Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. It includes everything from your website to your social media to your email marketing. And it’s more important than ever for educational institutions.
Think about it. With more and more people turning to the internet for information, it’s more important than ever for your school or college to have a strong digital presence. A good digital marketing strategy can help you reach more potential students, connect with your current students, and boost your bottom line.
Here are some of the things you can do:
- Create a website that accurately represents your school or college and makes it easy for potential students to learn more.
- Optimize your website for search engines so that potential students can easily find you.
- Develop a social media marketing strategy that helps you connect with current and potential students.
- Increase your email/SMS/WhatsApp marketing reach to boost enrollment efforts.
- Conduct a website or social media audit to identify areas of improvement.
- Build communities to engage current students and help them learn & grow together
- Build online lead generation systems to generate consistent qualified leads and enrollemnts.
Let’s Deep dive into the strategies and how they can be Implemented.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how you will use digital technologies to achieve your marketing goals. Having a digital marketing strategy is essential if you want to make the most of online marketing opportunities and ensure that your marketing efforts are effective.
Digital marketing is all about using digital technologies to reach and engage customers. There are many different digital marketing strategies, but some of the most common ones include email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and content marketing, Lead Generation Systems, Community Building, etc.
How to create a digital marketing strategy?
- Define your brand: Outline or use your brand guidelines to define your brand and how it’ll come through in your online campaigns. Think about your unique selling points (USPs), brand voice, and value proposition.
- Build your buyer personas: Determine who your education business wants to reach with custom buyer personas. Think about user demographics, as well as the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services.
- Create your S.M.A.R.T. goals: Use specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals (also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals) to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.
- Choose your digital marketing strategies: Pick the best strategies for your business. Focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business domain, versus trendy strategies. Plan according to you short term and long term goals.
- Set your digital marketing budget: Research digital marketing pricing to build a realistic budget for your business. For reference, most education businesses spend ₹ 1Lakh per month (schools) to ₹ 10 Lakh per month (edtech startups) on online marketing.
- Brainstorm your strategy: Guide your strategy to success by planning your strategy. If you’re advertising, determine your ad spend. If you’re publishing content, build your content calendar.
- Launch your campaigns: Following your planning, launch your campaigns across channels. Ensure all your channels feature the appropriate tracking information. Your website, for example, should feature your Google Analytics tracking code.
- Track your results: Monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. Use Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads to keep a pulse on your strategies and their return on investment (ROI).
6+1 digital marketing strategies for your business.
- PPC / Google Ads / Search Network Ads
Google search ads help you connect with customers who are looking for your products and services. With search ads, you can reach people when they’re actively searching for what you offer. The leads you get is from people searching for your product / serivices, therefore the sales cycle is shorter and the lead is in buying mode. Google Search Ads (PPC) is the best way to get started ASAP.
Below are the results of one of our Client where we have spent over 17 Lakhs and generated over 4.8 K leads.
2. Social Media Marketing – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your business through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s a great way to connect with new and existing customers, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website and generate leads by pin point targeting to your Niche Audience.
Facebook & Instagram are the top platforms where parents and students hangout and running them with all the detailed targeting options we have, social media can scale our marketing efforts 10X.
Facebook ads results where we have generated over 50K leads and spent over 25 Lakhs in 3 years.
3. Google My Business for Schools / Colleges:
Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses of all sizes to connect with customers on Google.
Google My Business makes it easy for customers to find your business on Google, including Maps and Contact details. Add information about your business, such as hours, contact info, and website. Plus, post updates and photos to show your customers what’s new.
The advantages of using Google My Business are:
1. Increased visibility on Google – When customers search for your business on Google, you can appear in the search results, along with your website, direction and phone number.
2. Connect with customers on Google – Customers can leave reviews, post questions, and follow your business.
3. Manage your information – Add or update your business information, such as hours, contact info, and website, whenever you want.
4. Get insights – View insights about how your business is performing on Google, including how many people have viewed your page and how many people have clicked through to your website.
5. Free traffic and leads from local customers once you optimize your Google My Business listing and get in the top 3 positions. Best for Schools & local institutes.
Below is the result of one of our client getting free admission enquiry calls, school visits and leads.
4. Search Engine Optimization:
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving the ranking of a website on search engines. The higher the ranking, the more likely people are to find the website.
The best way to improve ranking & avoid being penalized by the search engines is to use white hat techniques, which are techniques that are approved by the search engines. These techniques include:
- Optimizing your website for humans, not search engines
- Using high-quality, original content
- Optimizing your website for fast loading times
- Creating a website that is easy to navigate
- Using keyword-rich titles and descriptions
- Optimizing your images
- Using social media to promote your website, etc
By using these techniques, you can improve your website’s visibility and ranking in the search engines, and attract more visitors.
Organic Traffic boost of one of our client (from 5K to 36K+) after working on overall website and content optimization for Search Engine.
5. Online Community Building
If you’re a Education Business in 21st century, then building an community is the best thing you can do to engage with your community. Create communities to share work, learn from one another, and connect with others who share their passion.
Community feeling drives passion that make community members accountable and more connected. This also help members resolve issues, share information, ask questions.
Facebook community of our client where students connect and grow together. This also help the company run referral capaigns to attract more enrollments.
6. Content Marketing:
Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your education business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.
Content marketing works well when you focus on building a community around it at different stages of your marketing.
Share content related to your courses, studnets placed, questions related to courses, etc.
7. Marketing & Sales Funnel for growing companies
A sales funnel is a marketing tool that helps you visualize the customer journey from awareness to purchase. It also helps you track your progress and measure the results of your marketing efforts.
The sales funnel allows you to see how many people are visiting your site, how many are subscribing to your email list, and how many are buying your product.
Building a sales funnel may require to setup landing pages, signup forms, create videos, lead magnets, email automation tool, WhatsApp automation API, and an automated lead qualification process to scale marketing faster and efficiently.
3 Benefits of digital marketing strategies
With digital marketing strategies, your education business can reach — and exceed — its goals, which may include:
1. Increasing website traffic and leads
With all digital marketing strategies, one of the main goals is to increase traffic and leads to a education company’s website.
2. Boosting brand awareness
When you use digital marketing, you get your brand in front of more potential customers, whether through search results, email inboxes, social media platforms, or another outlet. As a result, more people become aware of your brand.
They’ll get to know your branding, your products, and what sets you apart from your competitors. Then, when they need the products or services you offer, they’re more likely to remember your brand and make a purchase.
3. Raising revenue and conversions
The biggest and most important objective of any marketing strategy is to increase revenue.
With our personalized and results-driven strategies, we can have a significant impact on your company’s bottom line.