Digital Marketing Guide For Schools And Colleges In 2023

Are you an educational institution and cannot find any guide for digital marketing for schools and other educational institutions? Learn why and how to build a digital marketing strategy. Education is a service. And there are many service providers. Just like products in the market, there are schools, colleges, and institutes. And choosing the right school is as difficult as choosing the right product, but far more important. But why are we talking about digital marketing for schools and colleges? That’s because education, today, is a product. Anybody who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. That is why marketing is important. As an education provider, it is a duty to let customers ie. students know which one is a good school or college and which one is a bad one. It is important to not let them make a bad choice that will waste their money but also their crucial years of learning and career.

The right advertising is needed to help them make the right decision. And the right advertising is the responsibility of the school or college or the coaching institute.

Today, there are many educational institutes and the sector is becoming competitive. It is not enough to depend on the results of your students alone to gain more students. However, that is the first requirement. But what if you are starting new?

For new institutions, it is very hard to break into space and get visibility. Without any results to show, it is essential to have a great and effective marketing plan.

Since today, most customers or students choose their schools by thoroughly researching online, it is important for schools to have an effective strategy for digital marketing for schools and colleges.

A school or college needs to take full advantage of various digital marketing channels. In addition to conventional channels of marketing like print, capitalizing on search traffic and social media as well as Youtube is the need of the hour.

The great thing about digital marketing for schools and colleges is that it is not expensive at all. You can perform online marketing in the smallest of budgets. By reading this guide, you can easily manage an online marketing campaign all by yourself.

Another big advantage of digital marketing is that it can constantly be monitored and analyzed. You can alter and manipulate the campaign to get the best results.

A common mistake many education institutions make is trying to be successful in marketing in all channels like search, social, video, and traditional. This requires a great deal of investment and divides resources.

A better strategy would be to choose a few first and then move on to the next. It is important to consider where do most of your search traffic comes from. Is it more from search engines or social media sites or Youtube?

You can also take advantage of the new trends in digital marketing

Students have a 30% additional chance of getting better jobs with digital marketing skills. Talk to an expert and find out how a digital marketing course can do wonders for you.

More professional Courses for you by IIM SKILLS

• Technical Writing Course
• SEO Course
• GST Course
• CAT Coaching
• Digital Marketing Course
• Content Writing Course

It also takes time to build a social media following. The alternative to gain exposure on social media would be through paid advertising which is expensive in the long run.

Once you have decided on which digital marketing channel you would prefer to use first, you have to ensure that the campaign is managed carefully either by you or by a professional.

A professional can always work better owing to their skills and experience. A professional may look like an investment at first but they will only help you optimize your campaign. This will get you more results out of your marketing budget and save you money.

If you want to do manage the digital marketing strategy yourself, you can invest in a digital marketing course.

There are also other requirements. It is important to create a balance between focusing on creating value for students and making a sale.

There are two objectives of digital marketing for a school or an institute. The first is to build a brand. To build awareness about your establishment and gain trust and credibility in the market.

The second is to provide value to the students. The ultimate goal of an educational institution is to provide learning. Through online marketing, you can provide helpful content to your audience.

Analysis of the campaign

The strongest point of digital marketing where it scores over conventional marketing is the ability to be analyzed. Without analyzing and reviewing your campaign, you are not taking the campaign to its full potential.

There are many parameters in an ad campaign that need to be assessed regularly. You need to identify areas that seem more effective and correct areas that need improvement.

Target audience

This is crucial in any marketing campaign. Through online marketing for educational institutions, you can reach the right market if you take care of a few things.

You can not simply say that your target audience is students. You will have to be more specific. There are many types of students- school students, entrance exam students, college students, vocational course students, coaching students, and so on.

Students are not only your only market. As a school or college, you can also aim your communication with the parents of the students.

Students have different targets and different levels of academic achievement. It is necessary to first find out these traits of your target market.

Ask yourself what would be the principal requirement of the students you want to target. You will have to understand what are their goals and how you can help them achieve them.

Answer these questions about your target market:

• What is their age?
• What are their goals and aspirations?
• What is their skill level?
• What are their requirements?
• Where can they be found?

These questions will help you build a profile of your ideal customer. All your communication would be targeted at this ideal customer.

If you offer a course that is suitable for more than one type of person, you can target each of them separately. This is because they will have different aspirations and different behavior on the internet.

