You've already put all your efforts into practice and it's still hard to capture students? If you identify with this situation, there is probably something wrong with your fundraising strategies.
But don't despair, this is the time to learn from your failures and improve your tactics. With that in mind, in this post, we have separated some of the most common mistakes in attracting students to help you find the gap and correct me.
In this post, you will see:
How does student recruitment work?
Attracting students: what are the main mistakes of institutions ofIt is what?
- Your website is not responsive
- You are not generating value
- Your landing pages are not user-friendly
- The ways to contact your Instituição educacional are not clear
- Your calls to action do not generate action
- You don't harness the power ofiinternet
- You are communicating generically
Good reading!
How does student recruitment work?
Student attraction is a set of marketing and sales strategies designed to attract and delight potential students, and this is one of the most important phases for school management.
In the race for capture, the focus is on converting the lead into an enrolled one, and of course this involves several processes, from creating a persona to producing assertive content, according to the stage in the funnel, to nurture and engage the future student.
In fact, there are many steps, and if you don't have experience in Educational Marketing, you may end up making some mistakes along the way. In the next topic, we will talk about the seven most common mistakes made by educational institutions within their strategies.
Attracting students: what are the main mistakes of educational institutions?
If you've been investing in fundraising strategies, but haven't been able to achieve results, it's time to rethink some points of your digital marketing strategy. Let's go?
Below, we separate seven of the most common mistakes made by educational institutions in the enrollment phase, such as:
- Your website is not responsive;
- You are not generating value;
- Your landing pages are not user-friendly;
- The ways of contacting your Instituição educacional are not clear;
- Your calls to action do not generate action;
- You don't harness the power of the internet;
- You are communicating generically.
1. Your website is not responsive
The website is your main conversion tool on the internet. If it is not optimized for mobile devices, here is a factor that is influencing your attracting potential students.
As the survey done by McAfee shows, the young brazilians are the ones who use electronic devices the most, and most of these users are aged between 17 and 18 years. Any resemblance to the audience you want to reach?
Therefore, if the letters are small, if the menus are difficult to access and if the page takes more than 2 seconds to load, your performance in attracting students on mobile is compromised.
2. You are not generating value
For many years, higher education institutions have based their actions only on massive actions, one-way communication. If you still bet on this formula, you are missing out on many potential students.
The tip here for capturing leads is to build a good content marketing strategy and dialogue with your audience with rich and valuable content, personalizing the contact.
Make students identify with your educational institution and develop the desire to study there long before the entrance exam. It's what great universities in the world, like Yale and Princeton, do.
3. Your landing pages are not user-friendly
Landing pages became quite popular as a way to capture leads, but they need special care to attract more students.
If your landing pages do not have an attractive design and contain formal content, without establishing any identification with visitors, there is yet another problem to solve in attracting students.
The main information, such as the benefits that the visitor will have when providing the data, must appear on the first screen, above the scroll bar. The images must be attractive, making the student imagine the material even before having access to it.
You should also optimize your landing pages with SEO tactics to rank them on Google and thus attract even more visitors. Finally, only ask for the data necessary to start a relationship with your visitors, such as name and email. No filling your potential students with questions right from the start, okay?
4. The ways to contact your educational institution are not clear
You know that 0800 hidden in the footer of your website, the links to social networks that don't lead anywhere and the contact form that never works? These are common problems that end up undermining your strategy for attracting more students.
Open easy-to-access communication channels and maintain a team dedicated to this service. A 0800 will never be effective if you don't widely publicize that it exists. Your social media won't have followers and engagement if you don't show the world you're there.
In addition to having multiple communication channels, be agile in responses. Research indicates that if you respond to a customer within 5 minutes of their first interaction, your chances of conversion increase.
Use chatbots to automate service, set up transactional emails, have a call center that allows students to select the desired option and thus get answers faster.
5. Your calls to action do not generate action
The term call to action is quite specific: call to action. If you do not indicate to the visitor what the next step is, you are missing the chance to take a step forward in the purchase journey.
There is a huge difference between an “ebook” button and a “Get your ebook right now” or “Sign up” and “Get your free enrollment right now”.
Create a sense of urgency and use exclusivity as a conversion strategy. If registration is free indefinitely and for anyone, the student will not make the decision right away.
On the other hand, if it's only for the first 50 people who click, the student's behavior will change completely. The action is taken immediately, as he cannot wait and consider other possibilities, running the risk of losing the benefit.
6. You don't leverage the power of the internet
Another very common mistake in the capture process is to leave aside the investment in the digital environment. Many educational institutions still do not use the internet in their attraction strategies.
But the reality is that students, like their parents, are part of this digital environment and often use the internet to search for services, products and even information about graduation.
Imagine the following situation: you don't invest in social networks and, despite having a blog, you don't nourish it frequently and have little up-to-date information about your university. in front of an unobscured website, the student is likely to close your page shortly thereafter.
If your institution invests in the digital environment, future students, who are looking for schools and courses, will find it easy to find your brand and obtain the necessary information about their EI, which, consequently, will contribute to their decision-making process. .
Therefore, our tip is: take advantage of the potential of the internet, invest in digital channels to highlight your university's information, values and differentials. Remember that, using the internet as an ally, you can have an even greater reach in your fundraising strategies.
7. You are communicating generically
We cannot talk about fundraising strategies without talking about communication. After all, a good dialogue between your educational institution and the student is the first step towards creating a solid relationship.
However, although communication is an important element in this recruitment process, there are those who make the mistake of speaking to their audience in a generic way.
By addressing all your potential students in the same way, you run the risk of feeding your lead content that is not of interest to them and, consequently, pushing them away instead of attracting them to your university.
For example, imagine that a lead dreams of starting a law course and you, without segmenting your audience, nurture them with communications about the medical course. Can you understand the problem?
They are totally different areas and probably will not arouse the interest of the student. On the contrary, it can harm your uptake.
So you don't make this mistake, the tip is to segment your target audience. Seek to select based on characteristics such as areas of interest, goals and age. It is important to keep in mind that this data will help you to build a more personalized communication.
It is worth noting that investing in good content marketing is essential in this process. After all, you can nurture the lead with the production of emails, blogs and other materials, according to the profile of your potential student.
If you identify one or more mistakes made by your educational institution, know that the first step you've already taken: you've found the root of the problem, now it's time to solve it.
Portugal