Are you struggling to achieve success with student enrolments every admissions season? What does your enrolment success rate look like? Is it average, bad, or barely surviving? If it is any of the three, there are fair chances that you have been acquiring irrelevant leads over the time.
This is the situation with most of the student recruitment teams in 760 universities and 38000+ colleges of India. It means there is a fierce competition for student enrolment.
If you are not getting the right students for your course, you probably need to fix your marketing strategy. The problem might be with the lead generation channels you are utilizing to reach your targeted persona.
Don’t worry! It’s time to change your admissions marketing strategy and start working on establishing your presence on some of the most popular lead generation channels in 2023.
We have collated a list of 4 popular channels that every B school should be using to generate good leads and boost their enrolments. Here we go –
Paid Media has become one of the most relevant channels for admissions marketing of a B Schools all across the world. Students are more active on search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. They can be targeted via ads.
Google Adwords is one of the most versatile platforms that can help you boost your enrolments in 2023. Students can be targeted on the basis of keywords, websites they are viewing, applications they are using, locations, age, company, and many other filters. You need to be spot on in your strategy.
Google Ads enables you to showcase your institution’s ad on it search results, partner network, Gmail, and even on YouTube. Video ads can be leveraged to the fullest to improve lead numbers and generate quality leads.
Similarly, Facebook and Instagram can be leveraged to showcase your ads to the target personas. You can run carousel ads, image ads, video ads, and few other ad formats on Facebook/Instagram. Proper optimizations can be done to improve the lead quality. Moreover, Facebook/Instagram can help you generate leads at a budget price.
If your targets are experienced professionals, then LinkedIn can be the ideal platform to generate most qualified leads for the program. You can hit the right target with the level of optimizations available on LinkedIn. However, the cost per lead might be on a higher side, but you will get hottest leads from this platform.
Other options to run paid advertisements are Quora, Twitter, and even Reddit. But Google, Facebook/Instagram, and LinkedIn are the most recommended platforms to start with. Level up your enrolment game with paid ads.
Portals like Shiksha, CollegeDunia, Pagalguy, and many others can be another great platform to feature your college and attract students from there. Ensure that you get your website listed on these portals, at least to give your brand a push.
You can later opt for premium display ad slots and other premium listings to fetch leads from these aggregator websites. Millions of students visit these websites every month in search of relevant information. There are fair chances that they might look to apply at some college during the admissions season.
Now, having a top listing of your institution or running a display banner of your institution on these websites can help you a lot in generating good leads. College aggregators will give you a good number of leads that can be worked upon towards enrolment.
The other benefit that you may get after listing your websites on these college aggregators is increase in website traffic. Websites like Shiksha, CollegeDunia, CollegeVidya etc. rank of Google on several popular keywords. Users landing to these websites might see your listing and visit your website directly.
So, these aggregators can also act as a source of generating qualified traffic on your website.
B Schools investing heavily on the first two channels lack behind in organic efforts in most of the cases. There website experience is poor, content marketing is missing, they don’t rank on competitive keywords, and ultimately, they have less organic traffic.
Organic SEO is a long-term game and this is the reason why most of the B Schools don’t like it. Even if they start with it, they lose their patience and stop investing in their SEO efforts. And this is one of the biggest mistakes they do.
SEO not only helps you rank high on Google on certain keywords, it also helps you to boost your organic lead funnel. And believe me, organic leads are the most qualified leads that you will receive. The chances of such leads converting into a paid application and then to enrolment are much higher as compared to any other source.
B Schools focusing on organic SEO will see a huge jump in their enrolments in 2023. This is for sure.
Chatbots are here to reduce manual labour and enhance productivity of the admissions team. Chatbots can be trained to answer a few queries that a prospect might ask. Gone are the days when your prospects would have to wait for a specific time to get in touch with you. One of the reasons why chatbots are much more effective is they offer solutions to prospects’ queries within seconds.
Before registering in your school’s program, the prospective students would need answers to the queries related to the duration of your program, the contents of your course, fee structure, accommodation, and much more. Though most of the information will be available on the website, most of the people still like to ask questions. Chatbots can make this process fast and fun.
You can program the chatbots with automated responses, providing answers to common questions immediately. Students/prospects don’t have to wait to get their answers. The more data you feed to the chatbot, the better it will be able to accommodate every stage of the student’s life cycle. Higher ed chatbots can build a knowledge base about the B School and can enable you to capture leads.
The competition is getting harder every year. Admissions marketing is becoming a critical asset for the B Schools. If done right, a B School can expect better enrolments, else, competitors will take the lead. If you are looking to hit the sweet spot in 2023 and stand out from the competition, you need to add these 4 lead generation channels to your admissions marketing strategy.
Start from today and make your admissions season a great success.