Digital Marketing for Higher Education

We develop your high performing custom digital marketing strategies, based on your prospect journey data and outcome measurements provided by your admissions teams (not form fills). We learned long ago that getting a prospective student to fill out a form is simply not enough. Our digital marketing campaigns are built and managed with the sole purpose of targeting high-intent prospects that are the most likely to enroll.

What better way to understand true prospect intent than to analyze the entire student journey from the first click all the way to class-start (and sometimes beyond). We acquire this level of prospect profile detail using sophisticated attribution models installed across multiple marketing channels visited by your prospects.

Tying this journey data directly into your ever-so-important admissions data powers up our marketing data by leveraging the outcome data housed by your school’s CRM, SIS, or any other lead management systems. This all sounds quite simple but the devil is in the details and that is what sets Edufficient apart from most other digital advertising firms.

Website Content Marketing

Your school’s website is a must-have tool for your enrollment marketing strategy as it provides you with a dedicated foundation where you can nurture and educate prospective students about your brand, programs, and education products. This requires a solid understanding of your target audience and the application of an effective SEO-friendly content marketing strategy.

At the rate that students are consuming program-related research content, having the right mix of these top-performing content types can exponentially increase your website traffic and engagement metrics. Ultimately, this can result in better brand recognition, authority building, and new enrollment opportunities for your school.

Organic Search (SEO)

When prospective students look for schools and programs, they’ll tend to consider those schools that rank higher. Standing out from the competition in the higher education market means that you’ll be harnessing new opportunities organically, and driving a consistent lead generation by seducing them further down your enrollment funnel.

Investing in a solid education-based SEO campaign can pay dividends in terms of ROI.  Additionally, a well-ranked website acts as the foundation by which all other marketing efforts rely (this includes traditional as well as digital marketing for higher education).

Voice Search

As stated, mobile phone use is considerably up in the education-seeking demo. Due to the close relationship between voice and mobile phone usage, it’s important to invest in the mobile optimization of your school’s website when attempting to capitalize on this upward trend.

In addition to the upswing in mobile, voice-activated search devices like Google Home, iPhone/Siri, Amazon Echo/Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana. Most of Edufficient’s digital marketing campaigns take serious consideration of voice search and implement those optimization techniques wherever possible.

Paid Search (SEM)

One of the advantages of using paid search as part of your digital marketing strategy is that your ads are shown above organic search results, making them more visible to users. Even with a pay per click model, a well managed PPC campaign can create a lot of marketing. With strategically placed positioning above organic results, your school can still capture that engaged student prospect before your competition’s search results are seen.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has become so widespread that it reached 3.9 billion users in 2020, and the figures are expected to grow to 4.3 billion users in 2023. With a properly managed campaign, email marketing can facilitate growth in both a school’s enrollment and retention.

What’s more, is that email marketing is not only one of the more affordable marketing methods used by colleges and universities but it’s also one of the most effective when it comes to seeing a return on investment (ROI). For every single dollar that the marketing team spends on email marketing, they see an average return of $44.

Social Media Marketing

We use social media advertising in our digital marketing campaigns not just because of the 3.81 billion people that use it but we find it especially effective for the education-seeking demographic. We find our client’s brand travels and converts well on social because people use the platforms to establish personal connections. Because of this very special personal relationship data, we see social media as an evolving media outlet that does extremely well to supplement our client’s campaigns.

Mobile App Marketing

The number of mobile phone users in the education-seeking demo is increasing by the day, and this trend is predicted to explode in the years to come. Because of this, it only makes sense for schools to serve promotional content to mobile using prospects. With geo-targeting and geofencing strategies, location data is used to promote school’s programs and educational products more easily than that of other mediums.

Video Marketing

Video content has become a key marketing tool for higher education institutions. Video is an adaptable, provocative advertising medium. Video is a consistently proven driver of increased click-through rates and better overall conversions. Well produced marketing videos are also likely to persist in the memory of prospects helping them to trust your brand and increase the likelihood of conversion the next time your brand is presented. The strategic use of video can undoubtedly meet and exceed your school’s marketing goals

Display Ads

Display ads allow your school to use a variety of marketing collateral including images, audio, and video to distribute your marketing message visually. These display ads are shown on networks approved websites (Google, Bing, etc), email platforms, social media platforms, and many other digital marketing channels that offer strategic ad placements.

We utilize display ads for our client’s campaigns because of how the cost-benefit relates to the display ad performance. Compared to search ads, display ads generally have lower cost-per-click due to the amount of advertising space available across the web (when comparing to that of a search engine result page).

One of the biggest differences is that you can’t target keywords as effectively. The success we have in display advertising is based on how well our experienced paid search managers can match your school’s ad to the host website’s audience through traffic analytic research. The biggest benefit we find in display ads is the ability to reach prospective students for retargeting.

Marketing Automation

Implementing a smart marketing automation campaign for your school can be a difference-maker when competing in the current market. Nurturing leads, increasing admissions, and generating continued brand patronage is not only valuable but can put you out ahead of the competition. Edufficient customizes marketing automated workflows to help keep your student prospects engaged and moving down the funnel closer to conversion.

Regardless of Channel, Attribution Wins the Day

Connecting all the technical dots from the beginning of the student journey all the way to enrollment or start takes a good amount of coordination between several systems.  Edufficient’s marketing experts and development team take on the burden of complex systems integration linking up all of the technologies that collect lead and attribution data and organize it to show a crystal clear path of your prospect’s journey along with all the data that comes with it.  

Having all the journey data tied to the final outcome data gives us a huge advantage in finding the perfect target audience as well as letting us know which prospects to avoid.  The result is a more efficient use of your digital marketing spend and an increased chance of meeting and exceeding your enrollment goals.