Skill-based institutions come under this category. They can have various types of customers who could be students, professionals, corporates, freelancers, and housewives too.

You will need to focus separately in order to get the attention of each of your demographics. You will need to alter your message, your tone of voice, or even your marketing channel.

Enroll in The Digital Marketing Master Course From IIM SKILLS to stay ahead of the competition. Download the Detailed Course Brochure for more information.

This is why digital marketing for schools and colleges is a perfect medium for marketing. Due to the advancement of communication technology in the form of high-speed internet and affordable smartphones, the way people do business has changed completely.

People now use their smartphones for so many purposes that were unimaginable a few decades ago. These purposes include shopping, banking, entertainment, knowledge, learning, and news.

With the help of the internet and social media, brands can directly communicate with their audience. This has given a new role to brand managers.

In the case of educational institutions, courses, and educational material is now provided online. Students can access courses in major universities and learn from renowned professors. In India, NPTEL is one such platform.

But universities are not the only ones taking advantage of online marketing. Coaching institutes have also spent great effort on building a powerful online presence.

Many coaching institutes provide lessons in the form of Youtube videos or blog articles. They also provide solutions to common problems that are regularly searched on the web.

Students refer to this material to clear their fundamentals. This exposes them to the teaching expertise of the institute’s professors. This content establishes the institute as an expert and students learn to trust their skills.

This trust helps build the brand of the institute. All these efforts increase the number of actual students who enroll in their courses.

Keeping your skill-set updated is a requirement in the professional environment. Our world is changing rapidly. With this change, the way businesses operate is also changing.

Businesses today are in constant need of employees adept with new and latest skills. But getting new employees to replace old ones is not a practical solution. This is why companies conduct training programs that impart knowledge to employees about new technology and equipment.

Employees also learn privately in their own time to keep their skills updated. Online courses are very beneficial to them. With online courses, employees can learn from home and on their own time too.

There are many websites offering courses in many skills. Some websites also act as aggregators of courses given by various industry leaders in their own domain. Coaching institutes can leverage the popularity of these websites to upload their paid online courses.

The benefit of online courses is immense. Students can learn without boundaries. There are no limitations of distance, batch strength, shortage of time, entrance exams, and such.

Through online courses, students can learn updated and industry-specific skills at their own time, own pace, and from wherever they live.

This will help them keep pace with the changes in the industry and compete with the new recruits. An employee who takes efforts to create value for the company is an asset to the company.

As we can see, digital marketing fro schools colleges or any educational institution is very significant.

With the aim of producing value for your customers, you can build brand awareness, brand loyalty and enroll more students in your courses.

Let us now learn how an educational institute can use online marketing to get more students and expand their growth.

SEO

In 2018, mobile searches on Google surpassed searches from computers. Since then mobile traffic is the biggest source of search traffic for most websites.

Today, designing content for mobile viewing is a must. If your website is not responsive or mobile-friendly, your site will lose its SEO score.

Use a mobile-friendly theme and arrange your content such that a mobile viewer has no technical issues.

However, being mobile-friendly is not the only characteristic. A website must offer helpful and relevant content as a prerequisite. If your content does not provide value to the user, no matter how much SEO you do, it will not be useful.

To rank among the top search engine results, you will need to create content that shows expertise but is also in demand. This requires keyword research. Keyword research can be done with the help of many digital marketing tools available online.

SEO increases brand visibility and instills trust in the brand, which in this case would be a school, college, or any educational institution. You need to examine several factors such as suitable and catchy title tags, suitable meta-descriptions, optimized keyword frequency, proper headers, internal links, and more.

You will also need to remove dead links, have a proper XML sitemap, faster loading time, and avoid posting irrelevant information.

You will need to provide the audience, with what the top listing articles are not providing.

Register For the Free Demo Session and Know how Digital marketing can lead to humongous success in business and career.

Backlinks

SEO is not the only quality important for your website to rank at the top of the search engine results. In a competitive niche, you also need high domain authority to rank at the top.

To build high domain authority, you will need many different sources to link to your website as a source. This will show Google that your content is trustworthy and reliable.

In fact, for many competitive keywords, you cannot rank first without backlinks. But your backlinks must come from websites that have relevant content.

Getting links in an illegal way works for the short term but Google will certainly penalize your website by not showing it in the search results.

Link building is a strategy that is part of every campaign of digital marketing for schools and other educational institutions.

