Social Garden’s Top 9 Student Recruitment Tactics for 2020

February 14, 2020

It’s that time of the year again! A time to think about how you and your team are going to boost your student recruitment numbers, fill up those key classes and empower more people with the education they deserve.

Although it can be daunting thinking about the competition within the education landscape, there are plenty of ways you can get students through your doors. In order to stay top of mind, relevant and appealing to the students of the future; here are our Top 9 Student Recruitment Tactics that will help you with your 2020 student recruitment marketing plan.

Align your lead nurture

This can be achieved simply by aligning your email marketing and social media content. It’s a great tactic to start with and it’s straightforward to integrate into your campaign.

This tactic ensures that information across platforms does not clash and that students don’t receive competing messages. For example, if the first email in your nurture is about scholarships, then we recommend your social media ads speak to scholarships too.

Database Re-engagement

This student recruitment tactic involves mining your database to re-engage potential leads that have shown interest in the past. You can use Email or SMS to prompt potential students from your database about particular courses. Based on how they engage, you can then create a short-list of the best prospects for providers to contact, aka ‘Hot Leads’. With your chosen provider/call centre, they can call these ‘Hot Leads’  and encourage them to apply to a course or otherwise book them in for an appointment with your recruitment team.

This is a great way to increase student applications out of past databases. Getting more students through the door and filling up your classes!

Build a complete funnel-attribution model

This is a tactic that may help you and your team to spend smarter in 2020 campaigns.

Create a model to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign at each level of the funnel through the conversion process.  From email to advertisements and even keywords, this model can be used to help you understand where prospective students engage the most. This means you can invest your money more effectively, to increase the likelihood of applications.

It’s great being able to prove that the money you’re spending actually contributes to the success of your marketing campaign.

Instant Experience on Social Media

With a growing trend for instant access to information, stimulation and content, Instant Experiences are needed now more than ever to target prospective students.

Instant Experiences are used to grab the attention of prospective students, whilst utilising the full effect of high quality content.  The biggest benefit from instant experiences is that it allows you to provide information, without the inconvenience of redirecting the user to a different page. Carousels, video and Lead Ad forms are all examples of this.

These immersive tools can be used to highlight your brand message and increase the likelihood of conversion at each touchpoint in the student journey. They are simple to implement, design and create, and will increase the quality and feel of any social media presence.

Set up lead alerts

These are seriously useful in improving your efficiency so that you can invest your time and resources effectively to increase conversions. These alerts are integrated automatically into your team’s inbox to access databases easily, and to remove manual searches. It’s a great way to streamline your online and offline activity and support your recruitment team.

Integrate User Generated Content (UGC)

Student ambassador video content is a great way to showcase what it’s really like to study at your university, TAFE or RTO. Distributing user generated content (UGC) across social media, email, auto-responders and vlogs provides a unique introspective for prospective students. We recommend including this in your marketing strategy to attract students in a more authentic way.

Hearing from someone who has studied at your institution creates personalisation and builds trust; which can increase engagement.

Gamification

Gamification incentivises leads to engage in lead capture forms by providing an interactive experience. This could mean building a quiz to make the lead generation process interesting and fun. Since prospective students are predominantly engaging via mobile, we ensure that our gamified tactics are mobile-friendly. This tactic contributes significantly to a great conversion rate.

Facebook Lead Ad Forms

One of the most successful CRO tactics that can be implemented is Facebook Lead Ad forms.

These provide students with an easily accessible platform to express interest in studying or download a course guide.

You can A/B test lead capture formats, conditional logic, field names and call to actions to obtain the highest quality leads. This form of User Experience experimentation will help you identify the best way to interact with prospective students. Better yet, the insights can feed back into your broader student recruitment marketing plan.

Conditional Forms

Conditional forms will allow you to streamline the student experience by only asking questions that are relevant to what the student elects. These forms will allow you to collect essential data to help you manage your student pipeline, personalise the user experience and improve your student recruitment.

Hopefully our student recruitment ideas and tactics help you understand how to improve your digital strategy to drive enrolments. Implementing even a few of these tactics into your 2020 campaigns will give your marketing efforts a competitive, innovative edge.