Many of us can still remember what our mailboxes looked like when we were seniors in high school.  They were likely stuffed to the max with pamphlets and brochures from community colleges, trade schools, and universities. It was exciting at first, but most ended up in the trash and had no impact on your final decision.

What a gigantic waste of time, energy, and money. Today’s trends in higher education combined with clever higher education marketing eliminate the blind advertising in order to find those students who actually are interested in the particular school you represent.

Trends in Higher Education

In an article published by The Huffington Post, Dr. Scott Miller, president of Virginia Wesleyan College, says, “Technology and our millennial students go hand in hand – literally. Smart phones, iPads, and the rest influence how our students perceive the world, relate to their professors, absorb and use information, and evaluate success.”

Miller goes on to describe faculty concerns regarding technology in the classroom. He says that many fear students will lose their motivation to learn when they have access to such vast information at their fingertips. Miller views things differently.

“Students will have a greater role in driving the curriculum, filtering knowledge and course requirements through technology and interacting with their counterparts in other nations, in real time, via Skype and other ‘smart’ classroom innovations,” he says.

It’s important to realize that technology inside and outside of higher education is here to stay. This doesn’t just change the way we plan our lessons or run our classroom, it also affects (or should affect) the way we reach our students and future students.

Recognize that your potential students are more likely to know what they want for their futures, and have an idea where to find it. This is where smart higher education marketing comes into play: give the students what they want and they will come to you.

Higher Education Marketing

These days, the tired, traditional practice of sending brochures and other marketing collateral to random students throughout the country is out. Instead, bring student traffic to your website and increase leads with inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is all about making people – in this case students – contact you instead of you contacting them. It’s about turning what we thought we knew about marketing upside down.

Students know what they and how to search for it. The job of a higher education marketing specialist is predicting what that is and providing valuable content that meets their needs.

According to Hubspot, some of the major themes of inbound marketing are:

• Content creation and distribution: Create content that answers Internet users’ basic questions and needs and then share that content through social media outlets.
• Personalization: Tailor content to the wants and needs of the people who are viewing it.
• Multi-channel: Inbound marketing approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you. (If you’re targeting potential students, you cannot ignore social media. It should be a large piece of your inbound marketing campaign — and a blog post of it’s own.)
• Integration: Content creation, publishing and analytics tools all work together to allow you to publish the right information at the right place at the right time.

Web Design for Higher Education

What happens if you build and implement  the greatest higher education inbound marketing campaign that ever existed, but fail to greet your inbound lead with an attractive, user-friendly website? You lose them. They click the back button and continue browsing before you ever get a chance to show off that valuable content you created just for them.

While beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to people and nature, there are some aspects of web design that are clearly cleaner, prettier and easier to use than others.

An inbound marketing agency that blends all the skills of a web design firm and SEO company can identify those key elements that make websites attractive, such as the appropriate use of white space, calls-to-action, and the most ideal locations for photos.

To make a website great, 602 Creative Studio offers the follow tips:

• Determine user intent: Determining the purpose of each visit is crucial to creating a website that people actually want to see.
• Visualize your perfect website: Close your eyes and imagine the steps that college-bound or current college students will take and provide that to them as part of your higher education marketing technique.
• Research and plan: It is your responsibility to design the website that is convenient and easy to navigate.  Look through your competitors’ websites to see how yours can improve. Examine your website based on trends in higher education combined with students’ points of view. This will give you a good understanding about creating a user-friendly website.
• Stick to the basics: Keep your website clean and neat with items on appropriate pages.
• Pay attention to compatibility: The website you create should be compatible with all the leading web browsers in the world.

For more information on inbound marketing for higher education contact Phoenix inbound marketing agency – 602 Creative Studio.

When the Internet first took over many years ago, businesses began creating static websites. They were the place people would go to learn the basics about your business: hours of operation, contact information and maybe a description of the services the business provides. If your website still looks like this, it is beyond time for a website upgrade.

A Website Upgrade – Is it Really Time?

Today’s websites must be updated regularly, providing up-to-date and current information for users. Competition is stiff, so your website needs to be reviewed regularly and updated on a consistent basis.

Accurate & Up-to-Date Information

You go out to breakfast at a neighborhood restaurant. It’s supposed to open at 7 a.m. You get there at 7:25 a.m., and the doors are still closed. Would you go back? If you’re a regular customer and really love those pancakes, you might – possibly. But if you are a new customer, you probably lost faith in the business.

And there goes one customer who could have been a regular out the door, so to speak.

What about seeing a new doctor? You’ve heard great things about that doctor, so you reach out to the office to make an appointment with that doctor – only to find out she relocated 10 months ago. Now, you’ve wasted your time – possibly even risked your health – and the business looks unprofessional.

All of the same principles apply to websites. A website upgrade should allow you to make changes when needed so that you can add blogs, update contact information and share relevant reports with your current and potential future clients.

Optimized for Search Engines (SEO)

According to 602 Creative Studio, each and every page within your website should be optimized for search engines. A all-encompassing web design, inbound marketing, and SEO company will use its expertise to ensure that all of the pages within your website are aligned with SEO best practices.

Research what your potential customers are most likely looking for when they are browsing the Internet, and make sure it’s on your site.

According to HubSpot, your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about. You need to make sure you’re appearing prominently when and where they search. To do that, you need to carefully, analytically pick keywords, optimize your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for.

