The education industry is undergoing a drastic transformation. Diversified student demographics, out-of-the-box teaching methodologies, EdTech innovations, and superior infrastructure are all redefining the education landscape.
This is both a challenge and an opportunity for educational institutions. The educational services industry is currently worth over $3.8 trillion. By 2029, its market size will be more than $5.1 trillion.
This shows how lucrative this sector is. However, to succeed, you need to understand the marketing strategies that work for education startups.
In this article, I’ll explain why education marketing is worthwhile. I’ve also handpicked nine actionable strategies to boost enrollments and establish your education startup as a thought leader.
Why Should Your Educational Institution Invest in Marketing?
Should educational entities invest in marketing? The answer is a resounding yes. Effective education marketing can deliver exceptional ROI. Here are five reasons why you should develop a solid marketing strategy.
- Reach a Diverse Audience: While educational institutions primarily target students, the target audience is far more diverse. Effective marketing techniques help you reach parents, caregivers, educators, working professionals, and corporate heads to initiate meaningful interaction.
- Positive Brand Building: Establishing authority and positioning your institution as a thought leader is not easy. You can run marketing campaigns to highlight your institution’s unique value propositions and build a positive reputation. Well-crafted marketing strategies are a must if you want to beat the competition and establish your credibility.
- Increase Enrollment Rate: Wider reach and positive branding result in improved lead generation. Strategies like email marketing and content marketing can help you nurture leads and convert them into students.
- Attract Investors: As an educational entity, you’re always looking for collaborators, sponsors, investors, and promoters to help you grow. Marketing your brand on multiple platforms will attract various collaborators, helping you establish profitable connections.
- Stay on Top of Trends: Planning and executing marketing campaigns can help you stay on top of the latest industry trends. This helps you gain a competitive edge and be better prepared to meet audience expectations.
9 Marketing Strategies to Popularize Your Educational Institution
Given the competition, educational institutions need a holistic marketing strategy to engage their audience, boost enrollment, and ensure long-term growth. Let’s take a look at the top nine marketing strategies that work for education startups.
1. Define Your UVP
Curriculum may be standardized, but what sets you apart as an educational institution is your approach, process, and quality. You need to identify the factors that make you stand out in a crowded market.
Begin by defining your unique value propositions in every aspect of your operations. You can highlight faculty expertise, quality infrastructure, innovative teaching methodologies, heightened security, inclusion of advanced tools and technology, and more.
Let’s say you use a learning management system to offer flexible and self-paced training programs. This would make you the most suitable option for students and working professionals looking for online courses.
Highlight how you are focused on imparting experiential learning that will enable your students to solve real-world problems.
2. Build a Robust Digital Profile
A study says that more than 60% of users access the internet to find information. This includes your target audience. That’s why you need to focus on building a robust and cohesive digital presence.
You can begin by creating a Google Business Profile and optimizing it with relevant information, images, contact details, and reviews. When someone searches for you on Google, your profile would look similar to the image below. The more relevant information you add, the more impressive your profile will be.
Get ready to meet your audience where they are. This includes creating impressive profiles on LinkedIn, online directories, online review sites, and more.
3. Offer a Great Website Experience
When discussing the marketing strategies that work for education startups, an impressive website experience tops the list. Here are a few core elements you need to focus on to impress your visitors:
- Responsive Design: Ensure that the content, layout, images, and interactive elements on your website are displayed properly on any device, whether it’s smartphones or desktops.
- Professional and Simple Layout: An educational institution’s website should look professional. The key is to keep the website layout simple and minimalistic without compromising on aesthetics.
- Effortless Navigation: Organize pages and relevant links to avoid clutter and facilitate better navigation. Help your visitors find the information they are looking for without much effort.
- Engaging Content: Create a good mix of text, images, and videos to enhance the website experience. Use free tools like Hemingway Editor or the grammar checker by Attrock to write top-notch landing pages.
- Consistent Branding: Maintain branding consistency in all areas, including color palette, design patterns, vocabulary, and information delivery.
