So, it’s that time of the year for enrolment again.

After many departmental meetings, you’ve confirmed your academic calendars, student discounts, promotion, intake period and it's time to prepare for the Open Day.

You’re confident that the university you represent is reputable, but is that good enough? Will word of mouth, flyers, Google, Facebook and Instagram ads be enough to reach your targeted students and parents?

And what about digital marketing? Your friend mentioned that landing pages helped her university to get the right prospects interested in enrolling in the school. But how so? Should you test it out too?

If you’ve read the title of this article, of course it’s what we’d advocate for!

Allow us to share 5 of our best practices for education landing pages that we’ve learned throughout the years. This will help you to convert prospects into students.

If you come on board with us, this is a sneak peek of what our partnership would look like.

Layout your concerns first

We’re aware that your school/university is the best. And we want your prospects to know that as well! But, what’s the catch? What’s the concern you and your team are having?

If you’ve worked with us - you’ll know that this is a question that we WILL ask you.

If your previous campaign did not perform well, we must identify the factor upfront. Together, let’s lean into the possible drawbacks, so that we can explore strategies to work around it.

Don’t hesitate to be transparent with the concerns you have (every uni has one), so that we can plan ahead to produce the best possible landing page to increase the enrolment of the program you’re offering.

Example 1.0

Be clear: Who do you want to speak to?

Are you speaking to the parents or the student? This would largely depend on the level of education your school offers. In addition to that, researching and developing personas for your existing members would help you better understand how to target your students/parents.

This will also depend on the university identity that you want to showcase, according to your values, lifestyle appeal, culture, special programs, financial aids and more.

Here are some food for thought:

• Students are a competitive market, and targeting a generation that has grown up with online advertising can be tricky.
  (Bear in mind that there is a growing level of apathy among Gen Z towards online adverts.)

• Your student personas will differ depending on whether they are an undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD student or international student.
  (Any lower than that, parent personas will be more important)

• Students attend higher education to enrich their knowledge, but they also want to feel welcome, protected, and free to explore their identity as well.
  (How does your university experience cater to that?)

• Parents want the best education for their children, but ultimately, they want them to be safe and happy too.
  (How can you give that assurance to parents?)

  
  

Example 1.1

In other words, you’ll need to be clear of whose attention you’re planning to get. What are their needs, interests and personality according to your experience? If you’re unsure, your database and marketing team will have the answer. Ultimately, your USP will have to attract the driving force of the final decision.

Design, language, campaign structure, and overall direction will be decided based on your students and/or parents’ persona. Once you provide us with your findings, we’ll put our team to work to develop a landing page that’s tailored just for your university.

Make Timely Optimisation

Once a campaign is running, you’ll have access to a LIVE Marketing Dashboard, and a LIVE Leads Dashboard. Meanwhile, we’ll measure the campaign’s performance based on the structure we’ve collectively agreed on.

Along the way, we may discover a keyword that’s working better than the others, or a keyword that may be attracting the wrong set of people. In the event of that situation, we’ll suggest to eliminate or to experiment with alternative keywords to attract leads of higher quality.

Example 1.2

For some universities, the sign-up forms perform on the first fold. For others, it works better at the bottom. Which would work better for you?

You see, many campaigns fail because there’s no practice of daily monitoring. If we only evaluate it at the end of every campaign, it’ll be too late. Keep close to our updates and suggestions. We don’t leave you alone once it’s running; we watch it unfold actively with you throughout the campaign period.

Track prospects’ Behavior

It’s important to analyze how people interact with your landing page.

• Which course do they spend most time reading?

• Which button do they click most?

• How far down do they scroll down a page?

Don’t wait until the end of the campaign to analyze the result. Study it in-the-moment so that you can identify which course or fact is successfully getting their attention. Or perhaps, we could check why they’re not converting into leads as well. We’ll always be updating you on all the notable findings so that you’ll know what’s getting your student’s attention.

With that, we’ll know which item to enhance and what obstacles to remove to increase the likelihood of intake sign-ups for the course you’re offering.

Adapt, and keep adapting.

After more than 10 years of creating landing pages, one can say that we’ve learned the “best templates” that can be used for all education landing pages. Well, it's true - we know how it works by now. But if we were to carry that mindset, how are we going to help YOU when a sudden crisis (or pandemic) hits us?

Take our COVID 19 Pandemic for example. Suddenly, all Open Days are placed on hold. Everything is placed on hold. We conduct meetings and end it with no answers. Zoom? Is Zoom the answer to everything?

Eventually, you settle with the fact that maybe, you could try a Virtual Open Day. It may not be what you want, but it serves the need of the season.

Have we ever done that? No. But after tireless coordination, it was made possible!

Example 1.3 (Click play!)

• Virtual Hall

• Virtual Booths

• LIVE Chat

• Real-time Dashboard

• Seamless Navigation

In other words, let’s spend less time counting losses and more time adapting to fit the climate. Change calls for you (as educators) and us (as digital marketing consultants) to move forward.

None of us should ever take our experiences for granted. Let’s always be on the lookout to adapt in order to stay relevant, together.

With that, here’s a FREE Education Landing Page Campaign Checklist to get you started with your digital marketing strategy!

Click the link below to download now!