Every college has extra special dates on its calendar. Sometimes, it’s a legendary sporting occasion like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race or the Harvard-Yale football game. Other schools might host high-profile academic conferences or mark historic historical moments. Some even become heavily involved in famous events in their home city, such as Tulane University in New Orleans, which participates in various festivities around Mardi Gras.
These digital micro-campaigns for colleges form part of their identity and provide a unique experience for their students, unlike those at any other school. They are also an opportunity to connect with prospective students and communicate your story and message when your institution is most visible. So, what is the best way to use events to promote your school?
Most colleges will feature significant happenings on campus, especially social media updates and other inbound content on the web. But what if you went further, building a ‘micro-campaign’ around specific events, concentrating your online marketing around short-term activities to boost your profile and generate valuable new leads? Smaller, more focused campaigns are becoming more popular with recruitment professionals, and in this blog, we take a closer look at the idea of micro-campaigns and how they can give a short-term boost to your school.
What Events Are Ideal For Digital Campaigns in Higher Education?
While some of the examples listed above are well-known, you don’t need to be playing host to a major, renowned event to conduct an effective micro-campaign. With the proper research, a little creative thinking, and strategic implementation, you can easily find something in your calendar that can be used to generate new leads while promoting your college’s brand identity. Here are some common event types that have the potential for student recruitment strategies:
- Academic events: Many schools host conferences, festivals, and talks on literature, science, and technology. Promoting these events is a great way to establish your institution as a leader in the field in the minds of prospective students.
- Recreational events: What’s the highlight of your student’s social calendar? If you’re hosting a concert, ball, or any other event that’s sure to be a great party, promoting it can help show potential applicants what a fun, active student life they can look forward to.
- Sporting events: If your school participates actively in collegiate athletics, this can be a great plus for student recruitment. You can highlight big competitions and local rivalries. These games often include other social events on campus as part of the festivities, so you won’t just be appealing to sports fans.
- Historic events: If your college is celebrating an anniversary or commemorating a historic moment in its past, building a micro-campaign around the festivities can imbue your institution with a real sense of heritage.
- Events around your hometown or region: If your local area holds an annual festival or celebrates a special occasion, you can participate in or have your events around it, helping sell the area to prospective students.
- Regular calendar events: Just because enrollment weeks, graduations, and moving days take place on every campus doesn’t mean they can’t be used as a valuable tool for promotion. Many schools have built creative campaigns around these occasions, offering potential recruits a taste of campus life.
- Recruitment events: For a more direct approach to lead generation, you can build micro-campaigns around your student recruitment activities to boost attendance at open days or better highlight your presence at recruitment fairs.
- Online events: In today’s world, not all college events take place on campus. Many universities have built successful campaigns around online or virtual recruitment events, while even traditional school calendar dates can include online Q&As, live chats, or streams.
Example: Royal Roads University made serious waves with its “Future View” campaign in November 2014. The special online event, which took place over three days, involved current students and faculty members wearing Google Glass and GoPro cameras so prospective applicants could experience the campus through their eyes. The campaign included special lectures, virtual tours, and live Q&As, as well as a ‘future mentor’ program, where successful graduates answered potential recruits’ questions.
Tailoring Your School’s Content Marketing Strategy Around Your Event
When seeking to create a micro-campaign around an event, each of your marketing channels can help maximize exposure. In the lead-up to your event, your website and social media accounts should be updated regularly with branded, shareable content that will get people interested and excited about it.
You can tweak your regular content strategy to make it more relevant to the event. For instance, you could write a blog post profiling a guest speaker at a conference or ceremony or create an article around the history of a sporting rivalry or a longstanding college tradition. Suppose you’re building up to an open day or recruitment fair. In that case, it’s a great time to post articles specifically designed for prospective students, such as guides to the local area or introductions to various courses. Every event has unique potential for branded content, and you can develop some exciting ideas with creative thinking.
Example: In a great example of how to take a regular part of the college year and find a unique way to promote it, Florida State University launched its “Countdown to Commencement” campaign in 2014, complete with a countdown clock, live videos, and other tailored content. One of their more original posts during the campaign was this ‘bucket list’ for seniors with essential university experiences to check off before they left.
Special events also allow schools to incorporate more visual content into their higher education content marketing strategy. If the event has occurred before, you can post photos and videos from previous years to give people new to the event a real sense of its atmosphere. You can encourage current students and alumni to do the same, enabling them to share their own memorable experiences.
