CMS, to organize, create, and manage digital content without complicated coding.

Consistent message and branding

Branding should be built into the actual design of your website and “fixed” so that general content contributors can’t modify design elements like color that could affect brand consistency.

Recommendation: brand.uga.edu

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings

A quality CMS should make it easy to update page titles, descriptions, and meta tags, all of which help to optimize content for search engines so that your college is findable. Include SEO and conversion in your program pages:

SEO is the answer when asking how to market a university/school or program. According to EAB research, 81% of students say a college website helped them decide whether a school was the right fit. Students search for academic programs via keywords, which means many will arrive at web pages for your programs instead of coming through your home page.
Make sure those landing pages not only rank higher than your competitors on search engines but that they have clear calls to action, so you convert those visitors to inquiries.
Recommendation for SEO Resources: UGA MarComm, Internal college web designer, Outside local agency (such as Kaptiv8)

Add a FAQ section and/or AI-powered chatbots

Include application requirements and deadlines.
Include average time to degree and career placement pathways.
Include information on assistantships if available in your program.
An AI Chatbot enables you to answer frequently asked questions twenty-four hours a day, and assist in guiding students through the application process. A student can get an answer to a question at 1 am and move on to starting an online application, instead of waiting for your office to open Monday morning. This can free up time for your team to brainstorm new ideas and boost productivity.

Call to Action

Embed the Graduate School Request for Information (RFI) and Apply Now buttons on your graduate program webpages.

The Power of Social Media

For best results, you want to incorporate a mix of social media platforms for your graduate program/school’s messaging. Instagram is the most popular with prospective students, as well as Facebook (reels) and LinkedIn. TikTok is gaining ground as well.

Using Social Media Effectively

Rather than taking a confetti approach to social media, sprinkling posts everywhere, use data analytics to identify where your target audience spends their time online and focus your efforts there.

— Younger audiences on more visual platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
— Adult students are more active on LinkedIn or Facebook.
— Don’t forget that international students may be found on apps such as WeChat, which are less popular in the U.S.

Most algorithms reward frequent posting, consistency and frequency count on social media. Design posts, such as interactive surveys, that encourage engagement and interaction.

Enable “social listening” and respond quickly to questions and reward your users for interacting with you.

Here are some tips for building your content:

Get current students involved

Peer-to-peer communication is one of the easiest and most realistic ways for a prospective student to get a grip on what it’s like to be on your campus. Ask existing students to write blog posts, provide testimonials, and take over your social media to show day-in-the-life experiences on campus.

Take note: students are also experts at discerning what’s real, so don’t try to fake your way with staged or stock photos. Be as authentic as possible. Original content is KEY.

Focus on video content

Video content has become an essential component to student recruitment strategies. Students are increasingly engaged by video and images, and your college/program needs to have a strong presence on social networks in which visual assets are the priority.

Prospective students rate video highly as a way to learn more about a particular college/program.

Consider integrating:

– Video (into social media and on your website)

Current events and happenings – Countdowns to important events and deadlines are a great way to keep your school top-of-mind, while providing actionable information that moves your students through the application process.
Student spotlights and testimonials – Highlight student and alumni success stories and answer the question, “Why Graduate Education at UGA?”
Day in the life of a graduate student
Campus and facility tours
Deep dives into financial aid or funding options – Address concerns of support and cost benefit.

– Livestreaming events unique to your campus such as sporting events, lectures, student activities, and campus traditions.

Graduate School reference: Three Minute Thesis, livestream on Facebook

Social Listening - Keep Track of Your Brand

Important to conduct ongoing Social Listening.

Survey the platforms for chatter regarding your institution, program or faculty regularly. This also helps to build your strategy around current campus campaigns.

What is your school’s digital image? What do students and fans share? When you have something positive to share, social media is a great way to promote it. And, when something less appealing is shared about your higher education institution, you’ll want to know about it sooner than later. That way, you can address it head-on.

Example: Instagram, Reddit most popular!

Email Marketing

Lean Into Slate

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems allow you to manage student interactions, track communications, and group your audiences into segments for more personalized outreach.

Slate(CRM) can help you manage engagement. You can customize your outreach and recruitment efforts by tracking the interests and behaviors of prospective students.

Pro tip: blanket emails get deleted; personalized, targeted emails get noticed by prospective students.

Host Engaging Events

The Campus Visit

The campus visit is the clincher of all recruitment marketing strategies. Prospective students can emotionally connect with the program, and the university atmosphere. Offer tours that concentrate on particular academic programs, as well as events led by current students who can offer an insider’s perspective. A self-guided option is also important to give visitors a chance to explore at their own speed.

For virtual events, interactivity is essential. Organize Q&A sessions, use breakout spaces for more focused conversations, and then follow up with participants. Record these sessions so they can reach more people who were unable to attend.

Afterward, drive traffic to these recorded events through ads or buttons on your website and social media accounts. Virtual events save money for all parties and offer the opportunity to interact with a larger geographic audience, but there is no substitute for in-person interactions. The key to running a virtual event is to make it feel as if it is personal and intimate.