Marketing for educational institutes is not exactly easy. With the number of government, public and international schools growing in Mumbai, marketing for educational institutes has become competitive and complex. Some institutes have had to increase their marketing budget since the field of marketing has become so competitive. There are so many channels of marketing institutes can choose from including digital marketing.
The marketing field may be competitive, but it is better than not attempting or giving up marketing completely. Marketing is essential for institutes in Mumbai because there are so many students and teachers who are searching for them and waiting to find an institute in which they can fit in perfectly.
Students or teachers may visit the institute’s website for online registration forms, information and access to courses, learning methods and for educational means. For the educational institute, marketing brings in some online presence and engagement, which will give the institute more chances to convince the student or the teacher why their institute would be perfect for them.
So why would an institute want to consider doing online marketing when there are so many other channels of marketing? Keep reading to find out why a principal, director or owner of an educational institute might want to consider online marketing or digital marketing.
Benefits Of Digital Marketing For Educational Institutes
1. Brand Awareness
Whether an institute has a website or a social media platform, it helps in improving the brand awareness of the institute. It also helps in the enrollment process and grows the base of your audience. When you are online, you can reach anyone in the world, you could not only attract domestic students, but you could also attract students who are staying abroad. Online marketing is beneficial to even institutes that are not very popular. So you do not have to be a Podar, Ambani or St.Xaviers to do online marketing.
2. More Affordable Than Traditional Marketing
There are a lot of institutes that still use traditional methods such as tv ads and radio ads, and in some cases, they even use cheaper traditional methods such as flyers are newspaper ads. However, Digital marketing still outdoes traditional marketing. For example, you could invest in a social media campaign and make it cost-effective and controllable while also having much more reach than traditional marketing.
Another plus of doing online marketing is that you can set your own budget, unlike traditional marketing, where you would have to negotiate for ad space. This allows you to promote your educational institute on your own terms.
3. Personalised Marketing Approach
Marketing on your own budget is not the only way you can personalise the way you promote your educational institute. When you focus on marketing online, you could use data to create a strategy that has been personalised based on your goals, budget and audience. This is something that you cannot do when you are promoting your institute via traditional means.
When you personalise the way you promote your institute based on your audience, your engagements and conversions will increase. For example, let us imagine your institute has a medical, engineering and a business department. Data gathering tools available online could help you personalise the message you send to your audience based on the intentions of the audience. So a different message would go to students interested in engineering while another message would go a student interested in medicine.
4. Higher Conversion Rates
Digital marketing allows you to target the area in which you would like your institute to be promoted, So an institute in Mumbai could target students or faculties in other parts of the country depending on the data and preference of the educational institute. Combine this with the way you could personalise your online marketing campaign and the chances of attracting more students increases drastically.
Another reason online campaign have higher conversion rates is because of the call to action. While traditional marketing methods also have a call to actions, most of them tell you to call or visit the institute’s website. Call to actions present online, would allow you to that in a single click saving a lot of time for a future student or faculty member.
5. Trackable And Modifiable
This is one of the biggest advantages of promoting your institute online. When you start an online campaign, you will be able to see the number of people who have seen the ads, the number of people who have interacted with the ad. This is not possible when you are promoting your education institute by using traditional methods.
When you use the traditional method, you might be able to find an estimate of the number of people who have viewed the ad, but you would not be able to find an estimate of the number of people who have approached you because of the ad.
Since you can see all the statistics of online marketing, you get a clear view of how your ad is performing. You can even change your ad if you think it is not doing very well. Another feature of online marketing is the retargeting feature. This is when users have seen your ad, but have not interacted with it. You can then target the same users again to try and get their attention again.
These are just some of the reasons why online and digital marketing is the way to go forward for educational institutes. If you are the principal, director or owner of an education institute, you would want to consider the following online marketing strategies to help your educational institute grow.
Marketing Strategies For Educational Institutions
1. Social Media
There is so much that can be done on social media if you are institute. If your institute does not have a social media account, you are missing out on all the opportunities present. There are 4 social media platforms where your institute must have an account; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin are the leading platforms in social media, and you will find a lot of potential students and teacher in these platforms.
Kids, teenagers and adults spend a lot of time on social media, Instagram has 800 million active monthly users. Facebook has 2.6 billion active monthly followers, Linkedin and twitter have 610 million followers and 330 million members, respectively. Besides this, you will also find apps like Snapchat and TikTok that are getting popular.
Instagram is one of the best apps to use for marketing your institute. It is a platform where you can show your programs, facilities, extracurricular activities and other USPs of your educational institute.
It is really easy to use Instagram, and even people who are not tech-savvy can get used to using this app. You can post attractive photos and also edit them in just a few taps or clicks. In Instagram, you will also find Instagram stories and Instagram live that allows you to interact with viewers and broadcast live events that may take place on your premises.
Besides Instagram, you could also create an account on Facebook and create a Facebook page for your institute. By creating a page, you will also be able to use Facebook Ads that you can use to boost the engagements of your post. To make your Facebook campaign successful, ensure that all the pictures you post are authentic or real.
Post pictures of actual students and alumni. Also, include a call to action on your post to motivate the user to sign up and follow your page. If you are using Facebook Ads, try to be as creative and unique as possible to attract more people.
2. Google Ads
If you are new to running online ads and have budget constraints, the best place to start would be Google Ads. Google Ads allow you to create different types of ads; for example, you could create image ads that appear on related websites or video ads that will play your advertisement before a video is played.
Google Ads also allows you to personalise and target ads to a specific demographic. You can use data available to you to create a specific ad for a particular audience. If you are receiving a lot of impressions, you could also retarget the audience to make your ad appear more than once.
When you are using Google Ads, try adding additional information to your ads, for example, you could add the receptionist’s telephone number or the institute’s email address.
3. Create Your Search Engine Optimised Website
It is essential for an institute to have its own website. The website should be well designed and optimised for search engines. Optimising your website will help your website rank better on search engine results. You could look at websites of other educational institution in Mumbai to get an idea of how you want your website to look.
Your website should be easy to navigate through so that the user can easily find his or her destination. Your pages should be detailed and informative. Most users would be searching for fees, entrance exam procedures or enrollment forms, make all these easy to find and enter all the possible information you think visitors may need.
Since the website would be of an institute, the content you put enter on your website would be on the formal side of things. A lot of things go into making a website that has been optimised for search engines; you could read our guide on Local SEO that will help attract students that are close to the institute’s locations. To attract international students, you would need to target their location and keywords. You could learn more about SEO by reading our guide on the changes that are taking place in SEO.
Conclusion
In the marketing strategies listed above, you would have found Ads and SEO. A lot of people get confused on whether to spend their budget on Ads, SEO or both. We could read our article comparing the two by clicking on this link. In the end, the method you choose would depend on the data you have collected, your goals and your budget.
Traditional marketing can still be helpful, but with the development of technology and the number of people using this technology, the only way forward is to promote your Educational Institute online. If you need any help with your website, you could contact us and we will help you improve your website.
