We’ve got a thought experiment for enrollment managers: imagine if your university or program came to life one day as a person.
One moment you’re in your office, eating lunch. The next — you’re chatting with a living, breathing human being who embodies all the ideas, energy, and unique personality of your institution. They introduce themselves as Your University, and they want nothing more than to form some deep connections with other humans. Your University’s plan? Simple — to go out to the nearest street corner and just tell everyone how awesome they are and that they’re looking to make a connection.
For what it’s worth, you try your best to hide the horror on your face. You know that’s not the way to make friends, but you’ve never had to explain it to someone before. Humans typically just get it.
But this is a brand new human, so you explain that getting to know someone takes time. Friendships are often formed over common interests, where two people can interact around something they both love or are interested in. You also let them know that no two relationships will look exactly alike, which — while exciting — also means that you can’t approach everyone the same way. And gently, you tell Your University that you can’t force relationships. Friendships develop on their own timeline. Start talking about more general things, and when the time is right, you can move toward more detailed, personal conversations in a way that’s natural and organic.
Essentially — you should avoid yelling on a street corner.
Let’s bring this analogy back into the real world. Student recruitment can seem increasingly difficult in today’s crowded and competitive institutional landscape. The direct outbound marketing strategies — the list buys, the direct mailers, spraying as many digital ads out into the ether as you can — these are the equivalent of yelling at a street corner. While it may have worked once, these tactics probably aren’t delivering for you anymore.
In order to meet and surpass your goals for student recruitment — not to mention find students who are the right fit for your institution — you need to think about enrollment management differently. You need a paradigm shift that uses advanced technology and simple principles we all understand simply from being humans. You need inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a holistic marketing methodology that combines and integrates educational content, conversion strategies, and marketing technology in order to attract and engage with qualified web traffic. This holistic methodology allows your institution to develop natural relationships over time with prospects based on their individual behavior and interests — the same way that all relationships develop.
Many of you may already be familiar with content marketing, which involves publishing content to establish thought leadership and then using that content to improve your marketing reach. Content marketing involves blogs, social media, published articles, press releases, videos, and more. Does the phrase “content is king” ring a bell?
However, content without context is not very effective at generating qualified prospective students.
Of course, we all know that many institutions already have some sort of blog, but most of them lack an inbound strategy that provides a game plan for a graduate school to do content marketing effectively. To be successful, you need to employ an inbound content marketing approach.
Implementing college marketing strategies through an inbound lens allows you to think about your institution as a person that you’re introducing to a prospective student, hoping and working hard to ensure that the two will hit it off and get to know each other. After all, we understand instinctively how connection works in human relationships. It’s time to leverage that kind of gut knowledge to transform how you think about student recruitment.
Nope, we're not talking about Google Ads or other paid search tactics (that’s worth an entirely separate blog post). We're talking about improved SEO for higher education — organic search results driven by high-quality content and a dedicated keyword strategy!
Google is constantly updating its algorithms, and — without going way off on a technical tangent — the most important thing to remember is that search engines want to deliver to users what they are looking for. Creating content that prospective students are looking for is the first step in learning how to recruit college students with high intent — and the first step toward getting your website ranking.
So, if your graduate enrollment marketing plan does not include creating fresh, program-specific information that is layered with keywords relevant to your student personas, then you shouldn’t expect to grow your website traffic from organic search results.
Be careful not to jump on the bandwagon that says “direct marketing is dead — inbound is the way to go!” In the world of graduate enrollment management, direct marketing campaigns are alive and well, and they help generate inquiries and applicants for many graduate programs, both big and small.
That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to find good lists of prospective students within your target market for your next multi-channel campaign. In fact, finding new sources of leads is one of the hardest aspects of graduate school marketing and recruitment! And that’s why inbound marketing is so effective for graduate student enrollment — most grad schools are looking for fresh new leads to invite to their next information session, webinar, or open house.
Here’s how inbound marketing generates new leads:
Is this starting to sound familiar? It’s probably because you may have, at one time in your life, purchased something from this little, tiny supplier called Amazon.com. I know that online shopping isn’t the same as deciding about grad school — nor is a marketing strategy for student recruitment limited to optimizing a user’s website experience. But, there are some important lessons to learn about providing people more of what prospective students want, instead of aimlessly blasting static messages to every one of your inquiries.
There is a lot more for graduate enrollment management professionals to consider. If you’re interested in learning more about inbound marketing for schools, we’re here to help.
In addition to the work we do as a higher education marketing agency, we analyzed hundreds of marketing campaigns for graduate student recruitment in order to understand what's working and what's not when it comes to enrollment marketing for graduate programs in higher education. You can access that benchmarks report here.
And if you want to see what inbound marketing for higher education looks like in practice, watch our free webinar series.