When it comes to marketing higher education institutions, it can be difficult to stand out amongst the competition. Every strategy to set your institution apart from others matters. Our team at Zozimus are experts in the social media, digital marketing and public relations space, and have produced impactful results for higher education clients time and again. Here are our top tips for promoting your institution to prospective students and parents..
Social Media Strategies
When it comes to targeting prospective students, meeting them where they are is essential to bringing awareness to your higher education intuition. So, where are they? Social media, of course. Each social media platform speaks to different audiences. Prospective students have a higher volume on TikTok and Instagram, where parents can be found on Facebook and even Linkedin. By creating specific campaigns on each platform, you can optimize your messaging and engage your audience to garner interest in enrolling.
Our team worked with Bay Path University to create the #MyPath campaign. This campaign featured long form interviews with various members of the Bay Path University community. The goal of this campaign was to share a wide variety of experiences that prospective students could engage with. This campaign had 310K impressions and 16K direct engagements.
Paid Media Campaigns
Finding your audience goes beyond social media, but also allowing your higher education institution to be easily found through online search. With an overwhelming amount of competition, it’s essential to have a fully encompassed paid media and SEO strategy. Allowing your institution to rise in search ranks will create brand recognition and increase engagement.
When working with Bryant University, our digital marketing team created a “Bryant Student Model” based on 4 years of admission data. This allowed us to build data-driven campaign targeting by fields such as zip codes and the most effective and desirable markets for Bryant to advertise in. These paid campaigns resulted in a 25% increase of applicants for the Fall 2022 class.
Marketing to Parents
With the rising cost associated with tuition and other college expenses, in order to market your university, it doesn’t come down to just marketing to prospective students. Senior VP of Strategy, Jake Garber, explores pivoting university strategy to include marketing directly to parents of prospective students. “Introducing parallel ‘parent marketing’ to run alongside prospective student marketing optimizes our clients’ efforts by activating a key center of influence within the decision and selection process. Initial results of this marketing style have proven successful enough that we have begun creating formal digital marketing budgets specifically for parents/guardians across the funnel.”
Working with the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, our digital marketing team worked to bridge the engagement with parents and prospective students. Zozimus created content for the Academy’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages, focusing on sharing cadet milestones, campus activities, career stories, and hands-on learning experiences. These campaigns resulted in over 17M impressions and a 2.8K audience increase.
Ready to market your higher education institution? Connect with us today to learn more!
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