Marketing for Education: 6 Digital Marketing Tips To Get Started

Digital marketing for education helps universities, schools, colleges and other institutions of learning target their audiences online. This is possible with the wide range of tools and platforms that are available and some are free.

How you start depends on a number of factors. First you should look at your goals and what you’re looking to achieve. This helps you to set things like budgets and the platforms that you’ll use.

I’ve listed here some of the most relevant digital marketing tips for education companies and institutions to set up and manage their campaigns today.

 

1. Invest in Google Ads

Investing in Google Ads marketing for education is a powerful way to reach the audiences you want to target like students. In there you can set up campaigns that will help you reach your goals more effectively and efficiently.

The most relevant for education companies and institutions are Search, Display, Remarketing and Discover campaigns. And you can use these at different stages of your advertising.

With Search for example, you’ll use keywords and text ads to target people who are searching on Google. And with a Remarketing campaign you’ll retarget people who’ve been on your website before to bring them back.

 

2. Review your landing pages

It’s important to think carefully about what to include in your landing pages, like the structure of the content, the calls to action and more. And you should check how responsive they are on all devices and what load times they currently achieve.

All this will help your marketing efforts and will provide a great user experience for your visitors.

You can start by checking how visitors are currently experiencing your landing pages. If you have a Google Analytics account, the Acquisition and Behaviour reports will provide you with much insights through the metrics there.

And one of the most important metrics is bounce rate. This metric reveals the percentage of people who visited your website and landing pages and left without seeing other pages.

 

Aiming for a bounce rate below 50% is usually a good idea. Anything above that, like the screenshot above reveals that some work still needs to be done to engage visitors and get them to convert.

 

3. Conduct market research online

Conducting marketing research for education programs online is crucial because it helps you to see how many people search per month and who your competitors are.

With the search volume size you can use tools to see what this is and some of these tools are free and some are paid. Below I describe how to use the research tools in your Google Ads account.

And you can use tools like SERanking to research your competitors. You’ll be able to see what keywords they are bidding on in their Google Ads campaigns and the text ads they are running.

Also, if you’re running campaigns already in Google Ads you should check the Auction Insights report to see who you appear next to in the search results. This will show how often you appear in the top and absolute top positions relative to your competitors. You can see this report in your Keywords tab in your campaign.

 

4. Target people who are searching

There are marketing platforms that you can use for people searching for education programs online. You can reach them as they search with keywords, by creating text and image ads to promote your school, university or college.

Google Ads and Microsoft Ads are two of the largest in this space. But Google Ads is far ahead in size and search volume, with the Google search engine having over 90% of search traffic globally.

And you can do a lot of research with tools like the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads to find keywords to add to your campaigns.

 

5. Track your sales or leads

A marketing strategy for an educational organisation should have good tracking in place. This is to track all actions that are important to you like registrations, enquiries, leads, downloads, views or anything else.

And this is most important when you are running adverts and need to make every click spend count.

A powerful tool that will help you track this on your website is Google Analytics. You’ll be able to see where your visitors are coming from in the Acquisition section. And the conversion tracking will provide you with greater info on who is taking the actions you want on your website.

In the Admin section you can create goal tracking. There are templates that you can choose from based on what you want to track.

The good thing about setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics is that you won’t need to add more code to your website beyond the Analytics code that you’ve already added.

 

6. Hire a PPC consultant

If you’re looking to set up education PPC campaigns in Google Ads, you should consider the help that you’ll need. Google provides a support team that you can reach out to if you need help with any part of your campaigns. This is ok if you need help for one-off events.

However, if you need set up and management for your Google Ads campaigns, then you should hire a PPC consultant to get ongoing support.

But, make sure they have experience with education companies and check their case studies and if they are a Google Partner or not.

 

Get in Touch

Marketing for education is an area of expertise for me because I’ve worked with universities, schools and colleges to promote and advertise their organisations. If you’d like to learn more and to find out how I can help, use the contact form below to reach me.