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Digital Marketing Strategies to Help Grow Your Education Business

on January 18, 2022

Digital Marketing Strategies to Help Grow Your Education Business

Once you’ve established your school or educational institution, the next step to growth is to get the word out to potential students and to start filling up enrollment spots. Pre-internet, the best way of getting this done was to advertise in local magazines and newspapers, partner with local schools, or canvas the neighborhood with fliers about your organization. Today, however, the go-to method for increasing awareness about your school, tutoring program, or educational institution is through the use of digital marketing. Given that almost everyone has access to a smartphone, computer, and internet connection, a savvy digital marketing strategy is going to give you the best bang for your buck when it comes to reaching the largest possible audience.

The topic of digital marketing is as broad as its potential scope, and so we’re going to give you a general overview of some strategies you should be focusing on to help you grow your school.

Optimize your website experience

Your website is the first port of call for denizens of the internet looking to discover information about your business. Because first impressions matter, your website should be attractive, intuitive to navigate, and contain all essential information about your school.

To improve the user experience for visitors to your website, make sure that it is:

  • Fast to load. Slow websites kill business, as there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to access a website that takes forever to load. If visitors have to wait an unreasonable time to access your website, they’ll likely move on before they even get a chance to view it.
  • Responsive. Whether your website is being accessed on a laptop, monitor, or mobile device, it should look equally attractive and proportionate. Since 55% of page views come from mobile devices, it’s critical that visitors get a good experience regardless of the device they use to view your website.
  • Easy to navigate. If your visitor is looking for a certain form, document, or contact detail, this information should be no more than three clicks away from your homepage. Important data buried deep within your website is frustrating to search for and will likely discourage visitors.
  • Compelling. The old adage “content is king” is truer today than it ever has been. Your website’s content should be witty, clear, informative, and current to encourage visitors to stay on your site and further explore your services.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines are the access routes to all information on the internet, and this includes your website. Using purpose-built web crawlers that analyze a number of different site variables cross-referenced by search terms, search engines determine which results are given priority and appear higher up on the search engine results pages (SERPS). To make sure that your website appears above competitors, it’s important that you have a solid SEO strategy in place. While this strategy can be endlessly extensive (and really, there’s no end to how much you can learn), it should be centered around the following principles:

  • Figuring out which keywords people use when searching for your service and making sure your website includes an appropriate number of them. This doesn’t mean you should spam them on every page, however, as this will actually affect your website negatively.
  • Producing relevant content (often using a blog) that provides value, answers questions, and solves problems for visitors to your website. This content should also contain relevant keywords mentioned in the point above.
  • Including backlinks to authoritative websites, and, if possible, getting authoritative sites to link back to your website.
  • Ensuring that your text, images, videos, and metadata are optimized according to SEO best practices.

Build a social media presence

Promoting your school or educational institution through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even TikTok can be extremely advantageous. Not only does this allow you to build a community that you can access at a moment’s notice, but it facilitates high-quality communication that allows you to really speak and listen to your followers. And since social media platforms are very popular among younger internet users, it’s a great opportunity to connect with potential students, understand their concerns, and tweak your platform based on their needs.

Communicate with visitors via a school blog

School blogs are great not only for SEO purposes as mentioned above, but they’re also a great tool for communicating with your users and attracting new visitors to your website. In addition, blogging allows you to establish yourself as an authority in your industry – in this case, education – and publish useful content that will consistently attract visitors looking for valuable, utilitarian content. If a blog post is particularly useful, people are likely to share it, resulting in greater reach, visibility, and impact.

Email marketing

Creating a weekly or monthly newsletter and sending it to your mailing list is a low-cost yet surprisingly powerful communication tool. The key to pulling this off is to start a mailing list and build up a catalog of individuals that you can email weekly, bimonthly or monthly. A popular way of doing this is by creating a branded opt-in pop-up form on your website that will allow visitors to sign up for your newsletter. You can then use this list to communicate and broadcast useful educational news, promotions, and other content which you think will help your business.