Social Media Presence

Are your social media accounts linked to your website? If not, your website upgrade should include a way for users to get to your social media accounts, and perhaps more importantly, your social media accounts should have a way for users to get to your site.

“The new marketing communication – inbound marketing – has become a two-way dialogue, much of which is facilitated by social media,” Lauren Dell says in a post featured on Mashable.

Posting regular updates on social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest is perhaps one of the best ways to bring visitors to your site.

Other Signs that It’s Time for a Website Upgrade

Here are some additional reasons you might consider a website upgrade.

Your Website Still has a Dial-up Connection.

Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration (we hope), but if your pages load slowly, you risk your user getting impatient and clicking on the little “x” in the top right corner. Speed is critical to the user and SEO.

Your Marketing Strategy has Changed

As your business grows, it changes. As society advances, it also changes. Your strategic marketing plan changes – and therefore your website – should reflect these changes and fulfill the current needs of your business as well as those of your customers.

Your Website is Not Responsive

A great amount of traffic to your site comes from links that you post on social media. And – as you will surely see by sitting with almost any teenager – phones, tablets and other mobile devices are what are most often used to browse through or upload to social media accounts.

For that reason, websites should be adjust to different screen sizes, allowing the entire page to appear on the screen without forcing users to expand, minimize or move the content left or right in order to see it completely.

Help with Your Website Upgrade

Because there is so much to understand and think about in this complicated process, consider consulting with someone from a web design and inbound marketing agency to assist you in meeting your goals.

If you are reading this, you probably already understand the concept of ecommerce and the demand to generate leads online. Just in case you’ve been under a rock for a few years, we’ll briefly describe the importance of generating leads before moving on the fun stuff!

Who Needs to Generate Leads Online?

Every organization relies on their customer base or clientele to purchase their products or services and bring in money. Whether established or start-up, building and nurturing that customer base is critical to a company’s success and growth. To build a customer base, you must obtain contact information for your sales team to speak with.

Before the internet came into our daily lives, business owners and marketers generated leads through less effective means like direct mail marketing, telemarketing, networking events, and advertising. The internet changed everything by providing a world of potential customers and a place to grow your number of leads in a smart, effective way.

Why Use  Inbound Marketing Instead of Traditional?

The digital age and the ease of the internet has made our society impatient. We want our answers, products, and services and we want them now. We don’t want to be bothered with the cold-calling and television commercial tactics of traditional marketing. Even the more modern practices of digital marketing like spammy emails and annoying popups are interruptive. These methods are intrusive, ineffective, and costly.

There’s a better, more organic way to generate leads online.

According HubSpot, the trailblazer of the inbound marketing movement, “… inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.” With inbound marketing, you will not only generate leads online, you’ll generate the right kind of leads online.

How To Generate Leads Online with Inbound Marketing

The Inbound Marketing Methodology requires specific actions to be taken in order to generate and maintain leads.

1. Know Your Customer

Identify your ideal customer and really get to know them. Think about what motivates them to search for your product or service. Think about their pain-points and any questions they may be asking themselves. Think about all of the ways you and your company can solve their problems and answer their questions.

2. Attract Visitors to Your Website

Now that you know who your ideal customer is and what type of questions they have, you are ready to create content that will attract visitors to your website.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Most of us begin our web surfing sessions with a stop by our favorite search engine, such as Google. Optimizing your website to rank on search engines is one of the most effective practices to bring traffic to your website and generate leads online. For tips that will help your website get found on Google and a full description of SEO visit our previous blog posts.
• Blogging: Here’s the most important element of blogging – You must create quality content that your ideal customer is actually looking for.  Each blog post needs to answer a question, solve a problem, report industry news, or entertain your readers. Remember, this is your chance to prove your expertise and become the go-to place for information within your market. For your best chance at business blogging success, publish blog posts regularly and often. Your readers and potential customers will begin to expect this. Don’t forget the importance of search engine optimization when writing your blogs.
• Social Media Marketing: Social media posting and monitoring is essential to any strategic marketing plan. You should use social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote the content that you’ve worked so hard to create.

3. Convert Visitors into Leads

When you’ve created exceptional content and promoted that content to the masses via social media, you’ll likely see increased traffic to your website. This is your chance. Take advantage of the increased traffic and convert those visitors into leads by gathering contact information.

It’s not as easy as it seems. People are hesitant to give out their contact information for fear of being hounded by unwanted sales calls and emails. You must to provide something of value, such as a free eBook or webinar in return. The following process has been tested and tweaked for maximum effectiveness in converting visitors into leads.

1. Offer Something Valuable: This should be something that further establishes your business as a leader in the industry, but most importantly it should be something that your ideal customer really needs or wants. Possibilities include whitepapers, eBooks, templates, checklists, webinars, etc…
2. Create Call-to-Action: A CTA is a button, or even a link, created to catch attention and call the website visitor to action. The CTA might say ‘Download our Free eBook’ or ‘Sign Up for Webinar’. Learn more about Call-to-Action best practices in this article by Smashing Magazine.
3. Build a Landing Page: Once the website visitor clicks on the CTA, the Landing Page should appear with details about your offer and a contact form that the must complete before they are able to access the offer. You should keep the contact form short with only a few questions. At the very least, you’ll need to ask for the visitor’s email address.

Congratulations! Once the visitor has completed the contact form, you’ve successfully generated a new lead. At this time, you should send an automatically thank you email and add the lead to your Customer Relationship Management application or mailing list.

For a real life example of how this process works and our free eBook, click the CTA below.