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Using Storytelling Marketing in Higher Education 4 Nov 2021 6:14 PM (3 years ago)

The Power of the Story

The power of storytelling marketing is integral to the human experience. In its most primal form, storytelling served as a way for people to make meaning out of the world around them, and in turn, pass that meaning down between generations. Over the centuries, the power of the story has not diminished. It has grown into a central component of our humanity, a way to make connections with one another, and a celebration of our collective life experiences. 

Over the years, storytelling has played a range of roles. Sometimes it serves to educate, other times to entertain. Now, in 2021, the role of the story is once again evolving. Marketing professionals are beginning to discover —and embrace— the idea of storytelling in advertising.

According to a Neil Patel case study, brand storytelling comprises more than 65% of our day-to-day conversation. The question now is how do content marketing professionals leverage the power of the story to their benefit, specifically when it comes to higher education marketing strategies?

What is Storytelling Marketing?

We all know a good story when we hear it, but what do we mean by storytelling marketing?

Storytelling marketing employs the use of narrative to build a connection between the audience and the educational brand.  In turn, a narrative is a written, spoken, or visual technique that combines facts and real-world accounts with drama, embellishment, and artistic flair in order to communicate a point. 

Storytelling in advertising is to some degree the opposite of the interruptive school of marketing that’s ruled the roost for so long. Rather than breaking the engagement between your potential customers and their chosen media, storytelling marketing seeks to build trust and intimacy with the audience on their own terms by appealing to them on a personal level in an effort to build a captivating brand.

What Makes Storytelling in Advertising So Compelling?

Good stories speak to something essential in us. They represent a web of connections between the storyteller, the audience, and the world. Using storytelling to advertise your institution helps marketers connect with their intended audience on an emotional level.

More importantly, if your marketing content is intentionally crafted as a narrative, it can boost your conversion rates up to 30%.  But what exactly are the benefits of storytelling under the lens of higher ed marketing strategies?

Stories Trigger Memories and Build Associations

Narrative structure has a way of resonating with the audience. When we read or hear a story, our brains attempt to create a mental image from the resulting information. This complex dance accomplishes three things:

• It uses past memories to help build a mental image 
• If the story is well crafted, it helps the audience form new memories
• It subconsciously builds associations between the narrative content and the service you provide

The bottom line? Through association and memory, storytelling marketing can make a sizable impact for your institution, especially when coupled with digital delivery methods.

Sharing Stories Fosters Audience Engagement

Interruptive advertising is passive in nature. The audience is essentially forced to listen to a message that may or may not have anything to do with them. Additionally, this type of marketing is short to the point of being bite-sized.

Content marketing, on the other hand, fosters the audience’s engagement with your message and your school. Instead of alienating potential students and their families, storytelling marketing bridges the gap, drawing them into your institution’s academic life in ways previously unimaginable.

Stories Build a Sense of Excitement Regarding Your School

Beyond audience engagement lies the excitement. If a story speaks to the human condition, reaching the audience on a personal level, then it has the potential to elicit a sense of excitement from them as well. Narrative delivery has the ability to draw potential students in, making them part of a shared experience while creating a sense of urgency and bolstering a strong call to action.

How Does Storytelling Marketing Relate to Higher Education?

Storytelling in advertising isn’t just some technique used in the ambiguous, nondescript world of inbound marketing. Content marketing has real-world implications for the college admissions industry. 

Think about college from the perspective of your students and their families. It’s more than just an educational opportunity; it’s a holistic life experience. From student life to extracurriculars, to involvement with student associations, and the lecture hall (whether traditional or online), colleges represent a microcosm of the world. In the current competitive college admissions climate, it’s not enough to employ short, interruptive advertising methods to entice potential students. 

They are looking to be part of something greater. The focus of your advertising efforts must give them a narrative taste of the entire college experience. Storytelling in advertising is a powerful content marketing tool, especially when it’s paired with digital and social media.

Stories include persuasion. They get under your skin and realign your worldview. At least the good ones do. The social media avenues available to us as recruitment professionals allow us to tell engaging stories details about life at our respective institutions while reaching a much wider audience. 

As an added benefit, the combination of digital marketing and narrative delivery has the potential to reach future applicants, members of Generation Z, like never before. 

Gen Z: Planning for the Future of Content Marketing

Students from demographics like Generation Z grew up with storytelling in advertising. As such, they possess an ability unique to their age group: the ability to fully digest a narrative, garnering an empathetic curiosity for both the content marketer and the subject of the story itself. In other words, they see things from all angles. 

They’ve also grown up hand-in-hand with digital media, specifically avenues like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Incidentally, each of those platforms has its own built-in story function which has emerged as a well-vetted strategy for building customer engagement. In fact, marketing content to Generation Z is heavily dependent on electronic word of mouth. Their ubiquitous use of social media is one of the best ways for recruitment professionals to garner free advertising, especially if their higher ed marketing strategies include well-crafted narratives.   

Edufficient specializes in lead generation services geared specifically for college recruitment professionals. Our platform can help you deliver high-quality pieces of content marketing via digital narratives to your core client demographics.

