Education is highly competitive and with the Government having announced a funding cut of £950m for British Universities over the next 3 years, it will only get tougher. 15-24 year olds make up 16% of the total PC-based Internet population in the UK but that figure leaps to 25% for mobile access.
As teenagers spend more time online and using smart mobile devices, education faces the challenges of finding new ways to grab attention and build engagement. In recognition of this, British Council now offers an e-marketing workshop1 to help education marketers understand how students select education products online (next course in London in November 2010).
How can higher education brands increase engagement with their customers? How can colleges win the persuasion battle and convince students that there is the right blend of skills and support to help them excel? How can they tap into the lucrative overseas student market?
Search and they will find
iProspect research shows that 62% of searchers click on links within the first page of results. It's logical that to be front of mind, you have to be highly visible on SERPs; rely on your marketing efforts, not on the propensity of searchers to sift through pages of results because we all have attention deficit issues online.
A few ideas:
Concentrate on your brand, location, departments and individual courses. In the last 12 months, in the UK alone there were approximately 390,000 searches for "psychology university" and 320,000 searches for "psychology courses".
It's a social thing
Traffic from social networks to brand websites is increasing. 99% of Generation Y users (aged 18-24) have a profile on a social networking site, though Twitter adoption in the under 24s is a slower burn. Higher education will benefit from the fact that social media is international - the key networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare enable local content to be dispersed to a global audience.
Here are some ideas worth exploring:
Be front of mind - get behavioural
Retargeting8 enables you to serve targeted online adverts to people who have visited your website when they browse elsewhere, using advertising networks and their media partners.
For example, Acme College has a new visit from a potential student who searched for "engineering degree" in Google. The student visits the engineering department landing page, then leaves and continues the web session on another website. Acme then serves adverts promoting its engineering courses via 3rd party websites to the same student to keep their message front of mind.
Evidence from the retail market9 suggests that 42.9% consumers who see retargeted adverts then return to the original website.
Further reading
There are some interesting articles available online for further reading. Check out the following:
Take away thoughts
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Higher education and digital marketing - joining the party
Email Deliverability Tips
by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)
Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.
- Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered. Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like. Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content. Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.
- http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
- http://www.bondedsender.com
- http://www.habeas.com
Click on titles to read more.
3/10/11 Email Timing: A Look At 6 Marketers
3/8/11 3 Helpful Thank You Page Examples
3/7/11 Meet AWeber at SXSW 2011
3/3/11 How to Instate Brand Ambassadors With Email
3/1/11 Do You Market Solutions, Or Just Stuff?
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How Does Google Work
Strategies – Web Ecommerce
I always laugh when listening to mainstream marketing company blabber on about branding and demographics. On the web, ecommerce is boils down to one concept and only one. You must determine the needs of your prospects and provide solutions.
It is so important that you should start every day and meeting off by saying, “What are the needs of my prospects and how does what I am doing provide a solution to those needs?” If you cannot provide a quick, simple answer, you have wondered off the path to profits and need to refocus.
So, what the hell do I mean by “needs.” The trick with web ecommerce is to realize that there is lookie loo traffic and need traffic. A person shopping online for Christmas presents on December 15th has a serious need and is highly motivated to buy. A person that is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning and catching up on the news has no needs and isn’t going to get off their butt to find their wallet. Obviously, you are only interested in the motivated person.
Finding the needs of your prospects should be the first thing you do. Before you decide on a business name. Before you buy a domain. Before you even decide on the exact products or services you will offer. All of these subjects will be determined by your prospects once you understand their needs.
Okay, so how do you figure out their needs? In the real world, you would invest $50,000 on a market analysis, surveys and so on to find out their needs and the best location for your business. You are going to love this. With web ecommerce, you are going to spend under a couple of hundred bucks.
You first step is to identify the single word that best describes your business. If you want to open an online travel site, the word is “travel.” If you want to sell a book on investing, the word is “investing.” Whatever you business, pick the one word that describes it best.
Taking your one word, you want to use this program: WordTracker. With Wordtracker, you are going to do a keyword analysis. You will do an analysis for “travel” by entering the word in a provided form, hitting the return button and then watching the program kick out every keyword phrase that incorporates “travel” that has been typed into a meta search engine in the last 60 days.
Think about that for a moment. It is going to report to you the exact phrases used by your prospects to find something related to your business, in this case, travel. Each of those keyword phrases represents a need your prospect has regarding travel.
Let’s say you were going to build a travel site focused on cruises to the Caribbean. After you do the keyword analysis using the phrase “cruise”, you find there are tons of search for cruises to Alaska. Your prospects are telling you the subject the site should focus on. Instead of wasting time and money on the wrong area, you know where to go to pull in customers. Your domain name, advertising and search engine optimization should all be focused on the keywords you identify for your area of interest.
Of all the purported strategies for web ecommerce, there is one that always works. Identify the needs of your prospects and provide solutions to them.
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7 tips for creating great link bait
1. Give them a reason to link to you
2. Link out first
3. Do the hard work to uncover great content
4. Keep their attention
5. Think of the visual element
6. Make the headline re-tweetable
7. Don't overcomplicate things
Writing your Resource Box for Success
Copyright 2006 Joshua Spaulding
Through the recent years many people have learned the secrets of Search Engine Optimization. More and more sites have seen the effects articles have done for the traffic of their sites.
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