What is Digital Marketing for Educational Institutes?

In the current digital era, it's crucial for schools to adopt digital marketing tactics. As most students, parents, and educators turn to the internet for information, schools that fail to implement digital marketing approaches stand the risk of falling behind.
What is Digital Marketing for Educational Institutes?

How Does Digital Marketing Help Educational Institutes?

Awareness

With SEO, schools can rank their keywords on Google's #1 page, building brand awareness, focussing their target audience and increasing organic traffic in the process.

Consideration

With PPC, schools gain immediate ROI through bidding the most relevant and cost beneficial keywords.

Conversion With CRO & UIUX, schools can optimize their user experience based on data analysis, heatmaps and A/B testings, thus enhancing both SEO & PPC conversions.

Loyalty

With Content Writing, schools can recurringly write insightful educational content, enhancing their expertise, experience, authoratativeness & trustworthiness.

First Page Educational Client Case Study

First Page Educational Client Case Study

First Page Educational Client Case Study

We implemented a strategic restructuring of our marketing campaigns, adopting a phased approach to enhance manageability. In an effort to broaden our spectrum of conversion signals, we incorporated upper-funnel conversions into our strategy, acknowledging the importance of early customer engagement. Additionally, we introduced a hierarchy of conversion values as well as migrated our campaign focus towards value-based bidding. We also sustained an enhanced remarketing pool leveraging GDN, Meta & Discovery. The results were so great that we had to change campaign objectives because we filled up all their student slots!

 

Click here to read the full case study from Stamford American School!

Why Choose First Page As Your School's Digital Marketing Agency?

Why Choose First Page As Your School's Digital Marketing Agency?

Why Choose First Page As Your School's Digital Marketing Agency?

1. Tailored Services

We provide solutions based on the client’s situation. You want more student signups? We got PPC specialists. You want more traffic to your website? We are one of the best SEO agencies in Hong Kong. You need help in content writing & implementation? Our writers and web developers got you covered.

2. Data-Driven

We built a powerful in-house and proprietary project management tool called SENTR™ to help you streamline your digital marketing campaigns. We believe that data is key to creating effective digital marketing strategies.

3. Experience

Simply put, we have over 10 years of digital marketing experience. We understand school’s, university’s, and tutorial centre’s pain points, which keywords best fit their student or parent’s search intent, most frequent questions they will ask and so on…

4. Transparency

Our campaign pricing, timeline, procedures and performance are all fully transparent. Our school clients are also given access to an online portal where they can see their marketing stats in real-time.

Best Educational Institute Digital Marketing Strategies

Best Educational Institute Digital Marketing Strategies

Best Educational Institute Digital Marketing Strategies

1. Determine Your 5s Goals

Establishing well-defined, attainable objectives is essential for the effectiveness of any digital marketing plan.

Sell – Digital platforms offer new ways to sell products/services, like new learning courses, new online classes so on.

Serve – Through digital channels, schools can improve student services with fast support and self-service options.

Save – Digital transformation can cut costs by automating tasks, digitizing records, and optimizing operations.

Speak – Digital platforms allow teachers to have two-way conversations with students and parents via personalized content.

Sizzle – Educational Institutes can use digital to create excitement and engagement through creative campaigns and experiences.

2. Research Your Target Audience

Before deciding on the platforms where you’ll share content and advertise, it’s important to know where your school’s students are coming from and where you should be marketing. For instance:

  • A university might acquire most of their students from international organic searches, which direct visitors to their regularly updated campus introductions or blogs.
  • A primary school might get numerous local parent inquiries, and these parent’s searching behaviour and social platforms would be vastly different than the searches from older university students.
  • An English learning tutorial centre offering online courses might want to target SEO in a global scale, as they wouldn’t want to confine their market in 1 location.

 

3. Optimize Your Website

The primary objective of your marketing endeavors, including traditional offline strategies, is to direct parents or students to your website. Your school’s website can make a strong first impression that either retains visitors or pushes them towards your competitor’s site. Your website should be sleek, up-to-date, and fast-loading. Sites with outdated fonts and graphics, slow loading times, and excessive content can result in visitors departing within mere seconds.

Did you know that mobile devices are responsible for more than half of all internet traffic? As of November 2023, people using mobile devices contribute to 56.2% of all website traffic.

This data indicates that mobile is rapidly becoming the favored method for online brand interactions. As such, it’s vital to rigorously test your school’s website to confirm it’s optimized for mobile. If it isn’t, users on mobile devices may find it difficult to engage with your brand or consume your excellent online content.

 

4. Kickstart With SEO

Parents NEVER enroll their kids before doing thorough research and school comparisons. Therefore, schools must do SEO to expand their digital presence and brand awareness, so parents can locate you, whether they’re searching for teachers in your school, your school’s name, or, most critically, considering perks of whether to enroll in your educational institute. By employing a SEO agency and maintaining consistent SEO efforts, your work can yield benefits for years to come.

