What is lead generation for higher education ?
Lead generation for new aspiring students is the ultimate objective of all higher education marketing teams. It is the initial part of the strategy, when sparking interest about your institution is key. Students today depend on the web to find, assess, and pick their school or college, so in order to make your marketing plan a success you need to embrace lead generation strategies that will get you the most value.
But why is higher education lead generation important ?
Convincing prospective students to enroll in your university or college requires you show them what you bring to the table. Show what is your Unique Selling Point and what are the opportunities that only your institution can provide them. This process requires you to build relationships based on their trust.
Lead generation also enables you to differentiate between forthcoming students who are just on your site browsing and the individuals who are truly intrigued. The analytics data from your site who understand the traffic and behavior patterns of visitors on your site. This translates into your business goals into key performance indicators and goals within analytics.
The right techniques will make your lead generation for your higher education institution so you can get your prospective students based on their needs and wants.
Here are 10 valuable lead generation for higher education tips that will give you a superior rate of profitability of time and assets. Therefore, provide you a better return on investment of time and resources.
1. Develop a easy and absolute University Website
As a higher education advertiser, your significant wellspring of lead generation should be your college’s site. This is so for some reasons, including the way that it is viewed as the most appropriate stage for getting the information and opportunities that are provided by your institution. An ideal website should contain all the possibilities that a prospective student would want to know about.
Your college website should be of value to the student leads. All the specific factors, for example, responsiveness on cell phones. This is the place where most students will visit your site from. It also includes the progression of your landing pages. This will help convert leads into sales. The website should contain the information in such a manner that the students should feel that their experience in the universities will be anything less than amazing. All the necessary forms, simplicity of discovering data, and so forth. Your college site should be more than just information, it should be a trip down to your institution. Using this strategy will improve lead generation for your higher education institution.
2. Advertising and Partnering with Higher Education Portals
This is particularly useful if foreign recruiting is part of your enrolment plan. But it works very hard to produce student leads locally, too. College portals like Shiksha are adept at providing prospective information on studying at some universities and colleges in India. It also helps institutions to advertise on the portal. College portals also have a higher rating than the website of your university on search engines such as Google. It is also known that some of them run paid ads on Google. So, it’s something you can try if you want greater exposure and extend your scope.
3. Advertise on social media to increase lead generation for higher education
Social media is one of the strongest outlets when it comes to the generation leading to higher education. With social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, you can meet potential students, professors and employees.
Posts on your profile, however, are not always enough.
Many social networks, including Facebook, offer preference to content from friends and family of users, as opposed to content from companies, authors, and colleges that a user follows. That’s why a lot of institutions are advertising on social media—and you should.
With social media advertising, you can build campaigns using the following targeting features:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests
- Last education
- Re-marketing
- And more and more
These hyper-targeted strategies will help your educational institution meet users with the most interest in your organisation. You can advertise to users who visited your website, for example, or to users who came to your campus on a tour day.
Make the most of social media and start using it for your high education institution for lead generation.
4. Use Chatbots to increase and accelerate communication
We are in an age where everything is faster-paced than ever before. Adding chatbots to your website makes sure the catch-up is not played by your university or college. For example, prospects who have questions about certain courses can get them answered in real time. Without having to wait for a recruiting agent’s phone call or email. It is obvious that chatbots are arguably the best way of supplying potential applicants with answers and the information they are looking for. With chatbots built into your website, there is a great chance for a website user to become a prospective student. Your higher education institution will have increased lead generation as students will want to join the institution that provided them information the fastest and most accurately.
5. Establish the segmentation of your customers
Many different categories make up your audience. Your website and marketing must speak their language, address their behaviors and include details specific to their particular stage in the recruitment process. This will help to effectively capture them as leads. You might still be using some degree of segmentation, but split your list even further based on what they did (or didn’t do) to boost results. Personalized communication via emails, calls or texts should be able to speak as clearly as possible to their current situation. This will increase the lead generation for your higher education institution.
6. Investing in Analytics on Google
You want to turn them into full-fledged students of your school beyond producing leads. You are taken closer to this purpose by Google Analytics. It guarantees that you are spending the resources of your team in the right direction. For example, consider your website where you have a lot of webpages for prospects with different details. Google Analytics lets you know if there is more traffic to the scholarship/aids page which may also impact a decision to change the page.
7. Adopt the Model A/B test
At the end of the day, unless proved otherwise, no single marketing strategy is a guaranteed achievement. This is why when running the content marketing campaigns for student recruitment, it is always advisable to do A/B exams. Online forms, such as Course Eligibility forms, which predominate on university websites and landing pages, are an instance. There is no doubt that you want to ask a lot of questions about opportunities, which will assist in your follow-up activities.
Research reports that it is typically the organisations that do 30+ A/B tests a month with the highest conversion rates. If you want to increase your conversion rates, you need to learn how to use “Experiments” in Google Analytics and make A/B research a part of your everyday marketing activities. Start easily and run an A/B test on the call to action on your most important landing page. Learn from that, refine the page, and then keep at least one test running at all times.
8. Using CRO to heighten lead generation for higher education
Boost your Conversion Rates with CRO that is, Conversion Rate Optimization. Landing pages and “conversion events” are all included in your daily web pages. Generally, the purpose of all pages is to promote certain activities. A landing page is a conversion that is fairly clear. In order to facilitate registration, daily pages can contain a pdf download or a connection to another main page that you know is very relevant. Irrespective of the type of pages you manage or convert that you are looking for, you must see that each page has a target or several goals. You must learn and apply the principles of Conversion Rate Optimization to generate more leads.
9. Understand Conversion Attribution for your leads
Do you regularly and reliably track which of your lead sources converts at the highest speed. Do you know what the relationship between the guest and your lead sources is the highest rate of return. Google Analytics also offers a tool to help you carry out this analysis and gain a deeper insight into the effectiveness of your marketing. If you tag offline, you can also add these sources to your analysis and research which will eventually increase lead generation for your higher education institution.
10. Build further Conversion Events
The web pages must have converting events at crucial junctures to catch leads. Interactive video, chat agents, info request forms, document downloads, newsletters, e-books, email lists, campus visits, etc. are all examples of conversion points that can be incorporated into the platform at appropriate points to collect lead info. Create page flow and conversion events that represent the content requirements and psychographic characteristics for the best performance for your resources and boost lead generation for your higher education institution.
Armed with this information you should be able to boost your marketing game and you should be able to generate more and more leads for your higher education institution. For more information on higher education leads check out our informative article !
