How to Make Your Admissions Journey Stand Out - Part 1
As admissions season is in full swing, this two-part blog series will ensure your admissions journey stands out from your competitors. In part one, we detail how to ensure you attract the best students and how you can utilise your website as a conversion machine!
Attracting Prospective Students
Sadly, many schools don’t utilise the full power of marketing because they already receive a high number of applications. This is great, but are you receiving applications from the type of students that you’re looking for? Are you targeting new markets or relying on the same old places?
There are a number of ways to build awareness and generate leads. Whether you take an inbound or outbound approach, you need to ensure everything that each element of your marketing activity represents your ethos, and who you are as a brand. Whether you’re publishing ads, writing long form content, running a billboard campaign or harnessing the power of audiovisual content, always ask yourself ‘is this us?’.
At Interactive Schools, we have seen great success in Paid Social campaigns to drive admissions. Guided by data insights, creating a highly targeted audience - using a combination of demographic and geotargeting that contains hundreds of prospective families - allows you to drive awareness and action. Paid social ‘call to actions’ can be modified to reflect your specific goals, and therefore is a hugely effective tool in reaching prospective audiences.
The Website Exploration
Hopefully you read our previous blog post How to Create an A* Open Day Landing Page as it contained some crucial information about keeping visitors engaged and more likely to book onto an upcoming event. However, this is just one small element of a much larger decision making process for families.
In most cases the school website will be the first destination for prospective families, and therefore you need to ensure all the photography, videos and information are all fully up to date. Out of date information will suggest that the school does not place value in keeping parents informed.
Once content is refreshed and updated, there are a lot of elements that can be added to create the WOW-factor that people will remember. Have you considered adding a hotspot map to your site? Or an admissions calculator that will help to enhance the user experience. A countdown clock is also a great feature to use to count down to admissions deadlines, or to a specific open day event to increase incentive to complete specific actions.
If you need any help in attracting the best students, adding new features to your website or creating a bespoke admissions experience, Interactive Schools can help.
This blog post continues with 'How to Make Your Admissions Journey Stand Out - Part 2’