Digital Marketing for Colleges and Universities: Attract, Engage, Enroll
If you’re in charge of marketing at a college or university, picture this:
- The school receives constant requests for tours from prospective families.
- New buildings are being planned to keep up with rising enrollment numbers.
- More faculty members are being hired each year.
- There’s a long waitlist of students who want to attend your university.
- You have full visibility into the performance of your digital marketing campaign.
The Houston Marketing Agency can help you achieve these goals and more with our digital marketing strategy for colleges
We’re a Marketing Agency Specializing in Colleges
Higher education is your specialty. Digital marketing is ours. After years of partnering with colleges and universities, we know what works.
Get in touch for a free, no-strings consultation.
Master Higher Ed Marketing With a Holistic Playbook for Digital Success
Our proven processes and strategies deliver real results, earning us a reputation as a top Houston Marketing Agency.
On your digital marketing journey, we will prioritize three essential pillars:
- Implementing data analytics to monitor your campaign’s performance
- Driving qualified inbound traffic to your website
- Converting that traffic into student enrollments
What could be simpler?
On the surface, it’s straightforward — but without tracking, your results lose their value.
Ask yourself these key questions about your digital marketing campaign:
- What’s your website’s current conversion rate?
- How many organic visitors did you attract from Google last month?
- What’s your cost per qualified lead through Google Ads?
If you know the answers to all of these questions, congrats! We’ll put you on the Dean’s List, and you probably don’t need this guide. But if you’re unsure, keep reading so we can share our ultimate digital marketing for colleges plan.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Successful digital marketing starts with data. Making decisions without dependable analytics isn’t a strategy — it’s a risk.
Some of the important KPIs your college or university should be tracking include:
- Year-over-year enrollment
- Administrative costs per student
- Student engagement
- Graduation rates
- Student and faculty retention rates
- Section fill rates
You should also be tracking key digital marketing KPIs such as:
- Number of website visitors by channel
- Cost per channel
- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
Data Fidelity
Unfortunately, many digital marketing agencies fall short when it comes to data fidelity. We’ve taken over campaigns from other providers only to uncover a range of issues, including:
- Counting the same conversion more than once, inflating results
- Failing to track each stage of the enrollment funnel, leaving gaps in understanding drop-off points and conversion rates
- Tracking meaningless actions — like a Google Maps direction request — as conversions, skewing performance data
At The Houston Marketing Agency, our goal is to deliver precise, relevant data tracking tailored to your college’s unique digital marketing campaign.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
There is more competition than ever in higher education. To help your college or university stand out, you must work to help potential students find what differentiates you from the others.
Understanding what someone is looking for in their post-secondary education can help you hone your marketing strategy to take advantage of what people are searching for and capture the right audience.
Let’s explore a few key areas you can focus on to get the most out of your campaign.
Let’s face it, Google isn’t the only search engine around — but it’s the most important one. This is an ideal place to begin when you’re digging into digital marketing data.
Based on this data, you can see that over 13,000 people per month are searching for colleges and universities near them. That’s more than 632,000 searches a year.
If we analyze the data that includes city-specific keywords, the results are still staggering. Nearly 30,000 people per month are searching for information about colleges in Houston.
You can also take a peek at other university-related topics that people are looking for, such as scholarships, dorms, or college superlatives.
Why are these searches important?
Without strong performance in both organic and paid traffic, your university could be missing out on valuable enrollment opportunities.
Organic
You can rank organically in two places on Google for keywords like “colleges near me.”
First, let’s look at the Google Local Pack.
Wondering how to get your college featured in the Google Local Pack?
While local SEO involves many behind-the-scenes factors and can get complex, the core formula comes down to a couple of essentials:
- A strong collection of localized, relevant content on your website
- An optimized, well-maintained, and highly reviewed Google Business Profile
Just below the Google Local Pack on the search results page, you’ll find the organic search listings.
How can you climb to the top of the organic search results?
While SEO involves many moving pieces, a few foundational steps you can take to improve your organic rankings include:
- Building a website that’s comprehensive and rich in valuable, relevant content
- Optimizing your on-page SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and headers
Paid
Not all paid marketing channels deliver the same results. Variables like your university’s programs, geographic location, and other factors will impact each channel’s performance.
Here are a few platforms worth considering when allocating your digital marketing budget.
Google Ads
Google Ads is a paid advertising platform that allows businesses to appear at the top of search engine results pages. You’ll often notice sponsored links sprinkled throughout the search results, but their prime position at the top increases the likelihood that your target audience will see them, click through, and convert them into potential enrollees.