Google Core Web Vitals: The Ranking Signals Shaking Up The SEO Community 2 Jul 2021 5:41 PM (3 years ago)

Google search as we know it has seen a significant facelift. To further optimize their platform, Google released a major algorithm update in mid-June to enhance its users’ browsing experience. The page experience rollout encompasses several ranking factors in its scoring. The latest being Google Core Web Vitals, which is relatively new to the SEO community. In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of Google core web vitals and why your site can’t afford to ignore this imperative shift.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Google core web vitals is an assessment score based on real-world usage data and interaction with a site. It is made up of the following three components to help ensure optimal performance:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The largest contentful paint measures how quickly a site’s content loads and is visible to users. To avoid a penalty from Google, websites should load within 2.5 seconds of the page load time.
• First Input Display: The first input display measures when a user is engaged with the page and documents actions such as button clicks. The interactivity within the page should occur within 100 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: The cumulative layout shift measures the visual stability of a page. According to Google’s web development department, to score within the 75th percentile of websites, the cumulative layout shift needs to have a score of 0.01 or less.

The ranking factors for these elements are illustrated below:

How Google Core Web Vitals Could Impact Your Rankings

Core web vitals is an active ranking signal on Google. Along with the page experience updates, Google measures how users interact with a page and whether or not your content and user experience prove valuable. Through these signals, such as load time, interactivity, and visual stability, Google will determine which websites to rank on top.

According to an initial case study performed by SEMRush, websites with “good” core web vital ratings were already performing well in search. Their findings concluded that websites with better vitals across all three categories had a better placement in the SERPs.

Mobile performance from the same study was said to have a lower score than desktop versions of a site. A concern that website owners should not take lightly as Google predominantly uses mobile-first indexing for ranking positions.

Google has approximately 246 million unique users in the United States alone. By failing to optimize your site from both a desktop and mobile experience, you could be losing out on market share, as the search engine giant accounts for 90% of all searches.

How to Evaluate Your Core Web Vitals Performance

To help diagnose your core web vitals, Google’s developer suite includes several platforms that support the measurement of this ranking signal. These tools can help site owners and SEO’s discover usability issues and user experience barriers to conversion:

The newest developments in the Lighthouse reporting kit now break down the audits in the core web vitals categories. Among the reporting features are opportunities outlined to enhance performance scores.

Google Search Console should also be leveraged to view how Google sees your site. There is a core web vitals tab within the dashboard where you can review the suggested fixes Google recommends.

Creating an Action Plan to Improve Your Site

With the ever-changing landscape of Google’s algorithm, your site must be optimized to maximize profits, conversions, and brand visibility. The page experience update will fully roll out in August 2021, making the need to improve your site structure more critically than ever not to sacrifice rankings. As user experience ramps up its momentum, don’t let your site get left in the dark. Our team of experts can help craft an SEO strategy for you to improve both your technical and on-page site presence.

Why Creative Digital Marketing Is More Important Than Ever 18 Feb 2021 3:02 PM (4 years ago)

We are living in an age where marketers can reach more people, more users, more potential students than ever before thanks to the vastness of the internet. Users can consume ads across multiple platforms and different devices based on who they are and what they interact with.

At Edufficient, we pride ourselves on the ability to obtain, quantify and leverage granular data to present creative digital marketing ideas and create ads that are specific and optimal to our client’s goals and needs. While the data excites all of us, there is another essential component to ad creation that particularly excites me; the creative.  I don’t just mean the image, but each individual entity that creates a top-performing ad. This ranges from the imagery to the copy and colors all the way down to the call to action of an ad.

We strive to create ads that will unequivocally gain an emotional response from a user.  An ad for higher education can incite hope, excitement, or even pride in a user, causing them to pursue more information; a win-win for both user and marketer. This is particularly critical on social media, where space on each social network is becoming a bit more crowded and standing out is way more advantageous than fitting in. We identify what digital marketing and social media marketing approach works for each of our clients and capitalize on it through rigorous testing and data analysis, even when resources are limited.

Know Your Creative Digital Marketing Elements

The initial creation of an ad starts with the data.  We gather as much information about our target audience as possible.  Who are they? What are their interests? Their typical age range? Where do they live? What are their other options in the area? From there, we ensure that our imagery fits those demographics while maintaining and creating brand identity and awareness.

An image is much more appealing when you see yourself in it.  Starting with alluring and inclusive images is just the beginning.  We then leverage and utilize the tools at our disposal to create ads and imagery that are sure to stand out. Video, as an example, is utilized as much as possible. Videos have been shown to improve conversions by up to 86%.

When video is unavailable, we begin social media ad creation to generate the same type of interest by mimicking the multidisciplinary effects of video with an array of colorful and representative static images. The movement in a static newsfeed is one of many possible creative digital marketing ideas sure to gain attention and stop a scrolling finger.

We then write our copy based on what we know is important to the user as well as any key program differentiators.  Perhaps a dental assisting program is accelerated and can get users on their way to a career sooner.  Or a massage therapy program offers a flexible schedule for working adults and parents. Or perhaps there is a particularly appealing financial aid package aimed to provide a student with a viable option toward their dreams.

Whatever these key identifiers may be, we create copy that is sure to excite a user and speak to them directly. Additionally, we use all available data to us in order to copywrite as effectively as possible, whether that be using top-performing ad copy and keywords from paid search, or leverage ad copy from high performing landing pages.  We want the copy to not only stop a user in their tracks but convince them to take action. Our copy, as well as call to actions, are all written to create a specific sense of urgency.

