In the past, we’ve discussed how many North American schools have started using social media to target and recruit foreign students. Well, it now looks more and more like these schools will also have to compete with foreign colleges and universities for North American students.

This isn’t a fluke either, as US applications from prospective US and Canadian students rose by almost 10 per cent (totaling 5,259 applicants) in 2012. Clearly, more and more students are looking to the UK for education.

The Times Higher Education explains that UK universities are appealing (particularly for US students) for their lower fees, shorter degrees and for the reputation of the British higher education system.

“A British degree is a valuable asset in the US job market,” Richard Everitt, deputy director of the British Council in the USA said in that report.  ”Three-quarters of American employers consider UK degrees to be the same as or better than US degrees, according to new research carried out by Ipsos Public Affairs on behalf of the British Council,” he said.

However, the UK is not the only source of potential competition for North American PSE institutions. The Beijing Municipal Education Commission has recently indicated that Beijing plans on attracting over 180,000 exchange students by 2020. Should they accomplish this, it would represent an increase of 112% over current figures (81 universities in Beijing hosted exchange students from 184 nations in 2011). The city has released a plan to accomplish this massive recruitment increase,  with an emphasis on co-operation between schools in Beijing and abroad, and more summer and winter educational programs for international students.

So, while schools can do well to implement marketing initiatives to target foreign students, it’s still important to also focus on the home front. An extensive strategic social media plan can help your college or university emphasize its services, programs and community ties. The development of a visible social media presence, one that is properly set up and maintained, can also help create a thriving online community, with your school at the centre. Considering that a recent survey said that 83 percent of students would view the Facebook page of a school they were considering, this is fundamental.

What are you thoughts on international recruitment?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Education Marketing News

Everything can use a good update now and again, and Web design is no different. Like school curriculums, facilities and other admin and marketing resources and materials, your college website will need to be freshened up and redesigned on occasion. A redesign ensures that your program pages are up-to-date with SEO and current Web design best practices.

If you’re thinking of redesigning your website, however, there are a few things you should consider before starting:

1. Understand where you are
   By leveraging Google Analytics, you should already know the strengths and weaknesses of your college or university website. What is working for you? What isn’t? Understanding where you are will make it easier for you to figure out where you have to go.
2. Define your website goals
   Aside from providing clarity, defining goals also helps make it easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing and online campaigns. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is the easiest way to get a plan in place.
3. Know your audience
   Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you have to know what audience you’re trying to reach. This distinction will help guide your choice of content, as well as a host of other design features.
4. Analyze your competition
   Before redesigning, it’s a good idea to analyze the competitive landscape. Find out what other college and university websites are doing: what do their sites say about their school? How are they laid out? How do they look? By isolating what you think best fits your goals, you can get a wealth of inspiration from what’s already out there.

With these ideas in mind, here are a few things you should do when redesigning your school website:

Focus on clarity and simplicity
User-friendly Web design should be the ultimate goal of any redesigning effort. Don’t bury content and information in unnecessarily complex design. Keep navigation and site architecture simple and clear, with plenty of visual clues and easily understandable links. Don’t be confusing.

Offer easy-to-find info and contacts
Don’t make it difficult for visitors to find information or to contact staff and faculty. Make pertinent school information easy to find and use, and your visitors will do just that.

Use 301s
Once you’ve redesigned your web site, you don’t want to lose pages that are ranking well on search engine results pages. Using 301s, however, you can redirect traffic from these old pages to new pages. 301 code is interpreted as a “permanent move” to a new location.

Update your website goals
Should there be changes to the URLs of your program pages, make sure that you also update your website goals to reflect these changes. Without this important step, the tracking and measurement of your website performance will not be accurate.

Emphasize school colors/logo
Whether or not you are rebranding your college or university, your redesign should emphasize the school’s logo and color scheme. This will help future brand identity initiatives and help give your college’s online presence a unique visual component.

Write for the web
Content may be king, but badly written text can easily cut off the royal bloodlines. New text (or updated old text) has to conform to Web writing best practices, and by that we mean:

• Concise text
• Paragraph breaks
• Headlines and categories
• Highlighted keywords
• Bullet lists
• Simple language

For more on writing for the Web, check out this entertaining chat between Sage and Rocky Lewis:

Integrate multimedia
Text is essential, but too much of it can force visiting eyes to glaze over. Make your site more dynamic with pictures, videos and audio. The more you mix and play with multimedia, the more engaging your program pages will be.

Focus on social media
As we’ve pointed out recently, a comprehensive social media plan is now a necessity for colleges and universities. Any redesign must have fully integrated social media components, buttons and calls to action. A school blog (or a series of student blogs) can also be a very important feature to include in any school site redesign.

Go Mobile
We’ve been saying for some time now that the future was mobile, well the future is now. A redesign of your college’s website must include mobile-friendly components or a mobile app.

What to avoid when redesigning your college website:

While it’s important to include certain elements, it’s just as important to make sure you avoid some of the following:

• Broken links – It can happen during a redesign, but make sure that all broken links are removed or fixed.
• “Under construction” signs – If you’re not ready to go live with something, don’t put it up.
• Out of date info – We know that things change quickly, but if you’re going to the trouble of redesigning a school website, you have to make sure that information (regarding courses, staff, faculty and events) has also been updated.