Your video content strategy can also continue during your event. Many schools now use everything from live-streaming apps like Periscope to virtual reality tech to allow those not attending an event to experience it online.
Example: In a great example of content that speaks to prospective students, the University of Bradford built a video campaign around moving day for new students, inviting them to make short films sharing their experience of leaving home for the first time.
Refining Your Social Media Strategy to Maximize Lead Generation
Events also provide unique opportunities for social media promotion. For instance, many schools hold Twitter Q&As or live chats on other sites with special guests, professors, or even students as part of events like open days and conferences.
Suppose your school participates in an event with several institutions or organizations, such as a recruitment fair. In that case, social media can be crucial in helping you stand out among the crowd. You can create event pages on Facebook and LinkedIn to promote your college’s presence at a recruitment fair and invite prospective leads to attend. Similarly, if your school is taking part in a broader local event, you can create event pages advertising anything specific that might be happening on your campus.
Event pages encourage networking before and after the event and social sharing to expand your potential attendance. Facebook pages now enable custom cover photos with calls-to-action buttons to “bring a business’s most important objective to the forefront of its Facebook presence.” Why not leverage these tools while sending advance reminders to RSVP in the weeks or months leading up to your event?
The key to building an event campaign on social media is branding consistency. It’s often ideal to create a unified hashtag across all your accounts and ensure your content is shared across as many platforms as possible.
Example: Here are a few select tweets and Facebook posts using the ‘#TrinIT’ hashtag Trinity College Dublin adopted to promote its ICT showcase event, an annual science and technology conference. You can see how the unified hashtag can help get events trending across multiple social media channels.
Using Advertising & PPC Within a Smaller Online Recruitment Campaign
Hopefully, the increased visibility you’ll enjoy in the build-up to your event will also open up new opportunities in your advertising strategy. Creating new ads highlighting your event as a unique selling proposition for your school can help it stand out.
Example: Southampton Solent University advertises its open days in a banner display ad on opendays.com, a website that provides a calendar of recruitment events in the UK. While this is an example of a straightforward—and possibly expensive—strategy, it reaches its target audience.
Event micro-campaigns are also ideal for remarketing. You can use tools like Facebook Custom Audiences to target previous visitors to your website, offering the event as something new to help reignite their interest. A promotion for your event could also be added to your email signature to highlight it to your mailing lists.
When refining your strategies for a micro-campaign, it’s important to customize your timing to maximize your potential ROI. For events like open days and recruitment fairs, you’ll want to carefully analyze the geographic location of your potential attendees, allowing them plenty of time to plan their travel. You can stagger your campaigns for different areas, promoting earlier to students from out of town and later to your local market.
Integrating Physical Marketing with Your Online Recruitment Campaign
Unless you’re running a special online event, some traditional promotion will probably be involved. Again, consistency across channels should be very much the aim, and it can be helpful to integrate as many elements of your physical and digital campaigns as possible. For instance, if you plan far enough, you can include event hashtags and Facebook event details on your brochures, flyers, and posters to help direct people who see your physical ads to your online recruitment campaign.
Having a physical presence for your recruitment staff can also be beneficial at the event. If your event is open to the public, you might attract prospective students who have come to check it out, so having an information booth with a contact sheet for potential leads might be surprisingly worthwhile.
Measuring The Effectiveness Of Micro-Campaigns For Education Lead Generation
One significant advantage of micro-campaigns is that they produce more easily measurable results than long-term activities. Recruitment departments can isolate the campaign’s timeline and analyze the data to track changes in website visits, social media exposure, SEO improvement, and conversions. This makes it easy to see the campaign’s effectiveness and whether it’s worth pursuing a similar strategy in the future.
Overall, the results you can expect depend very much on the type of event you are putting on. If it is more directly focused on recruitment, such as an open day, you will expect to accumulate many new leads while progressing existing leads closer to conversion.
Events not explicitly aimed at recruitment should be analyzed differently. While these campaigns may generate a smaller amount of new leads, they are mainly designed to raise your school’s profile online, boosting its visibility and helping it stay ‘top of mind’ with prospective applicants. This doesn’t mean they are less worthwhile, however. When today’s respective students research online, they are looking to get a sense of what life at your college will be like, and these events can help give your school a personality and colour that will stay with them when the time does come to apply.
FAQ To Consider
How do colleges use social media to attract students?
Social media can be crucial in helping you stand out among the crowd. You can create event pages on Facebook and LinkedIn to promote your college’s presence at a recruitment fair and invite prospective leads to attend.
