A higher education digital marketing audit provides a framework your school can use to make its recruitment strategy as effective as possible. Any school that has invested in a digital marketing audit knows how exciting—yet overwhelming—it can feel to open the document and be faced with pages and pages of ideas, suggestions, and areas of improvement.
It’s important to start bringing these ideas to life quickly. After all, an audit provides you with the keys to recruitment success; all your school has to do is use them.
But that begs the question: where should you start? Our blog offers some suggestions. Read on to learn how to make the most of your digital marketing audit as soon as you receive it!
Adjusting Your Brand’s Messaging After a Digital Marketing Audit for Schools
If defining or updating your personas was part of your school’s audit, ensure they are at the forefront of your education sector marketing going forward.
It’s easy for schools to say that they’ll ‘keep their personas in mind’ when implementing a new tactic or improving a preexisting strategy. Still, it’s more challenging to define how, exactly, they’ll do that.
Here are a few actionable strategies that you can use to ensure your marketing efforts are optimally tailored to your student personas.
Rethink Your Blog Calendar
If your school has a blog on its site, here is a hint: it should! Look at the kinds of blogs you typically post and any upcoming posts you have scheduled. Are these topics optimally aligned with your personas’ interests? Does each post incorporate one of your school’s key messages?
The next step is to create a persona-centred content calendar for the upcoming month. At HEM, we generally recommend creating content calendars one month in advance—that way, you’re not scrambling for blog ideas at the last minute.
Still, you’re not so far in advance that you risk your topics becoming irrelevant when you post them. Each blog should also hammer home one of your school’s key selling points—aka key messages—such as its international reputation, its highly practical training, or the travel opportunities it offers, to name a few.
Example: Sample key message for an online learner persona reflected perfectly in a blog by the UK College of English.
Tweak Social Media Messaging
Next, repeat the same process with your social media posts. Compare your social media content with your student personas and key messages to determine what you should do differently.
Consider whether there are different kinds of posts you should create or other social media channels on which your school should build a presence. Be sure to note your tone and the calls to action you use to ensure your messaging is optimally targeted to your prospective student audience.
Example: Two Twitter posts from Algonquin College. Notice the different tone of each post, which demonstrates the school’s intention to target distinct audiences with each post.
Update Key Web Pages
As you did with your digital content and social media posts, examine key pages on your school’s website to ensure your copy aligns with your student personas. The goal is to convey your school’s unique selling points on these pages as clearly, quickly, and effectively as possible.
Your personas’ motivations and concerns can be especially helpful for this process. Make sure to emphasize the kind of information prospects need to convert and address anything that may hold prospects back from applying to your school.
Any information you include should also be optimally relevant: these pages occupy prime real estate on your school’s site and play an integral role in your admissions process.
Example: A course page for Cumberland College. The moment a prospective student lands on the page, they’ll know the nuts and bolts of the course, such as when it starts and how long it lasts, as well as the program’s purpose: to provide eminently practical training for digital marketing experts.
Use Your Education Digital Marketing Audit for Keyword Optimization
A digital marketing audit for schools is about boosting your visibility, whether on a specific channel or in general. Whether you’ve opted for a large-scale digital marketing audit or one focusing on a particular aspect of recruitment, keywords will likely play an important role.
Whether your goal is to boost organic search traffic, optimize your paid advertising strategy, or generate more views for your videos, an audit can help you reevaluate your school’s keyword strategy.
This data allows your school to define which keywords to improve visibility for. From there, your school needs to integrate these keywords strategically into relevant content.
Example: Where to integrate keywords in your blog posts. Try to blend your keywords naturally into your content—otherwise, it could detract from your prospects’ reading experience.
While optimizing text-based content for SEO is becoming an increasingly common practice amongst schools, you shouldn’t just stop there. After all, your audit’s keyword investigation is likely very comprehensive, so it’s important to make the most of its insights.
Another way to boost search visibility on your site is to optimize your video content for SEO. It would be best to strategically integrate keywords into the title, description, and file name of each video you create. If you upload your video to a platform like YouTube—something which we highly recommend—you also have the opportunity to add keyword-centred tags.
Example: A Columbia University’s YouTube video incorporates undergraduate education-related keywords.
Updating Your School’s Branding Post-Audit
An audit is a great way to evaluate your school’s brand and determine whether its visual identity aligns with the latest digital trends.
