What is Education Marketing?
The rising digitalization of educational courses combined with the academic interests of the 21st century learners has led to a rise in demand for education marketing strategies for institutions across the globe. This is also further fueled by the advent of social media, deeper internet penetration and popularity of online courses. Today we have a GenZ buyer who will be engaged, discovered and acquired digitally by the education brands. This is a new paradigm shift in how education marketing will work.
Education marketing is mainly a set of strategies aimed at the higher education market. Because of the strong competition among colleges, it is important for institutions to amp up their marketing strategies to attract more students towards them. Plus, there is a challenge of keeping students interested in the idea of continuing higher education in the first place.
As per the Global Digital Report 2019, the 21st century has witnessed and astronomical increase in the use of social media. According to the latest statistics, about 84% of the global population that has access to the internet uses social media. The statistics from a research study by HighQ, go to show that 55% of people watch online videos every day and 78% of people watch online videos every week. This means that every potential student has access to social media and is capable of engaging with others via the same to promote various thoughts and ideas.
The technology scene is changing every day, it is important for the educational institutions to find the right technological channel through which they can get more enrolments into their institutions and manage the current student details efficiently. A study showed that 79% of the senior marketing professionals surveyed consider video content to be of a very high importance in the near future. Over social media across the globe, Snapchatters watch 10 billion videos every day and 500 million people watch online videos on Facebook. 82% of Twitter account holders also conveyed that prefer watching videos on the platform.
In an environment such as this, education marketing professionals should concentrate on conveying fantastic stories and at the same time diversify how they share the content. The diversification can be articles, podcasting, blogs, paid advertisements & marketing campaigns over internet, and videos. A recent study shows that 67% of internet users employ search engines as their first source of information for higher education institutions. Another 64.6% of internet users click on sponsored links when searching for higher education information.
Influencer marketing is going mainstream now-a-days with the advent of platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok and Vine. Education marketing professionals should let students be the face of their brand. Partnering with students who are already successful vloggers can go a long way in achieving relativeness to the millennial crowd.
Education marketing professionals should concentrate on telling stories to smaller and more focused groups, and at the same time be willing to pay extra to reach relevant audience. Focusing on a focused group will assist education marketing professionals dive deeper, so as to create content which is relatable, targeted, and authoritative to its target audience. As quoted by the digital marketing pioneer, writer and speaker, Ann Hanley: “Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well.”
