How to Use Digital Marketing to Attract More Students to Your Educational Institution
If you have an educational institution, such as a school, university, or training center, digital marketing offers a huge opportunity to grow and reach many more people. Although digital strategies to promote different services are trending, educational institutions are not using these digital channels effectively. This is why those who do will gain a significant advantage over others. Capturing students through digital means has never been easier. Therefore, it is crucial to take advantage of the current state of the relationship between the sector and the digital world before competition increases and advertising costs rise.
What is Educational Marketing?
Educational marketing is the tools and strategies institutions can use to attract students (leads) and achieve engagement (conversions). Through these tools and techniques, which can be digital or conventional, institutions seek to impact their target audience to capture their attention and convince them that they are the best option for their training processes and their children.
How to Use Google to Attract More Students with Digital Marketing?
Google Ads allows us to find and reach people in the geographical locations we determine who are actively searching for information about educational institutions where they or their children might want to study. Google charges you for each click made on a commercially interesting search, for example:
Martha, a resident of Chapinero in Bogotá, is looking for a school near her home for her 5-year-old daughter. When she goes to Google and searches for “bilingual schools in Bogotá,” several ads appear. Google will show Martha your educational institution's ad. If she clicks on your ad, Google will charge you. Therefore, the ideal scenario is that she arrives at a page designed specifically for her to leave her information or contact you via email, phone, chat, or WhatsApp. If Martha decides to fill out the form and leave her details for a sales representative to contact her, you will have obtained a potential customer in exchange for the cost Google charged you for the click.
Mateo wants to study law and is trying to decide which is the best university to do so. He then goes to Google and searches for “law universities in Bogotá.” As a result of his search, he will find several offers and ads. Google will charge the ad owners when Mateo clicks on them. Therefore, Mateo must have the option, for example, to contact via WhatsApp (since he is conducting his search from a mobile phone). When he clicks the "contact me via WhatsApp" button, he should be automatically directed to the university's commercial WhatsApp to inquire about tuition prices or any other information relevant to his decision-making process.
As you can see, Google charges for each click on ads containing the keywords you choose to show in your ideal customer's search. Setting up these campaigns can take time, and the learning curve for achieving good results is steep. To learn faster, you can take Google's free online courses, but it's important to remember that the cost of learning can be high in terms of what you invest in digital advertising on these platforms during this process. If you want to implement Google Search digital strategies easily, quickly, and effectively, it's best to hire professionals who specialize in this field.
What Are Effective Ways to Draw in More Students Through Facebook and Instagram?
Facebook has one of the most robust market segmentation platforms in the advertising industry. One of its advantages is the ability to show ads to people who aren’t actively searching for a product or service but match the profile of potential customers. We need to captivate them with valuable content or compelling ads.
Facebook's segmentation options allow us to explore and pinpoint diverse interests and demographics, connecting with individuals seeking an educational institution.
Example: To obtain quality leads for a school seeking students between 5 and 13 years old, it is possible to segment and reach all parents living within a 2-kilometer radius of the institution with pre-adolescent children aged 5-13 years. A video can be sent showcasing the school, its facilities, and all the added value. To capture their attention further, an invitation can be extended to these parents to take advantage of an early enrollment discount if they fill out a form on Facebook or write via WhatsApp or Messenger. When the school receives the data, they will initiate the sales process.
How Can I Take My Educational Digital Marketing Strategies to Another Level?
If you want to acquire a high volume of highly qualified clients, it is important to implement strategies such as remarketing (following the parent or user across the internet).
Example: Julia searched on Google for a school for her 10-year-old daughter. She reached your page, but at that moment, a friend called her to ask for a favor, and she forgot about the matter. After a few hours, once she had helped her friend, she checked her Facebook to write to a relative for their birthday. Oh, surprise! She finds a video inviting her to contact the school she had been looking at a few hours earlier. Upon seeing that the video talks about great-quality seals and the institution's excellent infrastructure, she decides to contact them by filling out a Facebook form. As a result, the school can begin the enrollment process for Julia's daughter.
