Higher Education Digital Marketing -
The Knowledge You Need for Success
In today's evolving higher education landscape, institutions face unprecedented challenges in reaching and engaging with prospective students. As an experienced higher education digital marketing agency, Search Influence connects you with your target audience and guarantees measurable results. Our data-driven strategies generate more traffic and increase brand visibility, resulting in a higher return on investment.
Search Influence is a Platinum Partner of UPCEA, the leading association for professional, continuing, and online (PCO) education. As part of the partnership, Search Influence shares its expertise on higher education digital marketing strategies and how institutions can optimize, measure, and track their search engine optimization (SEO) and paid ads strategies to drive more qualified prospects to their marketing channels.
Search Influence is a smart and hard-working team that helps us strategize and improve on our campaigns with best practices and the latest trends. They are always fantastic to work with, and they care about our success.
NANCY SARPA-SAMUELSON
Senior Marketing Manager
Palo Alto University
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Higher Education Digital Marketing Agency
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CHRISTA PAYNE
Assistant Dean, Administration and Operations
Tulane School of Professional Advancement
The communication between Search Influence and the Tulane School of Professional Advancement (SoPA) is clear, honest, and constant. They use the latest tools and weekly and monthly meetings to create a data-informed feedback loop that constantly improves our campaigns.
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Higher Education Digital Marketing Agency Services
SEO for Higher Education
To effectively reach potential students, your institution must rank highly in search engine results. Regardless of where prospects are in their student journey, they expect a search engine to answer their questions about the availability of programs, applying, and even enrollment.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps higher education institutions rank higher in search engine results, which increases visibility and, therefore, attracts more prospective students to your website.
Whether you're looking to grow enrollment or enhance your online presence, our SEO agency for higher education drives organic traffic and delivers measurable results, helping you stay ahead in the competitive academic landscape.
We craft a tailored approach that combines technical expertise, content optimization, and strategic link-building to boost your website's authority and credibility.
Digital Advertising for Higher Education
Our higher education digital advertising services help you maximize your advertising budget, drive enrollment growth, and strengthen your institution's brand presence. We strategically select the most effective channels to reach your target audience and leverage the latest data-driven strategies — including pay-per-click advertising, social media advertising, and display advertising — to ensure your institution's message reaches the right people at the right time.
Analytics and Lead Tracking for Higher Education
At Search Influence, we specialize in using data analytics to track the performance of your campaigns and evaluate your success. Our team of experts analyzes user interactions across your digital platforms, providing a 360-degree view of your audience's behavior. This data-driven approach allows us to capture every lead, understand its origin, and evaluate its quality. We use this data to inform decisions, refine your marketing strategies, and optimize your recruitment efforts.
Read more about Analytics and Lead Tracking for Higher Education
Your Challenge: Marketing Your School
There are many loops to close — often with a limited budget that must effectively stretch across various initiatives. You may have trouble customizing your website to fit the specific needs of your program, or you may also face challenges transitioning your staff from more traditional media techniques to the digital world.
At Search Influence, we are experienced in working within the parameters of a larger organization while still serving the core purpose of your campaign. Depend on us to find the balance you need to amplify your voice.
As an experienced higher education digital marketing agency, Search Influence will connect you to your target audience with a collaborative approach that ensures you are getting measurable results. We know every college or university is unique, with a wide range of goals in mind. Looking to increase enrollment and retention or target alumni and fundraising opportunities? Contact us! Our experienced team can provide marketing strategies for higher education, technical colleges, and beyond.
Best Practice Higher Education Digital Marketing Strategies
From integrated marketing plans to targeted ad campaigns and social media development, we specialize in finding where we can add the most value to let you focus on what you do best — positioning your students for excellence!
Search engine optimization
According to a Google study, 58% of students turn to search first when they begin research for higher education. Our deep roots in technical SEO and local search optimization will help potential students find you when they begin that journey.
Increase your search engine visibility
Search engine visibility is the amount of traffic that your institution’s website receives from its rank in the organic search results. Some tactics we may implement into your digital marketing strategy to help improve your search engine visibility include targeting your pages for keywords, evaluating your website for mobile-friendliness, and crafting compelling page titles.
