Prospective students and their parents are telling you a lot without “telling you” anything. If you listen carefully, you can respond effectively.
Let’s start at the top (of the funnel)
How’s your pipeline of prospective students who have expressed interest in your institution?
Enter PC&U. For the equivalent of a few pennies per student reached, PC&U drives thousands of inquiries for hundreds of schools every year. With access to College Board, NRCCUA, and ACT names and a Search universe of more than three million students, PC&U delivers reach and results no other resource can match. Not only that, but 100% of the leads delivered via PC&U have expressed interest specifically in your institution.
There’s still time to jump into PC&U for 2015—but not much! Contact us today to find out more about audience segment options and pricing.
Let’s move on to your database
At this point of the year, you’re sitting on a number of different lists with students at different stages of the enrollment cycle: inquiries, non-responders, applications, maybe some accepted students. How are you engaging these students and separating yourself from the competition?
Enter IP Targeting. The technology now exists to use any list you have to deliver online advertising directly into prospects’ homes and across all devices (hello, parents and influencers!). And you can use what you know about these people to hyper-focus your messaging when reaching them online. Think scholarships, event days, deadlines, etc.
Let’s consider your website
Visitors to your website are demonstrating various levels of intent and interest by just being there as well as by visiting specific pages.
Enter Retargeting. If you don’t have Retargeting running against your admission pages, you are now officially behind the times. Marketing 101 tells us all that frequency of message is what leads to conversions, and Retargeting is the simplest (and one of the cheapest!) ways to accomplish that. Plus, you can customize your Retargeting messaging to wherever visitors were on your site. This continues your “conversation” with whoever it is that came to your site (hello again, parents!). Oh—and this is one of the best options to help address stealth applicants.
Let’s talk yield
How confident are you feeling about the number of students you accepted who will ultimately enroll? It’s become a lot less predictable over the last few years, hasn’t it?
Enter Personalized Direct Marketing. With some variable data printing, e-mail customization, and PURL technology, you can engage with your accepted students in different ways than ever before. And more importantly, you can get a deeper sense of their intentions on enrolling. Think about how nice it would be to have a better sense of your May 1 situation on April 1! That can (and has) happened through campaigns like this.
Let’s not forget online behavior
What about when a student is doing some research online and searching for or researching your school, schools like yours, programs you offer, etc.?
Enter SEO, video, and keyword targeting. SEO is a simple question: does your school appear in the search results when it should or when you would want it to? If you haven’t tested this (in the “shoes” of a prospective student), stop reading and do so right now. For video, this is an area that continues to grow exponentially and presents the opportunity to gauge a lot of intent. By measuring who’s watched your video and for how long, you can get a sense of how engaged they are with your institution or brand. And with keyword targeting, you can ensure your brand is in front of people virtually anywhere online as they’re reading about topics you consider relevant.
These are all different ways to think about engaging people based on the level of interest they’re expressing in your institution. And, yes, they’re all areas Carnegie specializes in. Let us know how we can help.