Execution is Key | Digital and Social Media Marketing

These ads are then placed appropriately.  Depending on demographics, a variety of placements across digital and social media marketing channels such as Facebook and Instagram are utilized to get in front of the most appropriate users. This is where social media ad creation comes into play. Our creative is sized to fit each placement and take up the most real estate available on those placements.

Defining Success in Creative Digital Marketing

Our work isn’t done once we have turned our creative digital marketing ideas into published ads, or completed social media ad creation. Actually, it’s quite the contrary. Our creative digital marketing ads then go through a rigorous A/B testing process, or split testing. Each ad is tested against a counterpart with one variable changed to see which aspects work for our target audience, and which do not.

There are times where we test images by testing ads with the same copy but different imagery against each other. Other times, we test our copywriting by placing two ads with the same imagery but different copy against each other. Which ads perform best help us determine what will provide the greatest return on investment. Additionally, this process helps us understand what our target audience would prefer to consume.

Once we generate this critical baseline, it makes it easier to create subsequent ads and know all of our blind spots. The opportunity to speak to an audience through creative digital marketing is not one that I take lightly. I strive toward high-quality digital and social media ad creation for my clients that users consume and subliminally have a feeling of trustworthiness, quality, and inclusivity.

By experimenting with creative digital marketing ideas, creative types, ad formats and approaches, we can find the best ways to inspire a user to stop, look and engage.

Mobile Optimization – Why it Matters for Higher Education Websites 17 Dec 2020 3:27 PM (4 years ago)

Mobile optimization has emerged in the digital age making dial-up Internet and slow loading websites a pain point of the past. In higher education specifically, mobile technology has played an increasingly greater role. It’s safe to say mobile devices have taken over the world.

With just a few clicks in the search engines, students can learn about your school, browse your programs, and decide whether or not they want to learn more. Mobile technology has made the student recruitment journey much more convenient with access to potential students just an arms reach away.

For forward-thinking schools and universities who understand the importance of having a mobile optimized website, they can enjoy the perks of increased ROI, sales, and brand visibility.

The Importance of Mobile Optimization Going Forward

Trends show that mobile smartphone usage has no signs of slowing down. Phone users in the United States are expected to skyrocket to 290 million users through 2024.* E-commerce sales in 2019 alone surpassed 3.5 trillion U.S. dollars.*

You may be asking yourself “what does this all mean for my educational institution?”. The answer is simple – without a mobile-optimized website you will lose market position, experience decreased enrollments and starts, along with lower brand recognition.

5 Ways Your “Mobile Un-friendly” Website is Hurting You

Here are 5 reasons why your higher education website can’t afford to not be mobile-friendly. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to reach your potential students!

1. Your Website is the First Impression of Your School to Students – For educational institutions, their websites are the first impression a student has of your school. Make it count! When your website is mobile optimized and delivers an excellent user experience, key conversion points such as “apply now” and “contact us” become much more prominent. Studies conducted by the Pew Research Center, shows 30% of all smartphone owners have used their mobile device to look up information on educational content or to take a class online.*
2. Without a Fast, Mobile-Friendly Website, Students Will Abandon You – Let’s face it, people want fast results. In the digital world every second counts. If your site takes more than 4 seconds to load you could lose upward of 40% of users.
   With the use of mobile devices, people are used to instant gratification. If your page doesn’t load instantly, users will press the back button leading to your competitor websites in the search results. The ability to abandon your site is just a click away. Therefore, to nurture conversions and build brand engagement, you need to implement mobile optimization.
3. Poor Navigation Helps Your Competitors Beat You Out – Your website navigation gives users the ability to build confidence in your brand. When your audience can scan your website easily this leads to greater sales. Research shows the value proposition of a web page should be clearly communicated within 10 seconds. If your website fails to guide users in this time frame your competitors will be the go-to solution. No one wants that!
4. Google Favors Websites Optimized for Mobile – It’s no secret that Google is continually improving its organic search platform. Effective as of March 2021, Google will enable mobile-first indexing by default for all sites in search.
   It’s important to note, mobile-first indexing is already a ranking factor on Google but this update will impact it on a larger scale. This means if your website renders properly on mobile, has SEO strategized content, engages users, and is fast-loading you will gain preference in the search engines. With mobile optimization, schools can leverage increased traffic to meet their enrollment goals per cycle.
5. You Will Forfeit The Opportunity to Connect with Your Prospects- An important component to higher education recruitment is the ability to story tell. Students want to know how your program can help them overcome the challenges they face. The ability to hear success stories from former students, alumni, and school administration has the power to influence like no other form of communication. Students want to know they have the opportunity to “become” whatever career profession they desire. Therefore, the messaging of your website has to build the confidence of your potential students. However, if your site is unresponsive you lose out on the opportunity to nurture conversions thus losing your ability to become the hero.

We Can Help Your Higher Education Site for Mobile Mobile Optimization

Don’t lose out on the opportunity to connect with your students. Having a mobile-optimized website makes your school or university discoverable. When your site is mobile responsive and user friendly you can streamline the student conversion cycle to have increased enrollments and starts. Learn how Edufficient can help you remain competitive and deliver a seamless experience for potential students. Contact us to learn more about our digital marketing packages.

