Why is Digital Marketing Important for Your School?

The most effective way to reach Gen Z in 2023 is with digital marketing. The student journey looks different than in years past, with digital processes dramatically changing the direction and length of the path to higher education. 

Digital marketing helps you accomplish a number of goals: it can positively impact your school’s image, raise brand awareness,  and ultimately, drive future enrollments. With your target audience spending more time online than ever, now’s the time to take charge of your online presence. 

This guide will cover why digital marketing is important for your school and how you can implement it:

• Why digital marketing is important for your school
• How to get started with digital marketing
• Tools to make digital marketing easier

Why Digital Marketing Is Important for Your School

Marketing is all about positioning yourself to meet the needs of your customers where they are. With students spending most of their time online, accessing them on their preferred platforms is the perfect fit for your goals. 

Here are a few reasons that support that claim:

• According to recent research, Gen Z spends 8+ hours a day online, and 74% of them choose to spend their free time online.
• Digital marketing can specifically target students based on their program, online behavior, demographics, and more.
• Digital marketing doesn’t require the same overhead as traditional marketing; you can get significant results at a lower cost than print or broadcast marketing.
• Digital tools offer near-instantaneous, up-to-date campaign results, allowing you to discern your digital campaigns' ROI quickly. 
• Gen Z uses social media as a research tool to learn whether a school or brand aligns with their values. 
• According to the Digital Marketing Institute, not being present online can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. 60% of people consider it a bad experience when the brands they contact offer no response, and 84% expect a response within the first 24 hours.

A thorough digital marketing strategy is both effective and necessary, and it requires some thought.

How to Get Started With Digital Marketing

If you want to build a successful digital marketing strategy, it’s important that the foundation of your plan justifies the moves you make. We’ll take a look at some of the prerequisites you should consider and then map out how to bring your plan to life. 

Determine Your Place in the Industry

An important first step to any marketing plan is running a SWOT analysis on your school and your place within the industry. SWOT stands for:

• S: Strengths — What does your school do well? What competitive advantages does it have that other schools can’t match? 
• W: Weaknesses — What prevents your school from attracting international students? What would cause students to pick another school over yours? 
• O: Opportunities — Are there new technologies that you could implement? Which of your strengths are you not utilizing to its fullest extent? (i.e., if you have great writers on your team, you should focus on written content like blog posts and email campaigns instead of videos for TikTok.) 
• T: Threats — Competitors, learning curve of new technology, students’ visa issues, pandemic-related travel concerns, budget cuts, increased cost of higher education, U.S. political and cultural volatility, etc.

Conducting a SWOT analysis will help guide your actions as you start to build your marketing strategy. Always direct the focus of your marketing to areas that emphasize your strengths. 

Determine Which Channels to Utilize

The international student prospect pool in any given year is a limited bunch. Generalized strategies meant to attract the whole pool will yield subpar results, which is why it’s important to understand your audience, what makes them tick, and focus your efforts on attracting those specific students. 

Ask yourself these questions: 

• Which countries are represented in your international student population? Are these the countries that you want to continue to market to or would you like to broaden your student markets? (If so, you’ll need to consider the cultural needs of each market.)
• What inspired your current international students to search for your school?  
• What can you do to amplify the message they resonated with, but digitally? 
• What can you learn from marketing to your current students that you can use to draw in new markets?

Each social media platform (and blog, article, email campaign, etc.) draws similar audiences but for different purposes. 

What does Gen Z use each platform for?

• TikTok: Quick bursts of entertainment | Keeping up with trends | Building their own following
• Instagram: Visual storytelling | News resource | Getting a feel for a brand
• Facebook: Finding events | Catching up (occasionally)
• LinkedIn: Network building | Professional events 
• YouTube: Casual viewing | Low-effort content consumption 
• Blogs/Articles: High-value information | Comprehensive guides

This next part is the bit that takes some strategizing — you need to align your strengths with the channels that would best amplify them. If you’re just starting out, it’s best to focus on one or two platforms, but if you’re up to the challenge, creating unique experiences on each platform can lead to big results.