These remarketing strategies allow us to target users who have shown interest in our services capture their data at a much lower cost than unqualified leads, and increase brand recall. In this way, those interested but did not contact the institution for any reason can now do so.
These remarketing strategies can be extrapolated to Instagram, YouTube, websites, and applications, among others. If you want to implement these strategies, it is essential to hire professionals to install and configure the necessary codes so that you can obtain more students at a lower price.
Myths of Remarketing
This is a common myth, but nothing could be further from the truth. Google and Facebook use artificial intelligence algorithms to display remarketing in such a way that allows us to achieve our goal without bothering the user. And if you don’t trust Google and Facebook, it is also possible to control how a user sees a remarketing ad within a specific time frame.
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who take a valuable action, such as filling out a form, relative to the number of people who visit a landing page through advertising.
Ejemplo: The conversion rate is 1% if out of 100 people who visited my website through advertising, only one fills out the form.
The conversion rate for the education sector, according to Wordstream, ranges between 0.5% and 4%. Higher rates are indicators of excellent campaigns!
The costs per click for keywords in this sector today range between 800 and 4,000 Colombian pesos. If you want 100 visits to your page, you would be paying between 80,000 and 400,000 COP.
This is where the conversion rate, user experience on your website, campaign quality, and commercial effectiveness come into play to determine the true profitability of digital campaigns. An interesting fact: in the education sector, it is highly profitable, mainly because each student represents not only a high-ticket purchase but also a recurring purchase since they will be at your educational institution for many years.
How Can I Take My Educational Digital Marketing Strategies to the Next Level?
If you want to acquire highly qualified clients, it is important to implement strategies such as remarketing (following the parent or user across the internet).
Example: Julia searched on Google for a school for her 10-year-old daughter. She reached your page, but at that moment, a friend called her to ask for a favor, and she forgot about the matter. After a few hours, once she had helped her friend, she checked her Facebook to write to a relative for their birthday. Oh, surprise! She finds a video inviting her to contact the school she had been looking at a few hours earlier upon seeing that the video talks about great quality seals and the institution's excellent infrastructure, she decides to contact them by filling out a Facebook form. Thanks to this, the school can start the sales process so that Julia's daughter can enroll.
These remarketing strategies allow us to find users who have shown interest in our services, obtain their data at a much lower cost than those who are completely new leads, and increase brand recall. This way, those interested but didn't contact the institution for any reason can now do so.
These remarketing strategies can be extrapolated to Instagram, YouTube, websites, and applications, among others. If you want to implement these strategies, it is essential to hire professionals to install and configure the necessary codes so that you can obtain more students at a lower price.
Once you know how these advertising methods work, it is very important to understand who the decision-maker is and the best way to communicate with them. In this case, the decision-makers are the parents. Segmenting them on Facebook is easy, as we saw in the previous example, but there is still a critical factor that must be considered: the message. Each school has its parents, but even within the same category, we can subdivide the communication we direct to them. They may belong to high, low, or middle socioeconomic strata; they may be Millennials or Generation X… This is where creativity comes into play to communicate your institution's added value in the most assertive, attractive, and effective way.
After gaining extensive experience in this sector and observing what works and what doesn’t, we highly recommend using videos; if possible, several videos that showcase added values and reasons for parents to learn more about your institution. It has been demonstrated that videos increase interaction by 80% compared to images, and they can convey more emotion and value in less time.
If you need one or more videos to help you sell more, do not hesitate to contact Tres Pi Medios.
Here it is important to differentiate that the person searching can be both the parent and the child, so it is essential to manage an adequate communication for both on the landing page to increase the possibility that this prospect leaves their data.
As in the previous point, it is essential in the communication and creative strategy to use several videos to achieve impact and generate the necessary empathy in the parent or child to start the commercial process as soon as possible.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
