Best Marketing Strategies to Promote Your College and Increase Enrollment

It wasn’t long ago that higher education marketing took a uniform approach to attracting students. To successfully promote your college you had to have a glossy brochure filled with impressive photos of engaged students and beautiful campus scenery. The brochures were sent out to prospective students, enticing them to check out the school. 

Today, that tactic of marketing to the masses is no longer the most effective.

Now, higher education marketing strategies must be personalized and reach students on their terms. Think of the platforms students use today like social media, podcasts, and micro-influencers. Branding for colleges and universities needs to translate well along a host of mediums. Finally, you need a website for your institution that ranks high in search engines. Your site should create a positive user experience for prospective students, parents, and alumni alike. It is not an easy job.

So what do you do?

Understanding the Student’s Point of View

To gain insight on how you can promote your college to the Gen-Z, you’d first need to step into their shoes. Follow their thought process and journey in deciding “their” perfect school. 

Once you go through their pain points, you can figure out what they want and how they want it to be projected towards them. 

Let’s consider a hypothetical situation where we are high-school/undergrad graduates and are looking for prospective institutions for higher education. How would we proceed?

Do we Google the name of the college? Do we read online reviews? Click on their website? Stalk their social media? Maybe see how the college ranks amongst its competition? Or, check out who their famous alumni are?

Given that the initial step we took was that of combing through online content, you can assume that it plays an important role in your marketing. 

Now, let’s take a look at the best ways to promote your college and actually increase enrollment.

To Promote Your College You Must Boost Social Media Presence

To really connect with prospective students you must do a few things. But here’s the first one. You need to leverage social media platforms. You need to give prospective students a peek into life on campus. Showcase sporting events, student achievements, campus grounds, and student life and community. Take photographs of public spaces like lawns, outdoor study areas, and beautiful buildings. The campus environment plays a key role in shaping students’ lives, and it’s especially important in their decision-making process. If they can envision what life will be like at that school that will make them more likely to enroll.

Another emerging digital marketing strategy would be the use of live streams. Instagram Stories, Youtube Live, Twitch Stream, and TikTok Live are the big players in this arena. A few ways you could use live streaming include live streaming Q&A sessions, taking people behind the scenes, live streaming events like sports, and even live-streaming classes. Live streams are viewed as more authentic by many teens and can be a great way to build relationships with potential students.

Bonus tip: Build a Social Media Directory

On your website, create a directory with quick links to social media accounts used by your school’s different departments, schools, and administration. It’s an instant way for students to keep up-to-date. 

To Promote Your College You Must Define Your Brand 

Let’s take a bit of help from our corporate counterparts in this section. How do you choose your favorite/preferred piece of daily-use item, clothing, or fast food? 

The billboards, advertisements, and marketing campaigns spending millions of dollars that these corporates churn out play a subtle yet significant role in making us choose them among all their competition.

Brand awareness and brand image are extremely important when it comes to a prospective student choosing your school over another. 

You might have all the qualities of an ideal school but if your image is not projected to the audience in a well-crafted manner, then it’ll be incredibly difficult to achieve your goals.

Ask yourselves the following questions,

• What makes your college unique?
• What can it offer in terms of academics, extracurriculars, and placements?
• Why would anyone want to attend it?
• How are your educators unique compared to others?
• How is infrastructure compared to the rest?
• How special is your institution’s legacy?

Your answer will determine the amount of substance you hold to craft or optimize your brand image.

Prioritize SEO Marketing to Drive Visibility 

To promote your college you must prioritize search engine optimization (SEO) marketing. Why you may ask? Because it can improve visibility and rankings within the major search engines. With so many people conducting their research on major search engines like Google, established SEO strategies can assist with higher education advertising and marketing efforts.

The SEO marketing tactics should include:

• Creating and posting great content to websites, blogs, social media, and other channels
• Cultivating quality links from high-ranking and authoritative websites
• Developing an engaging presence on social media to expand the quality and quantity of social shares
• Researching and incorporating appropriate keywords to leverage popular search terms
• Ensuring websites and pages have proper HTML characteristics, including tags, URLs, headings, and similar elements
• Utilizing geographically targeted methods to communicate with local, national, and even international users
• Improving trustworthiness through domain and page authority as well as minimizing bounce rate
• Providing a mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and secure online experience to users

To Promote Your College Make Sure They Have A Great Website Experience

Creating a great higher ed website design for your college or university is not rocket science. All you have to do is think like a student. What information are they searching for? How do they like the information delivered? And can they actually access the information they want and need?

The three most important aspects of higher education web design are:

1. Usability, or how easy your site is to use.
2. Accessibility, so that anyone with a disability can access the information on your website.
3. User Experience, or the entire experience of interacting with your website, from design to information to engagement.

Don’t Forget Visuals and Aesthetics

In the age of visual content competition, beautiful aesthetics and design are a must if you want to succeed in the competition. With Gen Z growing up immersed in technology and social media, they are true digital natives. Gen Z is next in line for higher education and they live and breathe the digital world and digital intuition comes easy to them.

Gen Z’s are obsessed with visuals and aesthetics, more so than any other generation. They prefer beautiful designs and elements that go well with each other. 

If you want to catch their attention and connect with them, don’t forget to apply on-brand good design to your website and your marketing strategy as well.

Capture Hearts of the Incoming Freshmen

At the end of the day, things college students want include feeling valued, heard, and catered to. By flocking to social media, paying for their visit, focusing on them, and personalizing their experience, there’s no reason why a university can’t up enrollment. 

There are students just waiting to hear about their dream school. By utilizing these strategies to promote your college, you can improve your promotional efforts for the school community.