Re-targeting

Re-targeting ads is a very effective process for lead conversion. It is easier to convert a customer who is on the fence about buying your product rather than convince a user who is not even aware of your product.

Re-targeting simply reaches out to users who have shown interest in your product by opening the product page and learning details about it but did not make the purchase.

This has a high return on investment and is therefore very cost-effective. Re-targeting can complement your already existing digital marketing strategy.

It can help increase brand awareness and the effectiveness of the overall marketing campaign.

Ad Placement

If you are not using an ad-mediation network, it is essential to choose the right online space for ad placement. It is essential that the website where you are placing your display ad has a target audience that is common to your educational institution.

For example, for a management college, it is essential to place ads on a website that specifically reviews management colleges or various management courses.

You can also place your ads on educational websites that offer information about various universities. This will also be cheaper than running a PPC campaign and be more relevant to the audience. You will generate quality leads through this process.

Content

The content on the website of your school or institute must fall consistent with your business objectives. It is important to provide helpful content but it is also important to provide content that helps in conversion.

Unless your digital marketing for school or college does not increase your conversion rate, there is no monetary gain.

You can provide content that provides value to the student but also makes them draw into your sales funnel. Through the content, you can also promote your institute.

You can talk about past results from your institution, infrastructure, teaching methodology, and so on.

You must also create content that is in demand, not whatever you want. Your content must focus on certain keywords that are more searched. Ideally, use long-tail keywords. This is the best way to gain more traffic organically from search engines.

The content must be rich in information. After visiting your content, the student must not need to refer to any other source. This will improve your search engine rankings.

Social media

Social media is a boon to schools and educational institutions. Most of the student population is active on at least one social media platform.

Through social media, you can generate content that is valuable to the students in their preparation. You do not need to provide lessons. You can talk about general exam topics and trends.

You can also create short videos explaining tricky concepts. Video content always has the highest engagement out of any other content format. It is also easier to explain certain concepts on video.

The power of social media is in sharing. If you can create content that gets shared, this will provide promotion organically. This is a kind of promotion where you do not need to spend any money.

You can also use social media to lead students to your website. This way you can generate more page views and more leads.

You can also participate in various forum discussions on different exam groups. If you go there to provide genuine value, it will be appreciated by everyone.

Generating a big following on social media platforms takes time and this is not the way to get instant results. But there is an alternative.

Through paid ads on social media, you can target those users that show interest in specific courses and learnings. This way you can also save your money and target more relevant users that are much more likely to convert.

Through social media marketing, you can target users on the basis of various demographic factors like age, location, interests, gender, and many more. You can fix a daily marketing budget and manage your campaign.

You can create an ad yourself. With Facebook ads, you can create ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger since all of them are owned by Facebook.

With their analytical tools, you can also optimize your ads and test various versions of ads through A/B split testing to find the more effective version.

Social media marketing is a crucial part of any strategy for digital marketing for schools and colleges. This is because most of the target market can be found on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others.

Video content

“Seeing is believing.”

Video content is the best form of online content for marketing any school, college, or education provider. Videos are the most engaging form of content.

Any user would prefer to watch a video explaining a concept over a blog article explaining the same concept.

With the help of the video, you can not only provide helpful content but also demonstrate your teaching skills. This way you can get more students to join your institute.

You can do many things with video content. You can post videos explaining the concepts of any chapter or subject. You can explain important and frequent questions. You can also provide necessary and timely guidance related to the occupation.

For example, if you are teaching students for the engineering entrance exam, you can talk about the prospects of various engineering branches or the best colleges for various branches.

You can also invite notable guests in order to gain more viewers. This will improve brand awareness.

Offline publicity

Although this is not a part of the campaign for digital marketing for schools, this will immensely help your digital marketing efforts.

You can try to gain offline publicity by organizing many events like a seminar, career-guidance counseling, or participating in school events.

This will get you publicity in your sphere and will increase brand awareness. This will also make people search for you online and find various helpful and valuable content.

You can also use an online live event to gain publicity and engagement. Live events are supported by all major social media platforms like Facebook. Instagram and Twitter.

Live events are extremely popular and more than half of the users on social media watch at least one live feed every week.

You can host the FAQ session or inform students about various application guidelines and instructions. You can also provide strategies to be followed a few weeks after an exam. You can collaborate with other teachers or experts.

This was an article for digital marketing for schools, colleges, and other educational institutions. Find more helpful articles on our digital marketing blog.