Sources:

** Statista
* Pew Research Center
* * Google

When You Love It, Selling Education Marketing Is Easy 14 Nov 2020 8:11 PM (4 years ago)

Not many people dream of having a career in education sales but I can honestly say that I love my job at Edufficient and adore the education market. Selling education is easy when I have the opportunity to affect the process that provides the gift of education for people that are looking to change their lives. I also enjoy working with education institutions and other education partners. It’s a win-win situation for me, as it provides these prospects that we generate through multiple digital marketing avenues the ability to find, connect, and introduce them to colleges and universities. This improves the lives of not only themselves but their families as well from an admissions perspective while simultaneously contributing to school improvement.

Passion and Experience in Education Sales

For the past 35 years, my passion and career experience, and professional development have afforded me an avenue to be able to do what I love and be in a place where I can help match schools with the people who are looking to make their lives better.  My work doesn’t only increase the school’s ability to enroll more students but it makes a difference in the lives of people and their families.

My Approach to Selling Education Marketing Services

The strategy and goal for sales and marketing have not changed over the decades. To sell to education institutions, it all comes down to finding the right student at the right time and for the right program. There are multitudes of programs, at various degree levels within many colleges and universities. When starting a new campaign the colleges provide us with exactly the type of student that they want to recruit that has the best opportunity of success in their programs.  With good schools and a good sales team, the sales process is easy

Being Flexible to Best Serve Our Education Clients

Prior to the pandemic, colleges provided us with the vehicle of how their courses are whether online or brick and mortar. Today, many schools have had to change from a campus-based school to a hybrid or fully online program. At Edufficient, we are excited to be able to help these schools strategize for these changes and help them prioritize their budgets for their change in methodology from campus to online.

Connecting with Great People

Another great thing about my job and education sales is connecting to the thousands of various career schools, colleges, and universities strategically aligning the schools to develop various digital marketing strategies to find and marry the school with great prospects specifically for the programs they offer. The goal is always to build trust and recruit students that start school and graduate. I have a term I always use called Enroll Graduates. This is the goal of ours when generating prospects for our partner schools.

Selling education marketing services a unique opportunity as we create contact with our clients and these prospects may have never found each other if not for our services promoting and recruiting potential students for our partner schools. 

The process then leads to a graduate who now has the knowledge and skills gained through our partner schools that open up career opportunities that these newly found prospects would never have had if it wasn’t for Edufficient’s expert lead generation services.

Here Are 10 Things I Love About Selling Education Marketing Services:

1. Helping people. Selling education is an occupation where you spend most of your day helping those around you and better people’s lives.
2. Making people see what is possible.  Education sales are about helping people see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible. It about helping, but it’s more than that. As an education salesperson, you must help people see and attain what they once thought was impossible.
3. Remaining optimistic. I felt I was always optimistic, even long before I got into sales, but being consistently rejected helps you create the superpower of optimism. It is amazing what opportunities present themselves when you view everything optimistically.
4. Expecting the unexpected. With each new day comes new and exciting challenges.  I’ve learned to embrace the unexpected and have learned to grow from it.  When the unexpected becomes the expected, it is astonishing how that can change one’s outlook on life. 
5. Continuous learning.  Most education sales are about constant learning. Not a day goes by where I don’t learn something new. When you have the opportunity to sell to many different schools and partners, the learning just comes naturally.
6. Graduation celebration. There is no better feeling to watch a graduate walk across the stage and get their diploma to fulfill their educational journey. The graduate is now ready to fulfill their career and improve the lives of their families. The tears of joy are relentless from the families as this may be the first person who ever graduated from a college and some of them never attended college or even finished high school. What they see is a path to success while they celebrate their family members’ success. It’s amazing that I have tears of joy at every single graduation knowing I had a part in their path to success.
7. Building Relationships. Throughout my sales career, I have been able to meet so many different people from all walks of life, each with their own, unique story. The long-term relationships that I have developed because of them have been a huge blessing in my life.
8. Overcoming challenges. I am thankful that sales are not for the weak.  The obstacles I’ve had to deal with over the course of my career, and the lessons  I’ve learned from each one, has without a doubt made me a better salesman and human. The pressure of sales has helped me refine those skills.
9. The rewards are unlimited. The things I’ve been able to do and achieve far more than I ever would ever imagine thanks to being in sales. Education sales have provided me with amazing rewards.
10. Personal satisfaction. The personal satisfaction I’ve gained has shaped my outlook on life and how I view everything.  With every new sale and every newly enrolled student, I feel better about myself that I was able to change even just a tiny part of this world.

In Closing

Ultimately, it’s a blessing knowing that we made a difference in hundreds of thousands of students’ lives now career ready through a gift of education gained and it started with us. If you are responsible for marketing your school to high-intent students and love your job as much as I do, let’s talk. I am sure there will so much we can learn from each other.

Pay Per Lead Marketing FAQs 9 Nov 2020 9:58 PM (4 years ago)

If you are responsible for meeting enrollment goals for educational programs or products, you know that bringing in new students is the lifeblood to meeting goals. With so much competition, you might have determined that you need to hire a costly professional marketing team to help you break through the noise and reach your target audience. However, hiring in-house is expensive and does not always guarantee results. Consider running a Pay Per Lead Marketing campaign with a managed lead generation agency.

Even worse, focusing on marketing can often divert your focus from doing what you do best.  ENROLL STUDENTS.  You could turn to traditional marketing but that often be hit-and-miss, unmeasurable providing you with an uncertain return on your marketing investment. That’s why it makes sense to engage an enrollment marketing agency that offers Education-based Pay Per Lead marketing. Here’s how Pay Per Lead Marketing can work for you:

What are some of the marketing channels used by PPL partners?

