Looking for ways to make your higher EDU campaigns more interesting? You should, as the National Center for Education projects that the total undergraduate enrollment is projected to increase to 19.8 million students by 2025. This comes as great news after hearing for so long that enrollment was dropping.
To satisfy the needs of the modern student, here are five tips to help you spice up your higher EDU campaigns.
1. Set up audience segmented retargeting campaigns.
It’s important to track user behavior so that you can segment your audience based on their majors. For example, if a prospective student is searching for information on your engineering program, a retargeting campaign would show them ads for your engineering program, not your nursing or teaching program.
To do this, attach a pixel to your website that identifies which department or degrees an online visitor spends the most time on. The areas they spend the longest on are probably the ones they are interested in. You can use this information to send them highly targeted ads in place of generic ones.
2. Revisit your mobile strategy.
Prospective students tend to use their mobile devices to research schools, so revisit your mobile strategy and make sure that it caters to these individuals. To optimize your landing pages for mobile, keep the body text brief and lead forms simple. It’s also helpful to include call extensions so that prospects can easily phone your school if they would prefer.
Don’t forget the power in using visual elements. A short mobile video that explains your programs helps prospective students see and feel your school. Capturing students studying, listening to lectures, walking to class, etc. also provides genuine photographs of life on campus.
3. Offer an interactive quiz.
People love taking quizzes – unless they’re in school. The purpose of taking an online quiz is to help people learn more about themselves. In this case, you would be helping students choose a major that is best for them based on their responses. You can turn almost any topic into an interactive quiz – it doesn’t have to be limited to academics. As an example, you could launch a quiz called “Which mascot are you?” or “What type of learner are you?”
4. Identify GPS patterns.
If you’re looking to get more out of your media budget, target the geographical areas that your students are most likely to come from. Generate a report that describes your ideal student and use this information to target them in their locations. This works well for large universities as well as small brick-and-mortar colleges because you can use precision targeting technologies to identify specific audiences. Invite them to a campus event and track the response.
5. Create multi-page landing pages.
Simple landing pages are ideal for many fields, but the higher education field is not one of them. Today’s students want to be empowered. A landing page that has a few sentences of information can actually look lazy to a prospective student. Aim for multi-page landing pages that are rich in content and provide curriculum information, general campus news and success rates.
Shaking up your higher EDU campaigns can feel trying at times, but there are always ways to better reach your target students. These five tips will hopefully help to improve your own campaigns for a better response.
