Everyone wants a new start in the New Year: you, your prospective students, and even your enrollment marketing strategy. It’s the perfect time to start fresh and reach for even greater success.
The first step for a successful New Year’s new start is looking backward. Take the time to reflect on last year’s enrollment marketing strategy. Did you reach your enrollment goals? Did you have a clear plan in place, and was it executed well? The second step is to revise your strategy in line with your new goals for the new year, and the third step is to get started with your new enrollment strategy!
Today, we’ll go over all three of these steps, and what they might look like for your educational institution.
Reflect
Your enrollment marketing is responsible for showing your prospective students that your school is the ideal place for their new start. You’ve chosen the field of education to help people learn, but you can’t do that until you turn prospective students into current students. Is your enrollment marketing accomplishing that?
Take a look at your enrollment funnel from start to finish to see where you might be losing prospective students.
- Does your overall branding style and messaging portray the student as the hero of their own story, and your institution as the guide to help them achieve their goals?
- Do you have engaging content and lead generators that will attract people to your website?
- Is your website easy to read and viewable on both computers and mobile devices?
- Do all of your marketing materials (including your emails, website, and ads) display a clear call-to-action?
Revise
Once you’ve reflected on what strategies succeeded and what strategies needed work, then you can take the time to plan a new strategy that will help you reach the students who need the programs and degrees you offer.
Greenstone Media’s Enrollment Marketing Blueprint can help you find strategies to address the gaps in your enrollment marketing. Instead of a one-size-fits-all enrollment plan, our Blueprint is a way for our experienced team members to apply new strategies to your specific enrollment marketing gaps. If you already have an easily accessible website with a clear call-to-action, great! That improves your user experience and increases your chance of converting more traffic into enrollments. With that taken care of, we might then focus on maximizing your SEO keyword usage and expanding your email campaign strategies to get more people onto your website.
Alternatively, if you’re investing in a strategy like pay-per-click advertising, the Greenstone Media team can advise you on how best to focus those strategies in ways that reach audience members.
As a general rule, specificity is always good when advertising your institution. Your pay-per-click advertising should target keywords related to your institution’s specific strengths, like “Sports Management Degree,” and Facebook ads for a traditional college enrollment may have a higher enrollment rate if you focus on reaching students in local and nearby areas.
Restart
You’re ready to get started once you’ve created your new enrollment marketing strategy that builds off of your past successes and addresses any past challenges. Navigating the digital landscape of enrollment marketing can be tricky, but with student-centered messaging and strategic inbound marketing, you can connect with your future students.
To see the change that Greenstone Media can help your institution achieve, check out our partnership with Toccoa Falls College!
Toccoa Falls College is a four-year independent liberal arts institution that provides degree programs to individuals who may otherwise have difficulty accessing higher education. They wanted to increase their enrollment numbers to reach and help the students who needed them most. Our Greenstone Media team helped them reflect on past enrollment strategies and developed a custom digital marketing strategy that would address their admissions goals.
We helped them design Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads to drive leads to their lovely website, and the results speak for themselves. With their custom marketing strategy, Toccoa Falls College was able to generate 232 enrollment leads, 9,544 new visitors to their website, and achieve a 15% overall increase in enrollments.
Let Greenstone Media Help You Achieve Your New Year Goals!
Accomplishing a new and effective enrollment strategy can seem daunting, but that’s where Greenstone Media can help. Our experience in higher education enrollment marketing gives us the tools to design and implement a clear and effective strategy in the new year.
Are you ready to reach your enrollment growth goals?
It’s time to reflect, revise, and restart your enrollment marketing strategy. Leap into your new start by scheduling a call to discuss your enrollment marketing needs today!