Aim to rank for featured snippets
To quickly answer a user’s query, featured snippets are spotlighted clips of text that are automatically pulled from a webpage and presented at the top of Google’s organic search results. By optimizing your content for specific featured snippets, we can help impact your SEO efforts by increasing your university’s brand visibility and organic traffic to generate more leads — and applicants!
Optimize existing content to rank higher in search results
No matter how great your institution’s marketing efforts are, an existing degree program or faculty spotlight web page may just seem to lose its traffic as time passes. To help improve the quality and relevance of your web pages, we’ll review and update your site’s existing content by:
Rethinking content structure and substance
Optimizing images and keywords
Assessing internal and external link-building opportunities
Follow Google Search trends
Google Search data helps signify where your target audience is in the marketing funnel, as well as where your institution’s advertising efforts should be. Our team will keep a pulse on Google Search trends as they relate to your university and recommend the next steps for effectively targeting your audience.
Online Advertising
With students increasingly relying on online sources for help locating their perfect school, digital advertising campaigns are a segway into boosting your university’s inquiry and enrollment rates. To help your higher education institution obtain steady website traffic, we’ll craft campaigns that connect with your prospective student personas and select the right digital channels for all your paid marketing messages.
Leverage your lookalike audiences
Because these groups share similar demographics and interests with existing students, lookalike audiences are considered the most likely to engage with your content — and even enroll in your degree programs. Using data from your institute’s existing students, we’ll develop online advertising campaigns that help broaden your university’s reach to the students most inclined to take action.
Utilize proprietary data for ad targeting
From halts to annual search term reports to privacy limitations, Google, Facebook, and Apple have recently made sweeping changes to the accessibility of tactical data extracted from ad networks. Amidst these changes, our paid search agency for higher education can support your ad targeting goals by focusing on proprietary data to effectively tailor each campaign to your audience segments.
Focus on your responsive ads
According to data from Google, advertisers can expect to witness 10% more conversions, on average, when incorporating the multiple components of a responsive display ad. Because our digital advertising moguls acknowledge the performance potential of responsive ads, we’ll work with your team to create ads that drive relevant leads to your higher ed institution.
Build brand awareness through display advertising
While Google’s Search Network may be one of the best ways to capture your user’s intent, not every web surfer will automatically know about your university. This is where the Google Display Network can lend a helping hand. With Google Display, our team can help you invest in building brand awareness for your college using comprehensive audience research and targeting techniques.
Website, user experience, and conversion optimization
Improve the experience and make it easier for potential patients to contact you. Our team will evaluate your website as well as your collateral and recommend necessary updates to increase conversions. Sometimes, it’s as simple as making it clear to the user what you want them to do!
Transform your higher education website into a core marketing asset
According to a 2021 Siteimprove survey, the top three factors improving a higher education’s website performance include content, quality assurance (QA), and SEO. So, what do these findings mean for your digital marketing efforts?
It starts with reenvisioning how you reach prospective students with your content, its quality, and its efficiency. As part of your team, we’ll help you execute your university’s digital transformation by auditing and optimizing your existing content, aligning your web content with the search intent of students, and more.
Enhance your website design
Your higher education website is your school’s leading marketing tool when it comes to communicating with your community. If your site is out of date or complex to navigate, prospective students may bounce from your site as soon as they land on it. To keep your website accessible, informational, and engaging, our development team can work with you to:
Maintain your institution’s brand within the website design, including color scheme and tone
Incorporate visual content (e.g., alumni photos, video testimonials by passionate students)
Create easy-to-navigate paths for prospective students, current staff and students, and alumni
Make it accessible to all and optimally functional, no matter the user or device
Pay special attention to Google’s Core Web Vitals
In 2020, Google announced the rollout of its Core Web Vitals, a set of user-focused metrics that assess a web page’s “health” — or how well it provides a smooth, seamless user experience. These metrics consist of three components:
Content loading speed
Interactivity
Stability
With gradual advancements to the algorithm, Google has been able to analyze small details like these metrics to provide the best content and results in response to relevant search engine queries. The sooner your institution’s website moves toward a user-centric approach and optimizes for these Core Web Vitals, the higher it’ll rank, according to Google’s standards.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves any type of content that educates and informs a reader, primarily for marketing purposes. For your higher education institution, content marketing can help raise brand awareness, promote a new degree program, or drive new students to your site through organic search, social media, or even email newsletters.
