Once upon a time, students applying to colleges waited for relevant materials to arrive in their inboxes. Schools sent out viewbooks, pamphlets, and newsletters to prospective students to drive applications and enrollment—and it worked.
Today, it doesn’t. To help you navigate the new word of marketing to students, we've compiled The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing For Schools, an ebook that explains how to reach and engage students throughout their enrollment journey using content, personalization, and automation.
We've pulled out the first part of several chapters of the book to help you see exactly what you'll learn in the full guide.
Sneak Peek: How Inbound Helps Schools
Attract More Prospective Students
"The first step of the Inbound Methodology is to attract the right people to your site. After all, you can’t nurture and convert prospective students into applicants unless you have a base of visitors to work with.
This seems like a daunting task. For smaller schools, specific programs within larger institutions, or trade and nontraditional institutions, it’s difficult to build traffic and get found when you’re competing with established schools that seem to dominate search engine traffic and have money to spend on paid ads.
Larger institutions, on the other hand, probably already have a certain volume of site traffic, but it’s not always clear whether it’s the right kind. Are the prospective students checking out your school finding the right information? Are they seriously interested in attending? Is there a specific school or program you’re trying to help them find? The bad news is that you can’t click your heels and instantly shoot to the top of search rankings or quadruple your traffic.
But there’s good news too: Inbound marketing levels the playing field. Regardless of your budget, you can use inbound to own your search engine ranking instead of paying to maintain it, build your online presence, and attract the right visitors..."
Download the full ebook to continue reading about personas, blogging, and SEO >>
Convert Strangers Into Opt-in Contacts
"Your website content is up and running, and you’re starting to gain more traffic. But who’s visiting your site? How do you connect with your audience? That’s where conversion comes in—the moment at which the unknown turns into the known.
Any place on your website where a visitor has to fill out his or her name, email address, and other information to access content is known as a conversion point. You probably already have conversion points on your website—forms website visitors fill out to sign up for an information session, register for a tour, or apply.
But these are all late-stage conversion points. Students who aren’t serious about applying yet most likely won’t take the time to attend an info session or visit campus. ... Choosing a school is a big life decision, so don’t expect that students will be ready to make the commitment to applying or visiting campus after their first visit to their website.
Instead, capture their information as early as you can with smaller asks..."
Download the full ebook to continue reading about content offers and creating early stage conversion points >>Close More Prospective Students Into Applicants and Enrollments
"After a conversion, you have your visitors’ contact information! But to turn them from a visitor into an applicant and eventual student, you’ll need to do a little more work. It sounds like a gargantuan task to turn a random visitor into an enrolled student, but it’s actually a process that can be broken down into simple steps. You’ll have to use email lists to nurture students...
Marketers can use pre-planned workflows to nurture leads. Each workflow should be tailored to a specific lead’s needs, and are generally a series of email sends containing helpful content, offers, and CTAs.
Before you launch an email campaign, ask yourself:
- What action will a student have to take to be placed into a workflow?
- What kind of actions will a student have to take to “complete” a workflow (i.e. a student is asked to apply)?
- What content are you going to send?
The key to an effective workflow is to provide value at each stage of the enrollment cycle..."
Ready to get the full picture on how inbound marketing works for schools? There's a lot more where this came from. Click on the button below to download your copy of the full ebook now.
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