Advertorials	Linkedin Company Profile	Ringless Voicemail
Affiliate Marketing	Linkedin Group	Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Aggregator Inclusions	Local Search Marketing	SEM Search Engine Marketing
Blog/Microblog	Magazine Adverts	Smart TV/Xbox/Console App
Call Center	Marketing Email	SMS/ Texting
Content Marketing	Microsites	Social Media Marketing
Course Catalog	Mobile Advertising	Sub Affiliates
Digital Banners	Mobile App	Tablet App
Display Remarketing	Paid Placements / Media Buys	Telephone Automation (IVR)
Email Leads	Pay Per Call	TikTok
Email Marketing	Pay Per Click	Transactional Email
Email Signatures	Phone Calls/Phone Leads	TV Advertising (OTT/CTV)
Facebook Ads	Podcasts	Twitter (Organic)
Facebook Advertising	Presentations	Twitter Advertising (Paid)
Google Ads	Press Releases	Video Chat
Images & Infographics	Product Packaging	Video Marketing
In-box Ads / Gmail	Program Sponsorship	Wearable Technology
Influencer Outreach	Push Notifications	Webchat / Chatbots
Inserts	QR Codes	Webinars
Instagram	Radio Advertising	Website Via Tablet/Mobile
Interstitials	Recommend A Friend	Yelp Profiles
Kiosks	Relationship Marketing	Youtube And Trueview
Linkedin Advertising	Report Sponsorship	YouTube Channels

Lead Generation for Education 7 Nov 2020 10:57 PM (4 years ago)

Increasing ROI for University and College Enrollments

With increasing competition in the education sector, colleges and universities grapple to find students to get admissions. However, it’s no more a cakewalk- not even for Ivy League colleges in the United States. This is especially true amid the current COVID-19 situation. The entire sector is getting more digitized than ever in anticipation of remote learning, becoming a trend. Lead generation for education has never become more critical.

Students today are well-informed and have access to multiple colleges offering similar programs and facilities.

So, what sets you apart? A strong inbound marketing and lead generation strategy based on proven results, we say. Let’s talk about how.

Helps Understand Your Student Targets

The student recruitment cycles work at a break-neck speed, and any lapse in your actions will cause a loss of these potential qualified leads. Before you kick-start your inbound marketing action plan, you need to define your target audience.

Hence, our automated lead generation for education campaigns reaches the students you want at the right time and place. It begins with a comprehensive survey that gathers the information you’ll need to create a compelling message.

Whether you want to inquire about their age, grades, or contact information, a survey does it all. You can also drag this data out of your student administration system or CRM and cross-reference it to the right audience.

Delivers a Compelling Message

In this overcrowded digital space, you have a massive competition to get a student’s attention. Schools use various techniques and platforms to enhance their enrollments. If you follow their lead and serve students with more information than they need, you’ll end up overwhelming the potential leads. So, make your story pop brilliantly in the ever-growing blur of information.

Third-party vendors can handle your lead generation for education campaigns using dependable lead magnets, paid ads, websites, and targeted landing pages. And, you can expect a database of students who are waiting for your communications.

However, be specific as these students already have high-level information about your institution. Provide precise information, preferably about the programs they are interested in. Keep your response time quick, so you won’t let them wait for the details they need. 

Remember, you aren’t the only fish in the pond. So, promote the USP of your college, university, skilled trade school, technical school, community college, or career school, but don’t oversell.

Ranks High on the Search Engines

Before signing the enrollment agreement, prospective students would want to know everything about the higher education programs you offer. Since this is the awareness phase of the funnel, you need a story that tells more about your college or university and its benefits.

Digital search marketing comes to your aid here. It helps create effective content and leverage your marketing strategies to build organic rankings by optimizing them. Schools are the cornerstones of intellectual information.

Paid search ads further boost your lead generation program and rankings in digital searches. You can also create relatable ads with relevant information and result-driven keywords. Luckily, we know how to do it right with automated processes that capture every micro-moment when students look for some information online. And we do it on the platform they prefer, be it social media or search engines.

Nurtures Leads Down the Enrollment Funnel

Education leads need to be nurtured much differently than just a potential customer. While lead generation is essential to getting students in the enrollment funnel, lead nurturing is vital to keeping them within reach.

Incorporating a lead nurturing strategy can not just help you connect with prospective students, but also empower them toward healthier engagement and conversions. If you haven’t already, we heavily encourage you to consider it. And maybe even evaluating a marketing automation platform to further develop your overall strategy.

Uses Lead Generation Management (PPL)

Third-party vendors offer cost-effective and targeted lead generation for education. They generate organic leads from people actively looking at various admission options for better leads and higher ROI. 

A vendor provides aggregated information of various institutions offering a program that interests your targeted students and matches the leads to the respective schools. The schools pay these vendors for their lead generation services, but maintaining compliance and trust is essential in this process.

You need a market-oriented approach to vendor management for effectively accomplishing your objectives with higher transparency and better performance. Our team uses an advanced automated spidering technology to search and identify the sites or lead generation vendors using your trademarks or logos for promoting unapproved paid searches. It maintains stringent accountability and integrity with higher levels of compliance.