- Optimized Page Loading Speed: Adopt different techniques like image compression, lazy loading, minifying CSS and JS files, using CDN, and more to ensure your website pages load faster.
4. Participate in Events
One of the most popular marketing strategies that work for education startups to gain visibility is attending events. Send your best faculty and students to represent your school or college in conferences, education expos, cultural exchange programs, academic summits, educational fairs, and so on.
At the same time, organize competitions, carnivals, alumni reunions, and fests to build brand awareness. It is also a powerful sales strategy to impress your potential students and boost enrollment.
Online events like panel discussions, webinars, and podcasts can help you build your brand. They serve as a way for you to showcase your expertise, approach, and vision to make a difference in the education sector.
5. Automate Email Marketing
Email campaigns are one of the most effective marketing strategies that work for education startups, as they help boost enrollment rates.
Automate email marketing using an AI-driven tool like Mailchimp or Omnisend for the best results. These tools can help segment your subscribers while also logically customizing email campaigns for a higher conversion rate.
You can go a step further and integrate a call center solution like Zendesk with your email marketing platform for enhanced reach. This ensures you can follow up promptly with prospective students and maintain personalized communication with those already enrolled.
6. Promote Yourself on Social Media
As your primary target audience is active social media users, building a robust social media marketing strategy is a must to promote your educational institution.
While your website is more on the formal side, let your social media page be more informal and relatable. For example, you can use images and videos to showcase student life on your campus.
The goal is to create content that prospective students and collaborators can relate to. You can use AI ethically to generate compelling content and boost engagement on social media.
Remain active on Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn by updating your audience about the activities in your institution, running promotional campaigns, and generating leads for on-campus and virtual events.
7. Establish Credibility with Social Proof
Social proof is one of the most effective marketing techniques to influence your target audience. People’s opinions and validation are always more powerful than branded content when it comes to establishing credibility.
Leverage the power of student reviews, ratings, and user testimonials to create a positive image of your institution. Additionally, educational institutions are reviewed and ranked by popular journals and agencies. These social proof elements can be used to boost your brand’s reputation and authority.
Check out how the University of North Texas highlights social proof elements on its homepage to stamp its credibility.
You can encourage students, parents, and employees to leave a positive review on your website or social media for organic promotion. To create optimal impact, include ratings and testimonials in your Google Business Profile, social media campaigns, ads, and promotional emails.
8. Create Engaging Video Content
A whopping 99% of video marketers agree that video content is an extremely powerful digital marketing tool, making it one of the most effective marketing strategies that work for education startups.
You can create a variety of video content showcasing:
- Student life
- State-of-the-art facilities
- Virtual campus tour
- Events and activities
- Highlights of the year
- Testimonials by the faculty and students
Along with these, you can create sample or demo videos for co-curricular and extracurricular activities, self-paced learning programs, and online courses. Include them on your website to enhance visitor engagement. Video content can impact and impress your potential students better than just text.
You can strategically use videos to promote your institution on social media, YouTube, and promotional emails.
9. Consider Paid Advertising
Educational institutions should dedicate a portion of their budget to paid ads. To achieve maximum visibility, you can opt for traditional print ads in newspapers and magazines.
Use these ads to highlight your students’ performance, special achievements, new facilities, and more. Running ads during the admission season can generate maximum traction for you.
Similarly, you can invest in PPC campaigns, Facebook ads, display ads, and paid articles to enhance online reach. Consider collaborating with relevant influencers and industry experts to create sponsored content.
While there are multiple paid advertising options, choose the ones that resonate with your target audience to generate warm leads.
Final Thoughts
Education marketing is the need of the hour. Institutions should invest time and resources in creating a comprehensive marketing strategy if they want to beat the competition.
As I’ve explained, you can reap both short-term and long-term benefits by investing in marketing. Based on your institution’s goals, choose the best marketing strategies that work for education startups. Go ahead and set yourself up to garner popularity and revenue for your institution.