The number and frequency of school closures isn’t all that surprising. At its core, it’s a simple supply and demand issue. There just aren’t enough motivated prospects to fill all of the vacant seats throughout the country and the impending enrollment cliff is only going to make matters worse.

Some schools will have no issues making it through this downturn while others are certain to close. The schools in the middle are the ones that are going to have to work especially hard to ensure their survival.

However, maybe survival isn’t all about working hard. These schools need to work smarter than their competition. After all, everyone will be working hard to stay afloat so that’s not going to be your competitive advantage.

You’ll need to work smarter.

As we’ve said before , your institutional website is your most important marketing asset due to its reach, depth, and popularity. What other asset is globally accessible 24/7/365, covers every inch of your institutional story, and has been viewed by just about every single one of your constituents?

The answer is none. No other asset even comes close.

One way to be “smart” about your enrollment marketing is to ensure that your most valuable communications asset is actually up to the challenge of engaging, informing, and converting prospects. Is it really optimized for enrollment?

You’d be surprised at how many higher education websites we review where we find numerous opportunities for improvement. Too many websites use a dry academic tone when promoting their degrees and fail to include outcomes, testimonials, and other information pertinent to today’s buyers (prospects and their parents). These websites also lack appropriate conversion opportunities at every stage of the buyer journey which is one of the biggest mistakes a school can make. After all, why go through all the trouble of building a beautiful website and then not offer a way for prospects to engage further with the school?

Once optimized for enrollment, you can then concentrate on the task of drawing in prospects via outbound and inbound enrollment marketing strategies. This includes everything from search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing (SMM), programmatic/display advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), blogs, content marketing, email campaigns, text campaigns, traditional marketing, and more.

As a refresher, Inbound marketing refers to attracting potential customers by creating valuable content that draws them to your business organically, while outbound marketing involves proactively reaching out to potential customers through methods like cold calling, email blasts, or advertisements to push your message towards them; essentially, inbound marketing "pulls" customers in, while outbound marketing "pushes" your message out to them. (Google AI)

Besides being more cost-effective, there is one major advantage that inbound marketing has over outbound marketing and that is the mindset of the prospect. With outbound marketing, you are pushing a message out to them whether or not they are actively pursuing or interested in it. On the other hand, with inbound marketing, prospects are actively in the process of researching and searching for the exact degrees and programs you offer and are finding you when they are most interested.

So how can you use inbound enrollment marketing to your advantage and stay 1 (or 2) steps ahead of your competition over the next several years?

1. Invest in a proper search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to ensure your website is clicking on all cylinders and is primed to appear as high as possible in the search engines when prospects are actively searching for the degrees and programs you offer. The best part about organic search engine rankings is that savvy users know the difference between organic and paid search engine results and your organic listing is going to hold a broader appeal to them.
    
2. Invest the time and resources to continually add new content to your website in the form of blog posts. Search engines use a combination of relevance and authority to rank web pages and these blog articles help immensely. "Relevance" refers to how well a web page aligns with a user's search query, meaning the content directly addresses the topic being searched, while "authority" indicates how trustworthy and credible a website is considered to be by the search engine. (Google AI)

How much of a competitive advantage would this be? According to an article by Search Engine Land , Higher Ed is “failing at SEO” . So yeah, investing in SEO would be a huge advantage. Just keep in mind, however, that SEO is a long game and the fruits of its labor take many months to appear. According to Semrush , it’s anywhere from 4-12 months. However, once it does kick in, you can expect a steady increase in performance.

Here’s one client’s organic keyword growth over a two-year period:

Here’s their organic traffic growth:

And finally, here is their referring domain growth:

What you’ll notice in these charts is a slow start but once things got going, there has been steady and consistent improvements in their SEO metrics and that leads directly to improved placement in search engine results which ultimately leads to more qualified traffic landing on their fully optimized website.

Was it hard work? It’s time consuming but we never had to split the atom so we wouldn’t call it “hard”.

Is it “smart”? Absolutely!