As the world continues to adjust to the global disruption caused by COVID-19 in 2021, educational marketing must do the same.
What is education marketing?
This promotes and facilitates the use of valuable educational content by institutions and individuals. Educational content will reach the desired target audience with the right education marketing strategy, resulting in higher conversions.
What is the potential for digital marketing in education?
The e-learning market is flooded with online courses, videos, eBooks, and websites, making it challenging for new products or services to stand out without a well-planned and executed marketing strategy. When it comes to reaching a larger audience with a new product, digital marketing is both cost-effective and allows for precise targeting. Furthermore, digital allows education marketing to improve performance tracking and ROI.
Digital marketing for the education sector
Traditional marketing strategies are no longer appropriate for targeting younger demographics in today’s digital world. If educational institutions want to reach a large audience cost-effectively, they must have a greater focus on digital channels. Email, web content, social media, paid search are examples of such channels. It is challenging to use digital and other marketing channels, but the potential to greatly increase revenue and decrease cost per lead is enormous, making digital marketing an important cornerstone of any education marketing strategy.
The most significant benefit of digital advertising over traditional advertising is precise targeting based on demographics, intent, engagement patterns, and other factors. Digital marketing enables us to target graduate students who live in a specific area and have previously expressed an interest in a specific product or service, this type of targeting can have a huge impact on the click-through rate of advertising campaigns, as well as all other important metrics.
Case study
Melbourne Polytechnic: driving global prospects to one of Melbourne’s largest higher educational institutions.
Melbourne Polytechnic [Polytechnic] has been in the vocational education industry for over 100 years! They grew beyond the scope of a traditional TAFE institute (Technical and Further Education Institution) that blends practical learning and traditional theory with increased pathways to higher education.
Background
Polytechnic together with our parent company Momentro drew out a six-month campaign, which reached millions and generated quality leads from the desired target audience.
Target Audience
Five (5) countries from the APAC region, namely – Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka & Vietnam.
Our Content Approach
1 Social media posts
Parents and students alike spend a lot of time on social media sites, and educational institutions should establish a presence on sites like Facebook and Instagram to engage with them and learn more about their wants and expectations. Content published on social media should be bite-sized, captivating, and in line with the image the institution is trying to build.
Examples –
Each post was focused on one message. Digital marketing educational posts speak for themselves, you do not want that message to be confusing.
Polytechnic went on to reach their target audience via Facebook and Instagram via interesting posts that were sure to catch the eye of our target audience. These posts were used to drive traffic into the website as well as generate messages into the inbox.
2 Storytelling
a. Student Videos
Despite the pandemic/travel restrictions, Melbourne Polytechnic was able to organize online interviews with students from each target country, which were produced into videos.
These videos presented the students journey and what they believe and look forward to doing in their promising future.
b. Student Articles on the Polytechnic Website
Momentro developed testimonials of students from various backgrounds, which were featured on the Melbourne Polytechnic website. Testimonials help create a deeper, more emotional appeal for your brand. These testimonials strengthened the reputation of Polytechnic by expressing the trust that the international students have in Polytechnic and its business offerings.
3 Lead Magnet – the 900+ social media lead generation campaign.
Any rookie digital marketer can run a lead generation campaign, but not everyone can produce quality leads from a target audience which is a niche compared to the total audience in Facebook & Instagram. Reaching the right audience has its challenges. The present target audience are picky and only provide contact details on lead forms for content that is relevant to them and provides the right level of engagement and value
Example of our lead form – Marketing & sales came together in order to convert these leads.
4 Student game (web app)
Education marketing along with marketing in different industries face the challenge of locking in the attention of the target audience. In order to overcome this, Momentro developed a student game (web app) to canvas potential students/quality leads.
The game was developed to engage students who are interested in –
- Testing their knowledge about Melbourne city.
- Testing their knowledge about Melbourne Polytechnic.
- Basics of Hospitality.
- Basics of Accounting.
- Basics of Information Technology.
Prizes were given for the top 10 players on the leaderboard.
The game turned out to be a tremendous success as our goal (canvassing potential students) was met along with uplifting the brand image of Polytechnic from its competitors. We were able to produce a large volume of quality leads (apart from the social media lead generation campaign) from the student game.
Conclusion
The traffic campaign was orchestrated to generate website sessions into different parts of the website. Further, the quality of content and traffic to the site resulted in further positive outcomes including ‘Polytechnic’ showing on top of ‘SERP’ for organic search results such as – ‘Melbourne TAFE institutes’ and ‘Melbourne accounting course’.
Whilst the current global pandemic poses challenges to industries especially Education institutes and their global marketing efforts, this period still provides the opportunity for education institutes to engage and drive leads amongst prospective students using the right digital marketing strategies.
References
1. https://comboapp.com/higher-education-marketing-agency/education-marketing-strategies
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401220308082
3. FB Ad Console
Written by Savin Gamalath, Senior Executive – Account Management