Ohio Marketing Agency for Schools

How to Use Digital Marketing to Increase Student Enrollment

Today’s career training and higher education schools exist within a highly competitive marketplace. In this fast-paced digital world, it can be challenging to increase student enrollment without the right digital marketing strategy. Students and their families now rely on information obtained through online searches and targeted marketing efforts to make data-informed decisions at various stages of their “buyer journey.”

Digital marketing is a proven and cost-effective way to find qualified students and enroll them in your programs. Still, marketing campaigns and funnels must be well designed to achieve desired response rates and recruitment success. Linear Creative’s team of digital marketing experts has significant experience helping private schools and professional course institutions amplify their enrollments through a comprehensive approach that involves a genuine understanding of a school’s culture and the programs it offers.

Effective ways to promote your school

It is essential that you invest your time, budget, and resources into the right marketing strategies. Here are some tips for improving enrollment at your school:

Identify stages of the marketing funnel. Your marketing funnel can build awareness, cultivate prospects and inquiries, and eventually drive commitments to schedule visits, apply for financial aid, and enroll in a program of study. Each stage of the recruiting effort needs to be identified along with measurable goals. Doing so will help you create targeted messages to build relationships, reinforce your brand, and address known concerns of potential students.

Optimize your website. A bad website experience, especially on mobile, can negate any investments made in other marketing efforts. You want to make sure your website makes an impactful design-related impression, is engaging, easy to navigate, and gives potential students the information they need in real time to act.

Leverage the power of social media. Social media gives potential students a chance to see whether they might fit in and thrive within your school’s programs or environment. Branded messaging, testimonials, user-generated content, and social media ads are excellent ways to share information and encourage interactions.

Use pay-per-click ads. PPC ads will help you rank above organic search results to drive a highly targeted audience to your website or landing page. Pairing paid ads with programming retargeting ads will help keep your brand in front of potential students, even after they have left your website, persuading them to reconsider all that your school has to offer.

Personalize drip email campaigns. Gaining attention is much easier than keeping it. There are a lot of steps between visiting campus and enrolling in classes. Frequent emails can guide parents and students through the progressive actions they need to take.

We’ve helped our education clients nearly double their enrollment in some cases.

When you work with Linear Creative, you get a partnership that’s mission-aligned, strategic, focused, and in touch with today’s students and parents. In the Columbus School of Practical Nursing case, we developed an authentic campaign targeted at specific population groups with highly-focused messages that generated nearly a 100% increase in overall enrollment in less than six months!