Inbound marketing for the education sector attracts prospective students and their families by creating student-centric experiences, valuable content to engage them, answering their questions and encouraging them to interact with your institution.
Choosing a suitable school, college, or university has evolved from traditional outbound channels, that educational institutions had a great degree of control over, to inbound channels through which students and families can share opinions about schools, read reviews and research the institution. By the time the enrollment or admissions departments interact with a prospect, they already have a strong opinion about the school or college, which can work in your favour or against you. By employing an inbound methodology, educational institutions can take ownership of their online presence to a certain degree, helping shape the public's opinion about your institution.
The inbound methodology attracts customers by creating valuable content and tailored experiences at every stage of their journey. It achieves this via various pull marketing strategies that attract the customer to your company. Inbound marketing for education focuses on attracting students and their parents or guardians to your institution, meeting prospective families earlier than the admissions phase by creating content that answers their questions and encourages them to engage with your school or college. To grow and reach their target audience, schools and colleges must attract people to their website through relevant content and then provide help, support and empower current and future students to reach their goals.
An institution highlights its unique selling points via inbound marketing, helping it attract the right audience, increase its enrolments and their quality as the school or college attracts students and families that align with the institution's values. The schools can employ various inbound marketing strategies to achieve this, such as content creation, email marketing, social media presence or events, and other traditional engagement methods. Creating relevant, helpful and engaging content is critical as this represents the main element through which prospects learn about your institution. The content should always be created considering search engine optimisation (SEO). This allows your audience to discover your content through search engines ranking keywords used by you in your content, and prospects when researching schools and colleges.
Some of the most common and effective content types include:
- Blogging: through blog posts, prospects can find answers to their questions. They help the institution provide value and build trust with their target audience while generating content reusable in other marketing efforts.
- Website: the website is an institution's central representation online; thus, it must communicate and reinforce the value offered by the school or college to prospective and enrolled students, answering any questions about the institution and providing all of the pages that a prospect would expect to find.
- Landing Pages: the pages within your website that are specifically designed to convert visitors into prospects, encouraging them to take action, So they must be designed and optimised to reduce friction, remove distractions and prompt actions.
- Content Offers: represent private content that provides additional value to your prospects, such as a prospectus, guides or calculators. Content offers encourage conversion from visitors or prospects into contact.
- Social Media: having a social media presence and posting regularly is imperative to the inbound methodology for educational institutions as they represent an effective way to promote your content and interact with the audience.
- Validation Points: methods and materials through which the institution can prove its value and build trust with visitors and prospects, such as statistics, reports, data or testimonials.
The inbound methodology for educational industries is constructed from the same three stages of the inbound process - attract, engage and delight - adapted for the education sector.
1. Attract
The objective is to capture the attention of your target audience, attracting the target students and their families to your school or college through inbound marketing methods such as content tailored to the specific buyer personas created. To reach the audience, a school or college must start by creating and publishing relevant content – such as blog articles, content offers, and social media posts – to provide value and become relevant and helpful.
Examples of content that the institution could provide:
- A guide on how to choose the right university
- A blog post to help parents with subject option choices for their child
- Social media posts about student success stories at your college
- Social media posts about the next stage of the admissions process
The content produced must be optimised with SEO strategies to attract audiences deeper and move them further along their customer journey. Building an SEO strategy requires a school or college to identify and target keywords and phrases related to your products and services, what challenges you solve for customers, and how you help them. An effective SEO strategy will allow an institution's content and information to appear on search engine pages organically so that people who search for that information can easily find you.
More information about SEO and how it works can be found here.
2. Engage
The objective at this stage is to engage the audience by communicating with them, handling their enquiries and building long-term relationships with prospective students and families. An institution should use engagement strategies to showcase how the school or college will provide value to their students. The conversations should be tailored and personalised to each contact, reassuring prospective students why the institution will benefit them.
Prospects and students engage with various teams during their customer journey; some examples of departments or teams include:
- Marketing and events team
- Registrar/admissions team
- Senior leadership team
- Heads of Department/School (academic)
- Heads of House/Year/Student Services (pastoral)
- Receptionists/administrators
- Boarding/accommodation team
- SENCo/Support team
Analysing the customer journey and synchronising the conversations' goals across the team allows the school or college to offer the best possible service and be helpful to prospective students and their families throughout their experience with you.
The engage stage also captures the prospects' contact details and interests. Thus, when capturing student data, forms existent on the institution's website, the database and CRM functionality, call-to-action buttons and smart content must all be optimised to accurately and efficiently capture the desired data; as well as being personalised for communications. Engaging effectively with prospects allows an institution to establish a mutually beneficial relationship by using the needs of the prospective students and families to drive conversations.
- Engagement strategies that help achieve this include:
- How a school or college handles and manages admission calls
- How events such as open days or taster days are managed
- What solutions the institution offers to their needs
3. Delight
The objective, in this final stage, is to ensure that customers are content with the provided services long after they committed to your institution. Keeping students happy, satisfied and supported post-enrolment is very important. The school or college's teams become advisors and experts who can support students at any point or assist them whenever necessary. A common and effective delight strategy is using thoughtful, well-timed chatbots and surveys to help, support and request feedback from your students and families. Chatbots and surveys implemented at specific points throughout the customer's journey ensure that they are placed precisely when needed and of value.
Satisfaction surveys can also be employed to delight prospects and students; for example, surveys sent following an open day or surveys for students who have completed their first term at the institution can be used to capture feedback and delight prospects. The institution's blogs, website and social media content also facilitate the customer's delight. They represent channels through which students and their families can view student success stories, videos and exciting events or engage in meaningful conversations.
Followers, students or families may also provide feedback through your social media platforms. They may ask questions or share their experience with your services, which allows your institution to respond to these interactions, sharing information that helps followers and lets them know that the school or college cares for and values them. The delight stage ensures that the inbound strategy focuses on delighting customers in any situation, assisting and supporting them whether or not the institution gets any value from it. This stage is vital to the inbound methodology as it powers the flywheel: a delighted customer becomes a promoter, or an advocate, for your school or college, providing valuable reviews and word-of-mouth that attracts more prospecting students and families to your institution.