Our product or services include paid search monitoring, surveying online inquiry forms, and maintaining the best practices in the third-party lead generation programs to find any discrepancies or non-adherences. We work closely with the schools to define metrics relevant to their offerings for enforcing the correct rules and procedures.

Ensures Compliance Monitoring

Even after you hire lead generation vendors, there’s always a risk of lapsing in compliance related to your industry. In higher education, the consequences of non-compliance can be fatal to your reputation and bring harsh fines or loss of your accredited status.

Since your school’s brand is susceptible to third-party vendors using it without your consent, we can avert these risks with thorough compliance monitoring. It involves monitoring the third-party inquiry visiting your websites to detect brand violations, contacting the offending vendors on your behalf, transparent reporting of non-compliant content, lead audits, and trademark or search engine spidering to identify companies violating your trademarks without your consent.

Leverages Email Marketing and Marketing Automation

Once the vendor gets you the leads you want, you’ll want to promote your information to these leads. It may involve sending custom emails that differ from regular inquiries. Most students already know about your institution, so emails introduce specific programs and encourage direct actions like campus visits.

You’ll get more personalized information from the students by merging custom fields in your email addresses and segmenting the third-party leads according to demographics. Linking the emails to your website serves as the final destination of lead generation and enrollment marketing.

Guide your leads to specific pages like program list, financial aid, course content, fees, and accolades to deepen the knowledge of prospects about your institution. If you find it a tedious endeavor, use our customized email marketing platform that uses multivariate autoresponders and behavior-based email remarketing tools to send individualized content at the right time to the right prospects.

Ties the Loose Ends Together

A winning lead generation for education strategy reaps rich results by following the right marketing mix that includes pay per lead. Even after hiring third-party lead generation vendors, you may not get the expected results soon.

Hence, you need to tie all the ends and iron out the creases in your marketing strategies with the best messaging and distribution channels. It requires a sustainable and predictable lead generation pipeline that increases ROIs for enrollment management.

With proper compliance, consistency, and accuracy in your marketing messages, you may exceed your enrollment targets and improve graduation rates. Our platform follows your guidelines for managing your third-party vendors and keeps your institution protected against any regulatory action. To learn more about lead generation for education to Third-Party Inquiry Management, contact our sales team.

Fishing in a Crowded Lake 3 Nov 2020 6:33 PM (4 years ago)

Many higher education institutions in today’s competitive environment struggle with meeting their enrollment goals. Is your institution one of them that needs to re-examine your enrollment marketing strategy? Chances are you could reach your goal of raising enrollment rates by applying a better plan to market your school’s programs. Are your admission offices at the head of the line in filling class starts? If not, your enrollment marketing could be missing key elements.

What is a Good Enrollment Marketing Strategy?

A good enrollment strategy is a collective approach that is designed to both attract and engage prospective students. These fine-tuned marketing strategies have a direct impact on your enrollment, value recognition, and application retention.

Today’s prospective college students differ from those who applied in earlier generations. enrollment marketing strategy goes beyond traditional content marketing. Think of it as student marketing with a twist. At Edufficient, we show you how to super-charge your student recruiting efforts with data-driven methodologies.

Many marketing agencies promise increased leads. Your higher education digital marketing plan needs more technology driving it to deliver better lead generation. Our enrollment marketing approach helps you more easily to deliver more potential students from the resulting higher intent leads.

Our approach to Enrollment Marketing helps you successfully leverage your data to raise your enrollment outreach. Colleges typically advertise and market. If that is all you do, you are missing out on the benefits of an integrated marketing strategy. This involves Big Data analysis to identify the behavior of your graduating students. Most colleges lack the ability to leverage this hidden information to let them build an integrated marketing strategy that gets actionable results.

Let Edufficient’s experience in developing best practices lead you to a higher quality in student recruitment. Our comprehensive inbound marketing and enrollment strategy is based on an integrated marketing approach. Put our big data analysis processes to work for you. Experience the enrollment gains from our advanced technology and proven surgical marketing strategies to bring your recruitment program growth rather than continued stagnation or decline.

What exactly is an enrollment marketing strategy and why do you need it? Find out how it can help fill the gap in your higher education marketing plan. Understanding Edufficient’s enrollment marketing technology is important. It is not just a boilerplate approach to maximizing student enrollment results.

Why You Probably Need an Agency Like Edufficient

Two words should help answer the question about why you need Edufficient. Those two words are EXPECT MORE. You expect more from your recruiters. You expect more from your students. Traditional marketing efforts are not enough to reach the target audience of colleges and universities.

If you really do expect more, here are three more reasons for putting our higher education marketing strategies to work for your institution – more digital marketing strategies, more focused marketing efforts, and more than what other institutions are doing for student recruitment. Edufficient’s digital marketing strategies will deliver well-qualified leads. Our focused marketing efforts help you to identify and nurture potentially qualified students from the pool of potential applicants.

Does your enrollment marketing strategy consist of a variety of different touchpoints? This is a must for more powerful student recruiting. This could very well be an essential element that is missing from your current higher education marketing strategies. No student recruiting plan is complete without SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, and Email.

These services are critically important in identifying high intent leads that you can successfully nurture to enrollment. SEO or “search engine optimization,” is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. Two-thirds of schools fail to invest in SEO to improve their rankings because they do not understand the difference between branded and non-branded traffic. A Paid Search campaign only works with constant monitoring and analysis that we provide to gain in-depth insight.