Why is SEO Important for Schools?
SEO matters greatly as it enables potential students to discover you. Schools should keep in mind that SEO isn’t only about what they do on their website (on-page SEO), but also what they do on other websites and social media (off-site SEO).

 

5. Optimize With PPC

If we consider school’s lead generation as a “waterfall,” PPC and paid ad campaigns represent the most vigorous flow. PPC services can accelerate lead generation for schools much faster than organic content that has worked its way to the top of search engine rankings. In a blink, your website could be exposed to thousands of potential students.

PPC functions by advertisers bidding on keywords and paying per click to steer traffic towards their websites. The main disadvantage of PPC advertising is its dependency on funding – the moment you stop, the leads stop too. Paid ads can be substantially costly, depending on the nature of cases you are targeting.

For instance, the highest CPC for keyword “international schools hong kong” was around HK$10 page bid in November 2023. Not far behind was “international kindergarten in hong kong” with the highest CPC of HK$15.

Why is PPC Important for Schools?

PPC ads play a crucial role in swiftly connecting with new students. Evergreen content that is both relevant and informative, like a practice area page, requires time to climb to the top of Google search results. For new educational institutes, it can take years for their content to reach the top of search engine results pages.

6. Write More Content

There is a saying in 2023, and will even be more emphasized in 2024. “Content Is King”. Every content piece you share can drive new visitors and leads to your educational institute. Simply put, content marketing helps with search engine optimization. Do competitor research for your content. If other schools publish 3,000-word articles on a topic, Google may rank your shorter content lower in search results. Headers, readability, bullet points, structure, reference links also play a part in content strategy.

 

7. Wrap Up With CRO

Conversion Rate Optimization is all about effectively utilizing the leads acquired through your various strategies. CRO entails gathering contact information from potential students and establishing a follow-up process to further engage them into the enrollment funnel. Without CRO, your lead generation techniques might not significantly influence your enrollments.

Common Educational Institute Digital Marketing Mistakes

Common Educational Institute Digital Marketing Mistakes

Common Educational Institute Digital Marketing Mistakes

1. Lacking Human Touch & Connections

Educational institutes may struggle to persuade parents to enroll their kids if they don’t form a connection with them. Regrettably, many schools fail to grasp that parents are seeking someone who can ASSIST them get through their children’s most important stage in life.

— Solution
Video testimonials from past students and parents can powerfully demonstrate your empathetic understanding of the parent’s issues and your competence in building a good learning environment for their kids. Additionally, video FAQs can address some of the parent’s preliminary questions, making them a “warmer” lead when they reach out to you for a case review. Remember to include video schema once you added these videos, so Google can understand them better!

2. Not Creating Positive Reviews

Reflect on your personal experiences as a consumer reading reviews. For instance, have you ever sought reviews for a movie, a restaurant, or a product on an e-commerce platform like Amazon? Even if you’re not in the habit of writing reviews, chances are you’ve read reviews and testimonials while contemplating a purchase, opting for a service, or planning to visit a business.

— Solution
Genuine online reviews from actual parents or students are essential to building trust. Just as with blogging, keeping things current is key. On your website, your “testimonials” can be timeless and need not be dated, but you should regularly solicit reviews on third-party websites like Google and Social Media channels. Remember to include review schema once you added them on your website, so Google can understand them better!

 

3. Targeting Wrong Search Intent

Search intent is the purpose behind a user’s search on the internet. It’s crucial for SEO because it helps provide the most relevant results.

For the keyword “international schools”:

  1. Informational Intent: Parents want to know what facilities your school has to offer.
  2. Navigational Intent: After tons of research, parents have narrowed down a few schools to try out, so they will be searching with queries such as the school’s exact name.
  3. Transactional Intent: Parents are ready to enroll. For the education industry, the school’s exact name would also apply to this intent.
  4. Commercial Investigation: Parents are comparing different international schools, with search queries such as “top international schools in hong kong”.

Understanding these intents helps tailor content to meet user needs, yet sometimes our school clients might make the mistake of targeting the wrong keywords of the wrong intent.

— Solution

Look at what Google shows on the SERP when you type in the keyword in the search bar. When you read more of these results, you will start to gain insights and patterns on what type of keywords Google prefer to rank for which search intent.

Frequent Asked Questions From Our Educational Institute Clients

Results can vary based on the strategies used. SEO efforts often take several months to show significant results, while PPC campaigns can provide immediate visibility.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement can measure success. Also, tools like Google Analytics provide valuable data.

Monitor reviews and social media mentions, respond to negative feedback constructively, and encourage happy parents or students to leave positive reviews.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your site, like filling out a form. It’s a key metric in assessing the effectiveness of your digital marketing.

It depends on the size and complexity of your campaigns. Smaller firms may use a single individual, while larger firms may benefit from a dedicated team.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps your website rank higher in search engine results, making it more visible to parents and students.

Significant negotiation clout
with our partners.

Our network of partners gives us access to first in-market media products, collaboration plans and inside intel, so we can keep you ahead of your competition.

Google Partner
LinkedIn Marketing Partner
ContentKing Partner
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