How to Promote Your Educational Institute

1 . Launch a beautiful website

A good looking website is what you need to have in the first place. If you check the websites of colleges or universities, you can see that they are content-rich and highly credible. The website should have a good design and must be neat and clean.

One of the best examples of a good looking website for an educational institution is of the University of Notre Dame. They have a highly interactive website, neat and clean design, and covers all sectors of the institution.

For instance, check their campus life page, it clearly communicates with the students what their life will be at the University of Notre Dame.

Check out the way they’ve listed their campus facilities, simple, stylish and communicative.

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You need to have pages for

  • Academics
  • Admissions
  • Campus Lifestyle
  • Gallery
  • Research
  • Events
  • Alumni
  • Media

etc

Another good looking modern website of an educational institution is of Bucknell University. You can see that they’ve used a video banner in home page, excellent typography, catchy images, and graphics, etc. They know the latest web design aesthetics it is very much visible in their website.

2. Active facebook and instagram pages

Having an active and well-maintained Facebook and Instagram page is another great way to promote your institution. The number of social media users is improving on a great scale.

In 2019, 2.95 billion people, or 77.0% of internet users worldwide, were social media users. In 2020, that number is expected to touch 3.4 billion.

source

So do you want to miss this large audience? Not a chance. Also, a major share of active social media users are students.

So how do you build an active Facebook or Instagram page? Here are some examples of the best pages of educational institutions.

1. Boston College

Boston College has a well-maintained Facebook page. They publish posts regularly. If you look at their Facebook page, you can see that their posts are highly interactive and creative.

Below given is one of their recent popular Facebook posts. This post is about their new self-service kiosk called bench, from which students and faculty can pick up amazon packages or drop off returns.

2. UC Berkely

UC Berkely’s facebook page is a good example of taking care of its followers. They are highly active in their comment section and you can see they often clear the queries of their followers.

As said, students/young people are the majority users of Instagram. Having a good Instagram page is also highly important as having a facebook page.

Let’s have a look at some of the well managed instagram profiles of two famous universities.

Liberty University

Liberty University has a highly active Instagram profile. They often showcase the real-life updates, and activities happening inside the university. This easily connects with students and other young people and they have a large fan base.

View this post on Instagram

The @libertymbb and @libertywbb teams were on the road today in New Jersey as they took on NJIT. Both teams played hard and earned victories! Cheer on your @libertyflames next week as they return to Lynchburg! #GoFlames #LibertyUniversity ????

Arizona State University

Arizona state university has a dynamic Instagram page. If you check their profiles, you can understand how technically advanced the faculty is and how cool the environment is.

Check out this popular post of Arizona state university. This post has received around 2700 likes and a large number of views. Instagram allows you to post 1-minute videos, and if you can make small videos about your educational institutions like this, Instagram is the best platform out there to market it.

View this post on Instagram

#ASUHomecoming ❤️????

A post shared by Arizona State University (@arizonastateuniversity) on

3. Video Marketing

YouTube is the best platform to market videos of your educational institution. Nowadays video marketing is getting an upper hand compared to content marketing. A good video will be shared across various social media platforms, websites, etc.

You can also use YouTube ads to promote your video content. If you can get a decent amount of subscribers eventually, you can get organic views on your videos. You can create awesome videos and market it before students and parents.

Have a look at this video of Boston College

This is one of their videos which went popular through YouTube.

4. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is another great way to promote your educational institution. Hubspot is the best platform out there to automate your marketing procedure.

Through marketing automation, you can

Send personalized messages to your followers through different mediums like social media, websites, emails, and text. Marketing automation helps in lead generation, nurturing, and conversions. You can also start different marketing campaigns, automate it, and promote it through hubspot.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is one of greatest methods to promote your educational institutions. The only thing to note is, you have to do it in the right way.

Maryville college had this huge problem that their conventional marketing methods were not reaching the younger digitally savvy students. They started using hubspot to do their email marketing. The results were astounding, they were able to improve their website traffic by 126% and was able to generate an ROI of 225%. They were able to enroll a recording-breaking number of students after the successful campaign(much more than 195 years of this history of Maryville college.

Success of your email marketing campaign depends on a large number of factors.

1. As far as an educational institution is considered, the majority of the recipients are below 25 years old. The very same email sent to a 50-year-old will not work with young people. You have to keep this in mind before sending each email campaign.

2. Personalization– make sure your email is personalized. A personalized email has higher open rates than a typical email.

3. Subject – Email open rate is highly dependent on your email subject. Make sure your titles are attractive.

6. Paid Advertising Campaigns

When it comes to 2020, here are some of the most popular advertising methods through which you can market your educational institution.

1. Facebook ads- For colleges, schools, and institutions, Facebook ads work best. It is the best advertising method to build a brand of your educational institution.

2. Google ads – Do your keyword research properly using google keyword planner. After doing your research you can make a list of keywords including long-tail keywords and run google AdWords campaign.

3. Instagram ads -The majority of the Instagram users are young people(students fall into this category). Instagram ads can be a great method to reach out to young students.

7. Run an Active Blog

Having an active blog can generate traffic to your websites and this traffic can be converted to leads. You can collect emails and phone numbers of these visitors. You can do keyword research on google and post more articles that are on demand.

8. Educational events to attract students

Hosting educational events can get more recognition for your institution and also attract more students and parents. Provide something valuable that can attract a large number of audience. These kinds of events can help parents/students to build a relation with your educational institution.

9. Host and participate in Webinars

Another good idea in promoting your educational institution is through your webinars. You can offer free webinars through your website or online webinar software like everwebinar. The backbone of any college, school, university, or any educational institution is education and teaching. Educating students through webinars can create a large number of audience for your educational institution.

You can offer webinars for free and this can build a large group of following to your institution. This way you can promote the credibility and trust of your institution.

10. Live streaming, Stories and Chat

One of the very effective marketing strategies is going live. Like going live from Facebook , posting a story on Instagram or Snapchat can create high interactions. If you have experience in Instagram marketing, you might know that stories have like 4X reach than a normal Instagram post.

Go with this trend to build a large audience and brand through various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

11. Live Chats/Chatbots

Using live chat/chatbot software like drift is a good method to convert visitors into potential students. Students/Parents who are looking to join a course will have lots of queries to clarify. Through a live chat system, you can connect with the people, collect emails and phone numbers, and market your highlights and specialties of your educational institution.

If you want to automate the live chat feature, you can always use a chatbot that can interact super smartly with the audience to get their email or phone number.

About the author

Linjo Joson

Linjo is a PHP developer who loves to write about online businesses and marketing ideas

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