The education sector is more competitive than ever before, which means your marketing needs to be as effective as possible.

The education sector offers some tough competition as it becomes more of a challenge to attract students, especially as your audience is now a lot more aware of all marketing channels. With today’s students being much savvier when it comes to marketing methods, your digital marketing campaigns for the education sector need to be targeted and thought out than ever before.

You need to be able to deliver balanced and effective campaigns that can cut through the noise to set your institution apart from others for all the right reasons. So exactly how can you do this?

Prioritize your marketing channels

With so many marketing channels available, it can be easy to spread yourself too thin by trying to achieve an equal presence across them all. Not only is this going to be an ineffective way to reach your audience, but it’s also likely to be a lot more expensive.

All promotional activities you engage in should be prioritized across your most effective channels in order to reach the right people, at the right time and in the right way. This means looking at your data to assess where your audience is, but also where they are most engaged.

After all, you may have a large Twitter following but if you gain more engagement on Instagram or via email marketing, these will be the best channels to focus on.

Manage your funnel

Once you have your channels, you need to ensure that the recruitment channel that is generated by your marketing activities is managed very carefully. This means that as well as focusing on raising awareness, you need to support your funnel with various conversion activities that are intended to inspire students to choose your university, college or institution above all others.

Ultimately, this means that conversion must be kept in mind across all of your marketing activities. However, this doesn’t mean every message needs to be focused on sales, instead, you need to balance your messaging and focus on the ‘sales’ aspect at the right moment.

Measure your results

Of course, there’s very little point in choosing the right channels and managing your marketing funnel if you aren’t reviewing your results.

You need to put a robust system of measurement and evaluation in place to ensure that your processes are working and that you’re using the right tools. This will enable you to ensure that your marketing funnel is fully integrated and effective, as well as allow you to pinpoint any areas that require improvement.

Remember your audience

Of course, you can’t really do any of the above unless you know who your audience is. After all, how can you target them on the correct channels with the best messaging if you have no idea who they are?

It’s not enough to simply say that your audience is students, you also need to be able to answer other questions, including:

• How old are they are?
• What are looking at studying?
• What benefits will they be looking for from your university?
• Where are they from?
• What do they want from their educational experience?
• Where can you find them?

Answering these questions and others will allow you to build some in-depth personas, which will ultimately allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns that take into account your full audience. After all, if you’re trying to attract both young and mature students, there’s not much point in only focusing on one demographic.

Every part of your marketing campaign should come back to your audience, from your tone of voice to the channel you use. This will better ensure you succeed at digital marketing in the education sector and stand out from the competition.