Create long-tail content
As an effective part of any strategic web marketing campaign, a long-tail content strategy focuses on narrow and direct searches that prospective students, parents, and community members are intentionally scouting the web for. Our team will work with your university to develop a long-tail content strategy that combines target keywords, target market segments, and target geographies to deliver high-quality content to individual users who are more likely to be engaged leads.
Repurpose content that just works
Quality content doesn’t always need to have a short shelf life. Get more out of your institution’s best content by repurposing it! Whether it’s a blog post turned infographic or a webinar turned Twitter post, we’ll help you recycle the content that truly counts and attracts more leads while releasing content that feels fresh and unique.
Focus on student outcomes
Connect with prospective and current students and guide them through the admissions funnel by emphasizing what matters most. We’ll ensure that your website, social media platforms, and marketing messages boast your institution’s strongest selling points — your students’ career, financial, and academic outcomes.
Email Marketing & Nurturing
Convert more prospects and applicants through email marketing by sending messages timed to where they are in the decision-making process and to your application and enrollment deadlines. We’ll create nurture programs dedicated to each program of focus to share the most relevant information with prospects and applicants.
Use email marketing to promote your university
When executed properly, email marketing campaigns can be highly effective for recruiting and retaining students while also engaging your university’s current student body and alumni. No matter how big or small your university campus is, we can develop personalized email marketing strategies to target a wide variety of readers and foster long-lasting student relationships.
Create email campaigns for lead generation
Encouraging inquiries and campus visits doesn’t end with simply initiating student interest. Using email campaigns, your university can nurture student interest by delivering consistent messages that meet your recipients where they are in the marketing funnel. To generate and convert more leads into applicants, our email campaigns can include distributing content on upcoming events, program requirements, and more.
Increase student enrollment with elevated campaigns
Getting a prospective student’s email is only half the battle in enhancing your higher education institute’s enrollment numbers. To really drive your students through the funnel — beyond inquiry — you’ll need compelling emails that get the right information to the right people at the right time. By crafting thoughtful and highly targeted email campaigns, your institution can more effectively improve your student recruitment practices while also increasing conversion rates.
Analytics & Tracking
Our Google Analytics and Tag Manager-certified team has a high standard for delivery against well-documented key performance indicators. With monthly meetings to assess our progress, we’ll be agile in our response to market conditions and focus on your most critical metric: enrollment.
Incorporate call tracking into your strategy
From the state they are calling from to how they first found your university, call tracking lets you know exactly who a prospective student may be. By utilizing a call tracking strategy, we can help you shift your marketing campaigns towards a specific target audience, better anticipate rapid-fire questions, and focus on the ads that bring in the most leads.
Emphasize internal tracking
When tracked over time, higher education metrics provide meaningful insights into your institutional objectives and inform future marketing strategies. From how effectively you’re nurturing leads to whether you’re on track to meet enrollment targets, these key performance indicators help your university evaluate its success at each stage of the higher education funnel. To ensure your performance metrics signal success, we’ll track everything from impressions and website traffic to enrollments and retention rates.
Your Digital Marketing Agency for Education Enrollment
Are you looking for a higher education digital marketing agency to help you grow your institution’s reach? At Search Influence, we have years of experience working with higher education institutions of all sizes. Whether through SEO, paid search, or email lead nurture, our team can help you acquire and convert prospective students.
Contact us today to learn how we can take your education marketing to the next level.
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By submitting this form, you agree to receive information about Search Influence via email, phone and/or text. You may opt out at any time.
By submitting this form, you agree to receive information about Search Influence via email, phone and/or text. You may opt out at any time.
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