To update your branding according to the recommendations made in your higher ed digital marketing audit, create a list of priorities regarding what you want to update first.
After all, there are visual elements on practically every digital channel—from social media to email to your website and even your PowerPoint template for presentations—and non-digital channels, so updating your school’s visual identity is not a quick nor straightforward process.
You should also assess whether your school can create all the needed elements, such as logos and social media banners, in-house or whether you’ll need help from an outside agency.
If any of your school’s channels lack visuals, consider investing in a stock photo account. This is a great way to spruce up your school’s website—especially course pages and blog posts. You may also want to make an effort to take more photos of your campus and its community to use for various digital marketing endeavors.
Example: Griffith College does a great job incorporating images of its campus across its website. High-quality landscape photos are also great for creating email banners, social media posts, etc.
Using Your Higher Ed Digital Marketing Audit to Maximize Your Enrollment Funnel
The enrollment funnel is the backbone of any school’s recruitment efforts, so ensuring your funnel is functioning as smoothly as possible is important. This requires reevaluating your team’s workload to ensure you do everything possible to guide each lead through the admissions process.
If a lead conversion analysis was in the scope of your education marketing audit, use these findings to improve your team’s productivity. The faster you put this insight into action, the quicker you’ll start saving time and generating more applications.
Most lead conversion audits include an analysis of your school’s funnel through the lens of its admissions staff. This will usually look something like the chart below, which shows how many leads are assigned to each staff member over a given timeframe:
This information will show you which point in the funnel your staff members excel at best. Take Staff 1, for example: although they are allocated a relatively small share of leads, they generate the most students. Staff 2, in contrast, is great at urging leads to start their applications, but few become students.
From here, your school may want to sit down with its admissions staff to discuss their strategies and brainstorm how each one can improve their funnel. These insights can then be shared amongst your team.
Staff 1, for instance, may have great strategies to facilitate leads through the last step in the enrollment journey, while Staff 2 may have pointers on getting prospects to the application stage.
The above diagram demonstrates that the leads aren’t fairly allocated among staff members. In this case, it can be helpful to either implement or update a round-robin workflow that more fairly distributes leads among your team.
Example: A sample round-robin lead assignment that allocates leads to different users based on the student’s preferred campus.
You may also want to reevaluate your team’s workload to ensure they have enough time to adequately follow up with these leads and nurture them through the enrollment funnel. During the aforementioned interviews, ask your staff what percentage of their week is devoted to prospective students compared to other tasks.
Your school may also want to assess which admissions-related tasks take up most of this time to discern whether you should invest in software to streamline these tasks. This information can also help your school decide whether to hire more people or switch up who does what to ensure you’re devoting the time to each lead.
Using Your Higher Ed Digital Marketing Audit to Improve CRM & Marketing Automation Use
If you want your admissions team to operate more efficiently and effectively, CRM and marketing automation tools can be a great help—if you know how to use them properly.
An audit can provide several actionable insights about your CRM and marketing automation efforts. Still, you’ll never reap these benefits if you don’t have the people to carry them out. Whether the audit identified issues with your workflows or lead scoring system, you’ll need people to coordinate these updates.
You may want to have one person oversee all CRM activities or assign each of your admissions officers a CRM-related task (such as updating autoresponders, creating segments, monitoring productivity, etc.).
Make sure to ask your staff to note how long these activities take each week so you can better understand your team’s productivity. Remember that your team may be able to complete these tasks faster over time.
Based on your audit’s recommendations, you may also have to allocate time to larger projects, such as implementing a lead scoring system or creating workflows. Depending on your school’s resources and time constraints, you may want to opt for an external agency for these projects.
Regardless of whether you’re looking at your audit’s CRM recommendations or its student personas, it’s important to keep your school’s priorities and bandwidth in mind as you bring these insights to life.
These are important factors to consider when implementing a new digital marketing strategy. Still, it’s especially critical when you have so many updates to be made across multiple channels.
FAQ To Consider
How important is an audit to your digital marketing efforts?
A higher education digital marketing audit provides a framework your school can use to make its recruitment strategy as effective as possible. Any school that has invested in a digital marketing audit knows how exciting—yet overwhelming—it can feel to open the document and be faced with pages and pages of ideas, suggestions, and areas of improvement. It’s important to start bringing these ideas to life quickly. After all, an audit provides you with the keys to recruitment success; all your school has to do is use them.
