There are many universities doing well in terms of enrollment. However, there are others that are struggling. Either way, attracting new students is crucial if a university wants to continue having full classes.
If you represent a university, and you’re trying to attract more potential students or to make a wider audience aware of your school, there are various ways of doing that. If you’re at a loss for ideas, you can always contact a higher education digital marketing agency. Such entities are likely to have some notions you haven’t come up with before.
You can also pursue some of the ideas on this list.
Create and Air TV Commercials
It’s true that some people no longer watch network TV or cable anymore. They may watch TV using streaming services like Hulu these days. However, they watch, though, they’re still liable to see the commercials that come on during breaks from their shows.
This is an ideal place for your university to feature some commercials extolling the virtues of that particular institute of higher learning. If the commercials make your university seem like an attractive place to take some classes, then you might see enrollment spike after a clever or innovative TV commercial campaign.
Target High School Job Fairs
There are often job fairs that high schools have, usually for their seniors. These are meant to provide individuals who are not far from graduating with some options or ideas that they may wish to pursue within the coming months.
This is another useful place to advertise your college and its classes. If you set up a booth with some brochures and engage with the students, it’s likely that some of them will consider attending once they graduate.
Optimize the University’s Website
Your university will doubtless have a website. It should be large, highly detailed, and easy to navigate. That will make it more attractive to any individual who visits. However, it should also be optimized using the latest SEO practices.
Hiring a marketing team that can optimize your university’s website makes sense. This involves the inclusion of keywords and keyword strings, adding compelling visual elements, and so forth. Doing so will keep your website at the top of the search engine rankings and hopefully bring you more visitors.
Lean on Your Alumni
Using your alumni to act as part of your marketing team definitely makes sense. Assuming your alumni enjoyed their time at your university, asking them to tell their family members and friends about it can be highly useful.
Make a point of mentioning this in any newsletters or emails that you send to former students. Mention how affordable tuition is and any well-regarded classes or disciplines within your school. This should encourage your alumni to push for individuals they know to follow in their footsteps and enroll.
Create and Air Radio Spots
If someone doesn’t know about your school by watching TV and seeing some of your commercials, they might respond well to radio spots instead. You can create radio spots about your college and use them in one of two ways.
You can target the local market close to your university by running radio spots during shows on local stations. You can also create national spots that can run on nationwide radio services like SiriusXM. If your university offers online classes, then even someone on the other side of the country could be a potential student it’s sensible to target.
Advertise During Podcasts
If your ads don’t happen to be reaching the target audience through traditional radio spots or TV commercials, one other thing you can do is to create spots that a host might read during a podcast. There are millions of podcasts available now, and creating some spots for them is a clever idea.
By doing so, you can often reach potential students for your university who have very niche interests. For example, if they like listening to true crime podcasts, then maybe they want to get into something like forensic psychology. If that’s a career path your school offers, hearing that it’s available to them can often bring in some new students.
Rent Billboards
You can also rent billboards that feature encouragement for those who see them to register and attend your school. You can rent and feature these billboards anywhere, especially if you focus mainly on online classes. If you do, then someone who isn’t close to your college geographically is just as viable of a prospect as someone close by.
However, if you want to attract some students who will come and attend your school in person, then renting billboards and featuring ads in the same city as your university is the way to go. Those billboards can remind anyone walking or driving by that this is an option that’s available to them and is also easy for them to access because of its proximity.
Utilize PPC Marketing
PPC stands for pay-per-click marketing, and it’s the practice of creating ads that will appear when you determine that someone belongs to your target audience. It’s helpful to create something that can materialize when someone is spending time on their phone, a laptop, or a desktop computer.
If you can determine based on their age or activity that they might be a suitable candidate to go to classes at your school, creating ads for your university that show up right in front of such an individual is likely worth the money. If they click on that ad, that makes it more likely they will convert, meaning they will become a student.
Advertise on Social Media Platforms
One additional thing you may want to do to attract some more students to your university is to use social media. You might create ads and other promotional content that appear on platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, X, Instagram, and many others.
Since so many people enjoy social media platforms and spend so much time there, you can’t afford to ignore this way of reaching a large population segment.
