Google Ads is an excellent tool for driving leads to your institution, but if you want to boost clickthrough rates, we recommend using ad extensions.
It can significantly enhance the performance of your campaigns and drive more qualified traffic to your website. Why? Because they add twice the real estate for no extra money. Here's an example of a sitelink:
Ad extensions could be the difference between a prospective student choosing your institution over your competition. Here are four ways you can incorporate them into your campaigns:
Sitelink Extensions: Direct Prospects to Relevant Pages
Include extra links beneath your primary ad copy. Emphasize notable academic programs, special events, or helpful resources to guide prospects directly to relevant areas of your website.
Call Extensions: Simplify Phone Inquiries
Incorporate a phone number in your ads, enabling prospects to contact your admissions team with a single click. This extension is ideal for institutions that value phone interactions, increasing engagement and potential enrollment.
Location Extensions: Attract Local Students
Show your campus address, phone number, and map within your ads. This extension is ideal for institutions seeking to boost local student enrollment and engagement.
Include additional text to emphasize unique selling points, scholarships, or key features of your academic programs. Engage prospective students and entice them to click on your ads.
Implementing these ad extensions improves visibility, clickthrough rates, and potential student conversion rates. Ensure you track their performance, test different versions, and optimize based on data-driven insights.
Influence Enrollment Decisions with Student Testimonials
Student testimonials are crucial to building trust and credibility for your institution. They provide social proof by sharing satisfied students' positive experiences and validating your educational offerings.
The ideal method for collecting testimonials is to connect with students shortly after completing a course or program. Facilitate the process by providing straightforward instructions and convenient methods such as email, online forms, or testimonial collection platforms.
To streamline the process of collecting and managing testimonials, consider using the following platforms:
Testimonial Collection Platforms: Tools like Testimonial Hero, Vocal Video, or NiceJob offer specific platforms for collecting and organizing testimonials, often with customizable templates, automated requests, and easy sharing options.
Email Survey Tools: Platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms allow you to create personalized surveys to gather student feedback and testimonials, offering user-friendly interfaces and reporting features.
Review Management Platforms: Tools such as Podium, Trustpilot, or Yotpo enable you to collect and display student reviews and testimonials from various online sources, offering reputation management features and integrations with popular review sites.
Gathering testimonials is a powerful strategy for enhancing your institution's reputation and boosting enrollment. To learn more about using student testimonials for your institution, check our previous blog post.
Accelerate Institutional Growth with a Strategic Marketing Budget
Setting aside a dedicated higher education marketing budget is crucial for effectively promoting your academic offerings and reaching prospective students. A marketing budget allows for strategically allocating resources to various recruitment initiatives, maximizing your efforts and yielding quantifiable results.
Institutions spend between $429 and $623 per enrolled student, which can cover various marketing activities. Here are some key areas that a marketing budget may include:
Advertising: This involves various marketing channels such as pay-per-click, content marketing, social media advertising, email marketing, and social media management.
Branding: Investments in developing and enhancing your institution's brand, including logo design, brand guidelines, and messaging.
Marketing Agencies and Freelancers: This involves partnering with marketing agencies or hiring freelancers for specialized services tailored to your institution's needs.
Software: This includes investments in marketing tools to streamline and optimize your efforts. We recommend tools like Active Campaign, Surfer SEO, and Jasper.
By prioritizing and allocating resources to your marketing budget, you enable your institution to stand out in a competitive landscape, effectively engage with prospective students, and drive sustainable growth.
If you need help, we offer customized, full-service higher education marketing services that will fill your pipeline with quality prospects and applications. You can schedule a free consultation with one of our experts to learn more about our services and how they can help your school grow!
In this blog post, we will explore the world of marketing budgets in higher education, including average spending figures, areas where universities invest the most, critical components included in a marketing budget, and valuable insights on creating an effective budget that aligns with your institution's goals.
In this blog, we will explore common challenges faced in higher education digital marketing and discover seven practical solutions that can help you transform these problems into opportunities for success.
From leveraging the power of social media to university partnerships, we’ll discuss actionable steps you can take to increase your global reach and appeal to students from various cultural backgrounds. Dive into these eleven valuable strategies and discover how you can make your institution stand out to prospective international students!