There are several types of Google Ads campaigns we can test to assess performance, including:
- Search Ads
- Performance Max
- Display Ads
- And more
YouTube Ads
YouTube is the perfect place to give students and their parents a taste of what they could experience on your campus. High-quality videos giving tours of the beautiful grounds, engaging classes, exciting campus life, and more will have them signing up for in-person tours in no time.
With roughly 2.49 billion active users each month, YouTube represents a massive audience — and if you’re not leveraging it, you could be missing a significant portion of your potential market.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
Social media should play a key role in your university’s digital marketing strategy. While audience demographics do overlap across platforms, here’s a general overview of who tends to favor each one:
- Facebook remains popular with Baby Boomers and Gen X.
- Instagram appeals to both Gen X and Millennials.
- TikTok is especially popular among Millennials and Gen Z.
You’ll want to pour this part of your budget into the sites most likely to attract prospective students and their parents.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
Up to this point, we’ve focused on how to drive traffic to your school’s website — but that’s only the first step.
Attracting prospective students is important, but the real goal is turning those visitors into enrolled students who stay with your college for all four years and beyond.
The purpose of growing your website traffic is to convert those clicks into enrollments. Let’s dive into some actionable strategies to help make that happen.
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization involves a variety of strategies, including:
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and simple to navigate
- Using high-quality, original images and videos
- Featuring reviews and testimonials from students and faculty
There are countless ways to improve conversions, and we could spend all day covering them. For now, here are a few essential tactics your college can start using to increase conversion rates.
Split Test Landing Pages
Split testing is a fast, effective way to find out whether changes to your website’s copy, design, or on-page elements can improve conversion rates.
Here’s how it works:
- Landing Page A serves as your control.
- Landing Page B is your test version, where you adjust one element.
- For example, you might swap a button that says “Contact Us” with one that reads “Speak With an Admissions Representative Today.”
Then, you compare the performance of both pages to see which version resonates better with users. Regularly split testing your landing pages is a proven way to consistently increase conversions.
Clear CTAs
When visitors land on your college’s website, they should immediately encounter clear, direct Calls to Action (CTAs) placed throughout.
Some effective CTAs might include:
- Scheduling a campus tour
- Completing an application
- Requesting financial aid information
- And more
Whatever action you’re encouraging, the process should be simple and intuitive. The easier it is for prospective students to engage, the higher the likelihood they’ll convert into enrolled students.
Optimizing the Funnel
The path from curious searcher to enrolled student isn’t a straight line. Prospective students pass through several stages, and naturally, some will drop off at different points in the process.
The good news is, those drop-offs offer valuable opportunities to improve your digital marketing strategy by:
- Pinpointing where users disengage
- Running data-driven tests to optimize those areas
- Tracking performance closely
- Continuously refining through ongoing testing
Increase LTV on Autopilot
You’ve brought in traffic and converted a prospective student into an enrollee. Mission accomplished… or is it?
Not quite.
Enrolling a student is a big win, but the next step is maximizing their lifetime value (LTV). Here are a few strategic ways to boost a student’s LTV.
Extend Enrollment Duration
Enrolling a student for a single year is a good start, but ideally, you want them to remain at your school until they graduate — and even stay for a postgraduate degree if your institution offers them.
Ways you may be able to improve student retention include:
- Using data to track warning signs like poor attendance or low grades
- Offering incentives for enrollment among siblings
- Gauging satisfaction through regular email surveys
- And more
Increase Engagement & Word-of-Mouth Referrals
You can increase the LTV of current students by having them help bring new enrollments into the school.
Some ways to increase engagement may include:
- Offering sibling discounts to encourage families to enroll multiple children
- Building a strong alumni network that can organically refer new students through word-of-mouth
- Introducing legacy enrollment programs that provide priority admission or special benefits to alumni families enrolling their children
Turn Current Students Into Future Donors
Creating an unforgettable experience for students enrolled at your college and building a strong alumni network for them to enter when they graduate can mean lucrative fundraising opportunities for you in the future. Make sure you have automated email programs set up to contact alumni about new campaigns, trigger donation requests when it’s time for reunions, and more.
Digital Marketing for Colleges Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
At The Houston Digital Marketing Agency, we bring years of experience across a wide range of industries, helping both local and national brands boost leads and sales through customized, results-driven digital marketing campaigns.
We’d be honored to help your school grow enrollment with our specialized digital marketing services for colleges. And because we stand behind our work, we offer a 100% refund if we don’t improve your performance within three months.
Reach out to us today and let’s get started.