Customize Your Enrollment Marketing

Edufficient helps you to create a custom enrollment marketing strategy that is driven by a performance-based marketing plan that measures students by more than just clicks. This is how we help higher education facilities enroll more qualified students. We offer a variety of higher education digital marketing services including SEO, Paid Search Management, and Social Media Management.

Edufficient’s SEO service goes far beyond what is routinely offered by all major search engine companies on the Internet. Our core SEO strategy is built on a mix of branded and non-branded key terms. Few higher education marketing services offer both paid and organic social media management. By offering both, we give you a stronger social media presence, which is a key component for any organization’s digital marketing arsenal.

Two other tools that energize your marketing results are Paid Search Management and Email Marketing Automation. Our Paid Search Management service analyzes and evaluates analytics on campaign performance to continually make refinements. It uses A/B test strategy to ensure the best ROI, and it makes suggestions based on data.

Email marketing automation is one of the newest innovations that make digital marketing more efficient and effective than previous email marketing strategies. We use the latest software platforms and technologies that focus on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automates repetitive tasks.

A Strong Catch

At Edufficient, we use both best practices and the latest digital technology to keep your student enrollment marketing strategy productive and efficient. Let our marketing experts keep you from becoming that errant fisherman we mentioned at the start who did not know where or how to cast his lines to secure the best catch.

Optimizing for Voice Search in 2021 2 Nov 2020 2:09 PM (4 years ago)

Just when you thought optimizing your website for search on desktop browsers was becoming tough, optimizing your website for mobile search comes along. Once you are almost at peace with the fact that you might have mobile search engine optimization down, then along comes optimizing your website for voice search. Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and Cortana are just the start.

Voice Search Statistics

• 55% of households in the US are expected to own a smart speaker in 2022.
• 20% of mobile queries are currently done with voice search.
• Nearly 40 million Americans currently own a smart speaker.
• 58% of people have used voice search to find information about a local business.
• 72% of people who use voice search devices claim they have become part of their daily routines.

We live in a modern time where everyone is connected. The dark days of venturing out to rent a Blockbuster movie are over – and so it can be said about desktop vs. mobile phones. Staying connected while on the go has become the norm and digital companies are expected to change with the times. According to Search Engine Journal, “Voice search has become popular in recent years.

How To Properly Optimize for Voice Search

Optimizing for voice recognition should be a part of your ongoing SEO plan when understanding how a user may come across your listing. It’s a simple process when you’re initially structuring your website’s landing pages for both SEO (and PPC). Following the RankBrain update, Google has become much more effective at recognizing and understanding longer, more complex search queries.

Keyword Research for Voice Search Queries Separately

Prospects type in searches differently than they are spoken. This is probably the most important rule to remember when considering voice-activated SEO. On a laptop or phone, a person may search, “deli in 07651,” but on their phones, users may ask “what is the best deli near me?” This question and answer format have become key to voice SEO optimization strategies

To research keywords and questions related to your products, you can use tools like Answer the Public. All you need to do is type in a root keyword and it will generate a list of commonly asked questions, prepositional phrases, and more.

Google Search also provides you with its “People Also Ask” tool (which shows you additional questions related to your search). When you type in a question related to your product, Google will then provide a list of questions related to the topic that other users ask.

Think About Speech Patterns

We often take for granted how far Google has come in terms of updating their algorithms based on UX alone. Google’s end goal? To give the searcher the most accurate, up-to-date information in real-time. If the majority of the way people are searching is through voice-recognition software (think Siri, Alexa)… it won’t be long before Google prioritizes long-tail keywords as a major rank-factor. It’s already arguable that keywords and buzzwords that are highly competitive will begin to lose their importance. What will become prevalent, however, is the use of casual phrases and terms. For example, you could optimize for a phrase such as, “Where can I find the best Cosmetology schools in XYZ…” Including words like “best, great rating..” will help with moving your position in the SERPs.

Optimize Your Local Business Listings

Use location-based keyword identifiers in your on-page SEO strategy. Make sure to use long-tail keywords in combination with your institute. For example, if your school offers Cosmetology programs in a very specific state or region, it would be a good idea to optimize for keywords such as “cosmetology programs in XYZ.” You can also use phrases such as “Cosmetology schools near me.” Most importantly, be sure to utilize a local citation campaign. Having your business listing cited in location-based directories such as Google My Business listings can really help your visibility.

Implement Speakable Schema Markup

The more people use voice search with multimodal interaction devices, the more the need for web publishers to be able to easily call out portions of a webpage that are particularly appropriate for reading out aloud. Currently, the way to do this is by implementing speakable schema. Do this correctly and you should do well in the voice search results and featured snippet areas.

What Is Speakable Schema?

Speakable schema markup allows you to tell digital voice assistants what you want to be said for the content on a page. Digital marketers should consider deploying speakable schema markup as part of the regular search optimization process.

To deploy this markup, here are a few things to consider:

• Speakable markup for text content only. (Not photo captions or source attributions).
• Don’t use Speakable on the entire article. Use it only for key points.
• Speakable text should be just a few sentences and take no more than 30 seconds to read.
• The story should be broken up into short consumable sentences or ideas.

Evaluate Your Pages

Understanding your user through Google Analytics’ Behavior Flow feature can help you understand a visitor’s behavior on your site and help you identify areas of opportunity. You should ask, “Can visitors quickly get the gist and immediately understand what the page is about? Do you have all the news that fits? Relevant information must be displayed at the top of the page or you won’t hold the user’s attention.

