Education is becoming highly competitive with every passing day. With loads of investment in this sector, it is becoming increasingly tougher. A sizeable amount of PC based internet population is from the age group of 15 to 24 years old students. In the same way, the population of this same group of mobile users for accessing internet has bigger than the PC inhabitants. As students spend more amount of time over their PCs and web and smartphone devices, educational institutes and universities are finding new ways to get the attention and build up engagement. You can now see higher education brands engaging their clients (students) via the method of digital marketing.

Target the mature crowd

The success of digital marketing for higher education is based on the kind of students the educational institutes and universities targets. Amidst the various categories of students, you could find an import mature student market, which needs to be targeted. These students are mature and likely to research their career options in a more detailed fashion before taking any decision. Regardless of their career options, the moot point is they require information to help them to take any decision. Selecting a proper education path is really a pivotal moment in their life as it could certainly help them in shaping up their future.

With the help of digital marketing, you can build up a direct communication and a consistent kind of dialogue to influence your target clients (prospective students) in their entire buying cycle. With tools pertaining to the interactive online technology like the Live Chat module could be used in concurrence with the digital marketing campaigns. This will therefore help the marketers to provide the students the required level of information as and when they need it.

Engaging the prospective students or clients

What are the ways, which the higher education brands need to adopt to increase the engagement with their prospective clients or students, is a pertinent question to address. For this, there is a persuasion clash, which has to be won for the higher education. The students and of course their parents are supposed to be persuaded that the educational institute they select caters them the best solution for their requirements. However, not every student has the same demands, not all are attracted purely by the academic achievement for some of them extracurricular things could be really persuasive. Regardless of their requirements, you need to engage them and that’s the vital aspects of digital marketing as it gives you a number of options for increasing discussion and communication.

Increase visibility over the search engines

As per the research, only 8 percent students visit the third page of any search results while 68 percent people rely on the first page results. Hence it is imperative for the marketers to use the power of optimization and make sure that their website and blog content is powerful with all the relevant keywords and key phrases. You can try some popular methods of dominating over the search engines like Google or Bing. This includes setting up webmaster tools and submitting your XML sitemap to make sure the right pages get indexed. Create quality and useful content with relevant keywords for all your current web pages of site or blog. Find several education advice sites and directories in order to get quality links to benefit the best from your search engine optimization efforts.
Benefit from the power of social media

Traffic from different social networking sites to websites or blog is increasing. Around 99 percent of students (aged 18 to 24) have their profile over social media sites. Hence the higher education can easily benefit from a fact that the social media is an international phenomenon. Hence, using several social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Foursquare, etc. could help the marketers to display local content to a global audience. Using social media by marketers could help them to influence their potential students in their decision making process to a great extent. There are many ways of doing it, this include making Facebook fan page, sharing important information in the form of videos and pictures, etc.

Conclusion

The competition among the various educational institutes and universities is growing with every passing day. You can see countries, like US, UK, France, Germany, and Singapore now employing strategies to attract their potential international students. The modern tools of digital marketing can certainly help the marketers to attract a sizeable amount of students for various higher education career options. The only mantra is to adapt these modern methods fast.

About The Author: Alyssa is a self-employed designer, illustrator & blogger. She loves writing, along with travelling. Blogging is her passion. These days she is working on importance of Google Rank Tracker tool for a small ecommerce site.