No matter what kind of institution you are or the students you’re serving, there is always a need to evaluate your digital marketing efforts, given the constantly changing ecosystem of platforms, algorithms, and audience behaviors. While external partners can be a great resource for these efforts, taking the time to do your own digital marketing audit can help identify the specific areas that need attention, as well as where your team may need to call in for external support.
One reason for auditing is to ensure your digital marketing strategy aligns with your current institutional goals. Another reason to audit? You can make sure that all of your efforts are optimized to reach their full potential. After all, enrollment marketing teams can’t afford to waste time or resources when both costs and competition are on the rise.
Now, more than ever, enrollment marketers need to lift up the proverbial hood of their digital marketing and take a close look at how it’s running with a comprehensive digital marketing audit. And we can show you how.
How should you conduct your digital marketing audit?
Starting a digital marketing audit is a great opportunity to reconnect with relevant stakeholders. Gather the people and the data together to evaluate the performance of your content, website, and social media. This doesn't have to be overly detailed, especially if this is the first time you're conducting such an audit. Having all of this information presented and discussed collectively will be a positive step in the right direction.
Here is an example of questions you should be asking your team:
- Where are your leads coming from and when?
- What social media platforms are performing well and growing?
- Do you know how your webpages and content are ranking in search?
- What content offers are you providing throughout the entire recruitment funnel?
If you can't answer these questions, aren't able to answer them easily, or aren't satisfied with the answers, that's what this audit is for! You're actively determining the size and shape of the problem areas to focus on and then have that information to create a plan so you're able to address those with your team.
What should you examine in your digital marketing audit?
While there are several nuanced areas to examine in your digital marketing audit, it’s important to focus on the foundational elements first before venturing onto the rest. These foundational components act as the core tools to achieve your enrollment goals.
Social media & paid digital ads
Social media and other methods of digital advertising serve as a critical conduit to get the right people reading the right content at the right time. Part of examining these tools is taking a hard look at your frequency of posting content organically, the level of engagement with that content, and whether you’re getting value from the platforms you’re currently using. While it's tempting to be present on all platforms all of the time, a digital marketing audit can show you where it would be best to focus your limited time and resources.
Digital ads, while leveraging social media platforms, are not limited to them. A digital marketing audit of your efforts here should inventory:
- where you’re advertising
- how the performance on these platforms compares to one another
- and where else you may want to pursue advertising (such as on audio or video streaming platforms)
Digital ads are a powerful tool that can target highly specified audiences, so it’s crucial to evaluate your spend here to ensure your placements are on point and your offers are relevant to your prospective student audience.
Content calendar
When it comes to curating your content calendar, your digital marketing audit should look at how current your calendar is (and if it exists in the first place!). If you need to make a calendar, this can be built simply in a Google Sheet with whatever level of detail makes sense to include. It can also be mostly for yourself or just your team, as long as you have something you’re referencing and updating frequently.
A comprehensive content calendar should be built upon relevant college student personas tailored to your institutional goals, and consistently maintained as time goes on. In a perfect world, you’d want to plan ahead for your content, putting together a year's worth of content ideas in advance. (However, many teams operate on a quarterly or 6-month schedule, too.)
Know that more content doesn't necessarily mean better — especially if it's not aligned with your target audiences. Consider reworking your audience personas, if necessary, and use that work to inform the development of future content. The sooner you know what you want to produce, the sooner you can find the resources to help you make it happen.
Having a current and relevant content calendar gives your team a clear roadmap of where to go, what goals to aim for, and why. And, if you’re not sure where to get started or how to create content (hint: leverage your faculty!), subscribe to our blog for regular ideas and insights.
CRO and SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) work together to ensure that your website is discoverable and aligned with your user’s journey. These are all about making sure your website is working to its fullest potential. Your digital marketing audit should closely examine both of these factors since neglecting either one could create major gaps in your site's organic conversions.
Here’s a tangible example.
The Situation: University websites will often add layers of sub-pages to their program pages because it seems like a more organized approach.
The Issue: By adding so many sub-pages, schools add too many separate clicks, which negatively affects the user experience on their websites. Schools are effectively burying important information deep in their website — information that users don’t have the patience to click again and again to find.
The Unintended Consequences: Because each sub-page they’ve created is so niche, they have very little content on them. Google doesn’t index pages with too little content, which means the important information buried there won’t show up on the search engine results page. What’s more — when those subpages have no clear CTAs (calls to action), prospective students often just close out, because there’s nothing else to do.
The Solution: Consolidate those pages with the user in mind to centralize clicks and expand the scope of content.
At Direct Development, we know it’s very important to have no dead ends on any of your content, and a thorough audit of your website can identify where this type of issue needs to be addressed.
If all of this feels a little overwhelming, don’t fret. There are amazing tools out there for managing SEO, like Semrush, that have free tiers which allow you to take a test drive of their features. This would allow you to gather some initial insights into where you are in terms of keyword ranking, organic traffic, domain authority, etc.
You could even do this type of SEO keyword ranking research manually. All you would need to do is come up with 20 keywords you think are important or you think someone might search to find your school. For this sort of exercise, choose 5 branded keywords (for example, Harvard degrees), and 15 non-branded keywords (for example, business degrees).
Then, go to your browser of choice in incognito mode and type in those keywords in the Google search bar. Do you come up organically at all on the first page? The second? If not, maybe you’re using the wrong keywords, or maybe you need to put a bigger effort into developing your SEO strategy.
Leveraging a digital marketing audit to improve your enrollment management efforts
Completing periodic digital marketing audits serves as a form of routine maintenance as well as a driver of innovation. It empowers your team to make data-informed decisions about what you need to start, stop, and change versus relying on anecdotal evidence or assumptions. The world of enrollment marketing in higher education today is nuanced and longitudinal, meaning you need to be making precise, intentional decisions now about how to build the right pipeline of prospective students for the future.
Given the potential scale, complexity, and urgency of this work it is important to recognize when support is needed by a trusted partner. Let us know where you are in the process of conducting a digital marketing audit — we’re here to help! And use our downloadable diagnostics checklist to help you get started.