Here are two examples of matching your content to a platform: 

• Scenario 1: You’ve recently hired a highly regarded professor in the biotechnology field. Students would love the opportunity to hear from, and engage with someone of this professor’s stature and experience, so create an online event. Because it’s a hub for professionals, use Linkedin to promote it to students with interest in biotechnology, and hold the event on Facebook for its ability to amplify your reach to like-minded students.
• Scenario 2: A copywriter on your team is capable of writing high-value content for your website. After they create information-dense content, you repurpose quotes, statistics, and facts from their piece into small, shareable infographics that you use to create a gallery post on Instagram.

Now that you know what to focus on and where to implement it, it’s time to focus on the content.

Create a Content Plan

Now that you have your audience's attention, can you keep it? Quality content is the core of any successful marketing campaign. If your content is of higher quality than your competitors, students have no reason to go elsewhere. 

What does a strong content plan include?
​

• Understanding of student intent: Every marketer's goal is to guide the customer through the marketing funnel effectively. In a school search, the marketing funnel is comprised of three stages: awareness — someone’s first introduced to your school; consideration — they’re comparing your school to similar options; conversion — the stage where a student commits to your school. Similarly, you should aim to understand what students want at every stage of the funnel. Why did they click on your latest article? What are they looking for from your social media?

• Comprehensive content: Does your content satisfy student intent? Students shouldn’t have to click around to other articles or search elsewhere to find what they’re looking for. Now, this only applies to informational content — if your article is part of a blog or series, you should leave them wanting more — leading them into another piece. 
• Keywords: Keywords are words or phrases that an internet user types into their search engine to find content. Search engines recognize these phrases within articles and mix & match them with similar words that users have searched for — that’s how certain articles end up at the top of your search. 
• Ranked Keywords: Ranking for popular keywords raises your visibility online, but there’s a catch. It’s unlikely that you’ll rank for competitive keywords unless you already have a strong digital presence. Focus on more specific keywords — you’ll have less volume, but the quality of your leads will be much better. 
• Visually appealing content: Gen Z’s attention span is 8 seconds on average. You’re more likely to win them over with appealing graphics, infographics, or short videos than you are with long-form content. 
• Personable experiences: Gen Z has spent enough time on the internet to tell when something’s been touched up. They much rather prefer real, authentic content. This can include student testimonials, student-led live sessions, and generally engaging content — content that reflects what they’ll go through, by students who know from experience. 
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): At the end of each marketing campaign, you should assess whether you reached your goals and how you can improve. ​

Measure Your Marketing Campaign Performance 

Digital marketing has a number of tools that you can use to measure the performance of your campaigns. The question isn’t so much how to measure campaigns but what to measure. 

The student journey doesn’t go straight from exposure to conversion; it’s a long and winding road that looks different from one student to the next. Depending on where your students are in their journey — awareness, consideration, or decision — your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should reflect what that stage entails.

Download visual examples of current student journeys.

KPIs are the metrics used to measure the success of your campaign. Each metric represents a singular aspect of your content offering, and reflects the quality of the content that you’re putting out. For example, if your content has a strong subject line, it would be reflected by high open-rates. On the other hand, if your call-to-action for an advertisement is weak, few people will click on it resulting in low click-through-rates. 

Here are a few KPIs you can use at each stage to gauge performance:

• Awareness: Social media impressions, website page views, SEO rankings, open-rate, click-through-rate, bounce-rate
• Consideration: Time spent on page, engagement rate, pages per session
• Decision: Conversion rate, cost per conversion (ads) 

Marketing strategy is determined by what stage of the marketing funnel students are in, so each stage requires its own strategy. Likewise, the KPIs for each part of the funnel are meant to tell a different story, thus, will be different at each stage. 

Tools to Make Digital Marketing Easier

We know this is a lot to take in, but thankfully, there are lots of online tools that can make your life a lot easier. 

Here are a few that we recommend to get you started: 

• For scheduling content: Buffer
• For analyzing website performance: Google Analytics 
• For writing assistance: Grammarly 
• For keyword research: Semrush
• For email marketing: Mailchimp
• For blog management: WordPress

We’d also like to give an honorable mention to social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram — many of them have made enormous strides to give detailed insights into your posts’ performance.

You’ve Got This!With students spending more time online than ever before, the competition to win over international students has intensified. Digital marketing can be a powerful tool to tell your story, build your brand, and entice new students to attend your school. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing agency to develop and look after your digital marketing strategy get in touch with our team.