Today's prospective students and their parents are heavily researching online and extending the research hours, they rely on the Internet as a primary source of information, leaving behind the old model of building trusting relationships exercises like direct mail, outdoor billboards, print ads, radio, and TV commercials. Those outbound tools will likely stay in higher education marketing budgets, however marketeers are very conscious - now more than ever, that each comes with a high price tag and is difficult to track ROI.
Inbound marketing can help marketing and admission staff alike to attract and convert prospective students in the most cost effective way possible. With Inbound Marketing you are able to track a student or parent from the first time they visit your site to the moment they submit an application. Clarifying and benchmarking the student journey, in order to better optimize, define and refine the journey, creating your own Conversion Optimization Strategy.
Inbound Marketing uses many software, Hubspot for example helps your educational institutions attract higher quality traffic to your website, convert that website traffic into prospective students, and nurture those prospective students into applicants.
How does Inbound Marketing using HubSpot Work?
1- Attract Qualified Prospective Students and Parents
Optimize new and repurpose existing content to attract site traffic and increase brand awareness with content tailored to your audience journeys, your content can include blogging, microsites, social media and digital ads.
2- Personalize Relationships With Prospective Students
Engage audiences with customized content unique to their stage in the admission cycle, planned area of study, or website activity. You can create multiple conversion points to tailor campaigns and shorten the length of time between a prospective student’s first visit and their application submission.
3-Measure Campaign ROI With unrivaled Accuracy
Use closed-loop analytics that directly attribute enrollments to your marketing campaigns and provide a 360 view of a prospective student’s journey.
HubSpot can help to automate and measure your inbound marketing activities. With HubSpot, you can create automated email campaigns with content tailored to your prospects based on their stage in the Enrollment Journey. To keep everything under one roof, HubSpot has Integration APIs to help you connect all the silos.
Inbound marketing isn't a 'one size fits all' in a flash. Inbound efforts build over time (3-6 months) and should be seen as a part of a broad marketing strategy.
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