It’s a competitive world these days, and universities and colleges are not immune. So, how do you stand above the rest? How do you become the school that people automatically think of when they want to brush up their skills, take a fun class, or go back to school? Here are three easy strategies for increasing enrolments and strengthening brand loyalty.
Increase online offerings
In the olden days, we had to offer classes that were geared to the masses. In other words, we couldn’t offer niche classes like Herbalism, Reflexology or Certified Indoor Environmentalist because for every class added, staff had to be added and physical classroom space had to be made available. And, it certainly didn’t make sense to do that if the class would not fill up. This is no longer an issue. With online education partners, like Gatlin International, you can easily add all sorts of niche classes at no cost to your school. Since people are searching the worldwide Web all hours of every day to find information on the things that interest them, it makes sense to add as many niche classes as you can. When an individual becomes your student once, they are more likely to come back to you for subsequent educational courses that they need or want.
Build many landing pages
A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees. So many marketing strategies dump prospective students on the home page. This leads to many quick exits because people don’t have time to wade through and find the information for which they seek. They want to land on a page and find the answer to their questions. So, of course your campaign is much more effective if a person seeking information on sociology courses is landed onto your page that gives information on your sociology programme and courses.
But, if you want to be more thorough in your efforts to increase your enrolments, it is important to do a little investigation into the top questions that students have when they are searching on educational topics. You can go to Google’s keyword tool to do some of this sort of investigation. But, if I were interested in sociology, I’d want to know what sorts of jobs I could get with a sociology degree. It makes sense to build articles that answer these types of questions and use them as landing pages. This way you do not lose the interest of the person who wants their career questions answered first before looking further into a field of study. The goal of this landing page would, of course, be to get them to click on a call to action at the end of the article that sends them to your sociology programme catalog page for more information. When you build landing pages that are informative articles that answer your prospective student’s burning questions, and also optimize the page to get them to take the next step, you’ve built an excellent sales funnel that serves everyone involved.
Speakers and events
Getting prospective students to your school to hear authors and speakers on popular topics is a great way to introduce people to your school and offerings. Also, make your large auditoriums available for live musical, theatrical, comic and charitable events. The more you get people use to coming to your school for any reason, the more ‘top of mind’ you will be when they have a class they are interested in taking.
These are our top three tips for increasing enrolments and brand loyalty today. If you have others, please feel free to leave a comment and share your views.
Tags: brand loyalty, colleges, increase enrolments, niche courses, online education, universities