First, there was no choice. Students would go to the nearest school or university, probably the same one their parents attended.

Then there was a choice, but only one place to showcase your college. Create a good prospectus, and you were well on your way to attracting students.

Then came the internet – and that changed (almost) everything. Parents and students are now bombarded with overwhelming information about every school, university, and even individual courses. So, how do you stand out from the crowd? Develop a marketing plan to drive your enrollment.

In this article, we’ll examine how to create a marketing plan for your educational facility that will attract parents and students and drive enrollment.

Enrollment Marketing: Definition and Importance

Enrollment marketing encompasses everything you do to attract new students. It includes your digital marketing strategies, such as building your website and social media presence, your student’s email marketing journey with you, and designing prospectuses and literature.

When students and parents come to pick where they want to go to learn, they now have more choices than ever before—more choices about where to go and more choices about how to find out about the place they are interested in.

Whether it’s the multitude of social media platforms or more traditional methods, nowadays, you’re fighting to be heard across a thousand different formats. That variety of mediums makes it a real challenge to reach your intended audience the way you want—but with the right plan, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to tell your story how you want.

What Are the Benefits of Enrollment Marketing?

Creating a marketing plan to drive student enrollment isn’t just about creating a flashy ad campaign to lure in the students. There are some other real-world benefits to a cohesive enrollment marketing plan. With an enrollment marketing plan, you can:

• Improve your return on investment: By targeting your marketing and delivering your message to the right people, you can spend less per student on enrollment. This leaves more money to spend on education, improving your facilities, and further driving enrollment.

• Drive improvements: Enrollment marketing involves assessing your strengths and weaknesses to best showcase yourself to potential students. By focusing on what’s essential to pupils, you’ll also learn what you must do to improve in real life.

• Improve your public image: The better you present yourself, the more your prestige will be raised in the eyes of the general public. Not only do you persuade those you market to, but by word of mouth, you’ll boost your image across the board. This will feed back into your marketing, further improving your standings as an educator.

Best Practices for a Marketing Plan That Supercharges Enrollment

Let’s explore practical tips for developing a marketing plan to drive student enrollment.

Set Your Goals

Determining your goals is the first step in creating your enrollment marketing plan. Think carefully about what you really want to achieve. Is it all about the numbers, or is there a specific type of student you want to attract? Are you prepared for an influx of new students, or would you prefer to build your admissions numbers over a longer period?

All of these factors will affect how you approach your new marketing strategy, so it’s essential to establish the details before you create your marketing roadmap.

Determine the Unique Traits of Your School

Next, you should figure out your unique selling points. Are you focused on academic achievement? Inspiring, inclusive teaching? Do you excel at vocational education? Perhaps you can offer students a unique experience they won’t get anywhere else in the country.

This is also a great time to involve others in the process. Ask your students what they like most. What is your faculty most proud of? Their answers may surprise you and inspire your marketing plan.

While you’re asking, pay attention to what they don’t like. No institution is perfect; there’s always room for improvement. It may even be vital information you must act upon before implementing your marketing plan.

Profile Your Target Audience

Finally, once you’ve figured out your goals and best qualities, you need to know who you want to attract. This can vary dramatically depending on your organization, and again, it affects your entire plan.

Start by deciding if you want to focus on interacting with students or parents. If you’re a university, you can probably assume that your first port of call is to lure in the students so they can do the hard work of convincing the parents. However, if you’re a school, you should probably focus on the parents instead.

Next, you need to profile your ideal target. How old are they? What are their hobbies and interests? What do they want from your school or college?  If you can build a complete profile at this stage, you can focus your marketing to specific demographics.

For example, if you’re targeting a younger audience, you may want to focus on social media platforms to showcase your facilities. However, if you’re focused more on academic claims, then perhaps more traditional routes will yield better results and convince parents you’re the place they want to send their kids.

Of course, you will likely have many different audiences you wish to target. That’s great! You want to attract a diverse range of students. Think about the courses you teach as well as any additional experiences student attendance will offer potential pupils. Build a profile for each one so you can tailor your message to them specifically.

Improve Your Website

It’s easy to ignore your website. You already know what’s on there, so you probably don’t check it anymore. However, websites shouldn’t be ‘set and forget.’ In fact, your website is the window through which people will see your college.

While you might make your first impression via social media or tempt potential pupils with a prospectus, your website will likely be the thing that hooks them. Here, you have unlimited space to parade your wares to people across the length and breadth of the country. Here, you can tell your story.

Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

While your website is a fantastic tool, it won’t do anything unless students see it. And where do people find your website? On the first page of the search results, of course. In fact, research shows that only 0.63% of people click on links on the second page. That means your website needs to be the first thing they see when they Google you. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

SEO is about ensuring that your website includes the phrases people type into search engines so that search engines know that your site has the answers people seek.

Does it work? Well, take a look at the first three headings of this article. Notice that they’re phrased as questions. Was one of them the question you typed into Google to find this article? 

These are known as ‘long-tail keywords,’ and you can utilize them to ensure that you appear when potential students search for specific things. For example, you could include the sentence, ‘We pride ourselves on having one of the best college sports programs on the West Coast,’ on your website.

Out of context, the addition of ‘on the West Coast’ might seem odd, but when people search for ‘best college sports programs on the West Coast,’ you’ll be at the top of the results.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

While we spend more time online than ever, how we access websites has changed in recent years. Now, 61% of all websites are accessed through mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

So, if you haven’t spent the time optimizing your experience, you’re excluding more than half of your audience. What’s more, most potential students today have had mobile devices their entire lives and use apps that are perfectly optimized for mobile devices. In short, they won’t stand for poorly formatted websites.

Utilize Social Media

Social media platforms can be a fantastic way to reach new students as they offer an unparalleled opportunity to target the people you most want to reach. Social media users provide the platforms they are on with a vast amount of information, and you can leverage these demographics to ensure that your message reaches the right people.

If you have a fantastic basketball team, you can easily target 17-year-olds interested in basketball. Do you have an outstanding political science faculty? Finding students interested in politics is a breeze, as is using the analytical tools offered by social media platforms.

Segment Your Audience

As we discussed earlier, you will likely want to communicate with students and parents about various subjects and courses. That’s not a problem, though, as long as you segment your audience.

Segmenting your audience means splitting it into specific demographic groups so that each sees a personalized ad or message. That means that for the basketball enthusiast, you will showcase your exceptional sports facilities and on-court successes.

For the political student, you might show passionate professors delivering engaging lectures and highlighting the changes student activist groups have fought for.

Finally, you might want to persuade the parents of these children that you’re the right place for them to invest in their kids’ future. You can show them your library and beautiful grounds, show off your league standings, and demonstrate the increase in earnings alumni can expect. And if you’re reaching out via email, there are plenty of free email finder tools that can help you build targeted contact lists for campaigns.

Focus on Communication

It’s easy to think of marketing as something you do to people. However, modern marketing is a conversation between you and prospective students. Sure, it’s your job to break the ice, but once the conversation has begun, you must remember to be receptive to what the pupils say and responsive when they ask questions.

This can be one of the most complex parts of the job. However, with technology on your side, there are many options to keep you connected with potential students. Consider investing in chatbots to answer pupils’ questions immediately or using call center intelligent routing to ensure people always get through the people they need.

Use Storytelling to Emotionally Engage 

So far, we have looked at the message you want to get across to your students. Now, it’s time to think about how to present that message. One of the best ways to do this is to use storytelling to emotionally engage with your audience.

Humans are natural storytellers—just ask your English Literature Department! Stories are how we connect with and understand the world. They are how we engage emotionally with places and characters. You can use this to build an emotional link between you and your campus and potential students.

The best way to do this through social media is to utilize visual storytelling through videos. Show potential students what it would be like to live and study on your campus by placing them in your world, making them the hero, and showing them the possibilities studying with you can unlock.

Analyze and Learn

It would be wonderful to think that, after all of this effort, you’d devise the perfect marketing plan to drive your enrollment forever. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that sort of world. Not only are we all fallible, but things also change. Students want different things; technology changes how you tell your story to them.

Fortunately, technology also gives you the tools to learn and improve your marketing strategy and adjust it when necessary. For example, CRM software or a call center KPI dashboard can help you collect and collate data, and social media and website analytics allow you to measure how your campaigns are working.

With a data-driven approach like this, you can ensure you’re always on the right track and striving for constant improvement.

Conclusion

The education sector is more competitive than ever, with more choices for every student. This is great news for pupils but more challenging for you. Now, every school and college pour money into marketing. If you want to stay ahead of the crowd, you need a plan.

The good news is that the tools are out there to enable you to tell your story better than ever before, too. If you do the groundwork, develop a strategic roadmap, and analyze and learn to improve your marketing plan, you have the ability and the tools to stand out from the rest and drive student enrollment.