Our Clients Love Our Marketing Automation 30 Oct 2020 12:38 AM (4 years ago)

One of the great things about the Edufficient lead platform is its ability to integrate and connect with some of the most cutting edge marketing tools in the industry.  Adding marketing automation platforms and management to our arsenal has garnered tremendous success for our clients.

Through our experience, we have evaluated, tested, and managed many products that help our clients maximize performance across several different marketing channels. The thing we love the most about all of these tools is seeing how channel-specific technologies integrate with one another.   Using integration in a unified way in order to tell a holistic story about a prospect’s journey from click to enrollment.

While each of these tools is great at affecting the lead generation process at different points in the funnel, rarely do you see a tool that can follow and nurture a prospect from well-outside of the funnel. It’s often hard to see the journey from lead, all the way down to enrollment (and sometimes through to graduation). That is until now. 

A well-integrated marketing automation platform does a great job of not only automating repetitive tasks but marrying several marketing efforts and technologies to provide a more comprehensive approach to lead generation and retention. Implementing a marketing automation strategy can easily provide our clients with a more competitive advantage, increased reach, and provide attribution data that gives our clients an amazing amount of insight into the entire prospect journey.

With thousands of institutions competing in the same prospect pool at the same time, it has become more important than ever to engage prospects well before they inquire. In today’s competitive prospecting climate, a successful recruitment strategy starts with capturing a prospect’s attention early and keeping them engaged all the way to the point of school selection and on to enrollment. Adding marketing automation platforms to the center of your marketing strategy can put a school out in front of other competing schools.

How does it all work?

As prospective students reach the point where they begin to take action regarding their educational goals, they often establish contact with many different colleges and universities by making inquiries. During the decision-making stage, colleges and universities need to maintain contact with prospective students to understand their challenges and explain their unique approaches to help them overcome them. You can make your outbound contacts even more effective by personalizing them to match prospective students’ interests — but no university has the resources necessary to personalize thousands of emails manually.

Personalizing messages according to student’s interests is just the beginning of its raw power. It is possible to configure an automation platform to send messages instantly when prospective students access certain areas of your website, submit specific forms, or reach varying levels of engagement. With marketing automation platforms, you can deliver the right message to the right person at the perfect time.

Create Profiles of Prospective Students

Learn which email campaigns to date have been most successful. Find out at which point during the research phase is a prospective student most likely to respond favorably to an email campaign. On the flip side, it is also possible to learn if any of your recurring email campaigns been consistently unsuccessful. 

If your college or university currently manages its email marketing manually, it’s likely that a lot of these success metrics go unknown. With marketing automation, you can easily pull detailed real-time and historical reports on each of the campaigns. With real data in hand, you’ll always know what’s working and where you need to improve.

As prospective students interact with your institution’s website, email campaigns, and other marketing properties, they generate a wealth of information that your enrollment representatives can use to be more persuasive and informative during calls. With the instant reports that marketing automation platforms can generate, representatives can begin calls already knowing which campaigns have piqued students’ interests and what website pages they have viewed. A representative who already knows a prospective student’s interests can work more efficiently and help more students through the enrollment process.

Connect with Behavior-Based Trigger Emails 

Everyone knows that email marketing is one of the most important channels in digital marketing. With the power of the mobile phone, a direct connection to your prospect consistently exists in the hand (literally) of your prospective student.  If your current email strategy consists of mass emails or timed drip delays, you are missing the boat.  Behavior-based trigger emails set up in a solid marketing automation campaign are the absolute best way to get your prospect to open and click an email.

Recapture The Interest Of Older Contacts

A younger student may consider his or her options for years before settling on a college or university to attend. During that time, you want your institution to remain at the forefront of that person’s mind. Just as an action can be a trigger in automated marketing, inaction can also be a trigger. Using your automated marketing platform, you can send helpful messages to people who haven’t visited your website in a while. 

Sending useful information to prospective students keeps them thinking about your institution when many other schools are also competing for their attention.  The more we learn about the journey, the more advantages we have as marketers to reach these prospects in a way that’s not only valuable to them but genuine in the approach. 

Help Out Your Admission Teams, Score Your Leads

Adding lead scoring to your enrollment marketing process certainly helps you understand your lead quality better and could be helpful to your admissions teams.  Put simply, lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to each prospect generated for your school. Prospects can be scored based on multiple attributes, including the form information they’ve submitted and all the engagement points they collect while doing school choice research. This process helps admissions prioritize and expedite outreach to high intent prospects.  Incorporating a lead scoring model will ultimately increase the rate at which those prospects become students.

Nurture Your Prospects to the Finish Line

Once you have learned about your prospect, and understand the intent, the next step is to use the powerful automated workflows to nurture them to conversion.  Using automated campaigns for lead nurturing can decrease “days to enrollment” while solidifying customer relationships.

At the end of the day, you’ll find that you have higher quality prospects, paired with increased knowledge and understanding of their needs and behaviors.

Get Going with Marketing Automation Platforms Today

Seeing the way marketing automation platforms connect to just about every marketing channel available has us thinking about prospecting in lots of new and exciting ways. If you are interested in learning more about how marketing automation can help your school generate more qualified inquiries, give us a call.