Happy New Year and welcome to our first blog post of 2015!
We are very excited about the future of digital marketing in higher ed and look forward to bring to you our take on the industry news of the day, new technologies and applications of digital marketing to help you reach your business and marketing goals in the coming year.
Being big fans of measuring our own activity, we thought we would kick off this year with a recap of our most popular blog posts from 2014, as determined by you, our readers. The metric we have used to determine this ranking was by using unique page views of blog posts over the period of 2014. In other words, your visit to read a post was counted as one vote, even if you came back to read it a number of times, (as long as our tracking cookie was still on your computer). This result also includes posts that were originally published in 2013 and became very popular in 2014. We thought you would want to see those as well.
So, here are the Top 10 HEM blog posts for 2014:
- The Potential of Gamification for Student Recruitment
- Text Messaging for Student Recruitment
- Could Snapchat be the Next Big Trend in Student Marketing?
- Telling Your School’s Story with Student Testimonials
- International Student Recruitment in Brazil
- Conducting Cohort Analysis with Google Analytics
- Understanding Student Recruitment in China 101
- The Year in Higher Education Marketing: Trends of 2013
- Student Personas and Behavior-Targeted Content
- 3 Steps to Lead Nurturing for Increased Enrollment
Top Infographic Honorable Mention goes to:
4 Reasons Why Higher Ed Institutions Must Invest in SEO
As we look back over our blogging activity from 2014, a number of trends seem clear to us from our readership’s interests.
- International student recruitment is of great interest as indicated by activity on our posts about Brazil, China and other countries. International student recruitment from abroad by universities, colleges, vocational and language schools is a key growth strategy across the marketplace in both Canada and the US, as population demographics work against continued growth from traditional target markets.
- Content marketing is coming of age in higher ed. Marketers are adopting content marketing as a key strategy to deliver their messaging prioirites as well as address the SEO priorities of their websites. Audience personas, behavior targeted content, testimonials and visual content are all elements of a larger picture and strategic approach, to content strategy.
- Lead generation has become a marketing priority for almost all higher ed institutions. Once seen as only important to private, for-profit institutions, lead generation has matured into a high priority, critical path activity incorporating social media, email, inbound marketing and website home pages to a highly competitive level, as unseen in previous years.
We hope you have enjoyed reading our blog posts in the past year. We have certainly enjoyed producing them and have learned much in the process. We thank you for your wonderful support of the blog through your comments and encouragement. Please let us know how we are doing and if you have any topics you would like see us to cover in the coming year, please let us know.