What else do you think is important when redesigning your college website?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Education Marketing Tips, Web Design

We’ve discussed the importance of mobile-friendly Web resources and a strategic social media plan, but what does all this mean for the tried and true viewbook of old?

As you all know, a viewbook is really your marketing department’s time to shine, presenting the school they way they want, in a concise and enticing manner. But as the Chronicle of Higher Education recently explored, some college administrators are wondering if it’s actually worth the time and cost to produce this annual catalog. The magazine actually quotes Richard A. Hesel, a principal with the education consulting firm Art & Science Group, who says that viewbooks are “vanity pieces”, which are no longer as effective as they once were when it comes to communicating facts and attracting students.

The reasons? High school students are not relying on brochures and what is essentially a coffee-table book for information about a school. They’re using the Web and social media. A recent survey on mobile use indicated that:

• 50 percent of students said they would “like” a school’s Facebook page to see future posts from that school
• 83 percent said they would view the Facebook page of a school they were considering

Furthermore, this year’s Horizon Report estimated that tablet computing and mobile apps are both expected to break into the education mainstream within the year. Given these findings, should schools keep producing viewbooks?

The answer is yes, sort of. The idea behind a viewbook is still valid, but like everything else, schools have to now rethink the way they do things, using the Web, social media and mobile resources to their advantage. Some schools have started replacing the traditional viewbook with smaller brochures, while others are emphasizing smaller, sleeker viewbooks that are a bit edgier. More forward-thinking universities, however, have already started producing viewbook apps for smartphones and tablets. Given that 94% of students own smartphones (and tablet use will continue to increase), this seems like a logical transition. However, other avenues, such as social media, can also be beneficial (a viewbook can actually be “deconstructed” – with video on YouTube, photos on Flickr, etc).

As an example, check out Saint Francis University’s online viewbook:

What do you think? Are viewbooks, in the traditional sense, still worth producing?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Mobile Marketing

A new survey from Noel-Levitz, OmniUpdate, CollegeWeekLive, and NRCCUA® (the National Research Center for College & University Admissions) asked nearly 2,300 college-bound high school students about their use of mobile devices, particularly when it comes to searching for schools.

Here’s what the mobile devices survey found:

• 94 percent of respondents students said they use a mobile device (cell phone, smartphone, or tablet) at least once per week.

This underscores the tremendous necessity for mobile marketing and mobile-friendly Web offerings.

• 50 percent have looked at a campus web site on a mobile device.
• 76% of respondents have accessed Facebook from their mobile device.
• 46 percent of students who looked at campus Facebook pages did so more than once (from a few times a day to a few times a month)
• 50 percent of students said they would “like” a school’s Facebook page to see future posts from that school.
• 83 percent said they would view the Facebook page of a school they were considering.

Taken together, these findings clearly illustrate how important it is for schools to have a comprehensive social media plan and strategy. Prospective students are now using social media platforms to get a better sense of what a school has to offer, and Facebook appears to be a starting point for many.

• Only 4 percent have used a tablet device (iPad, Blackberry or Android tablet) to visit college Web sites.

This figure probably has more to do with the relative “newness” of tablets. We suspect it will rise with time. In the meantime, it’s clear that the mobile Web experience for most student is still restricted to smartphones, which means that schools should be creating content that is optimized for smaller, harder to scroll screens.

This last point is especially important given that a majority of respondents said that a positive mobile browsing experience improved their opinion of the school. Clearly, mobile-friendly Web offerings are becoming a necessity.

The survey also examined what content students would want to browse on a mobile device. The following six items were considered the most important to respondents:

1. Academic program listing
2. Cost/scholarship calculators
3. A calendar of important dates and deadlines
4. Specific details about academic programs
5. An application process summary
6. Online application forms

Click here for more of the Noel-Levitz, OmniUpdate, CollegeWeekLive, and NRCCUA® survey findings.

What do you think about these survey results?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Mobile Marketing, Social Media

As we’ve said many times before, a comprehensive social media plan is becoming a fundamental component of a well-rounded education marketing strategy. No matter how well intentioned this plan may be, however, its success is contingent on how well you have setup and maintained your social media profiles and pages.

There are, for example, many small techniques you can use to help create a more user-friendly, engaging and effective Facebook page.

Here are a few tips on how to create a great Facebook page:

Branding and Naming
Facebook recently removed restrictions they had on renaming urls, so there’s really no excuse to have a series of numbers at the end of your Facebook page URL. Your college’s name should be right there in the page’s URL.

Similarly, make sure that the name you’ve set for the title of your page is relevant to your college or program (and ideally the actual name of your college or program). Similarly, try to avoid any titles that may be confusing or inaccurate. Any confusion will have a direct impact on the number of friends or likes your college will attract. Also, once you have 100 friends, Facebook will no longer allow you to change it, which means that a bad initial choice can live on and on.

Be Welcoming
You want to have a lively wall, full of comments, posts and discussions, but you don’t want this to be the first page people land on. Create a welcome tab made specifically to greet visitors to the page and encourage them to become fans. Welcome text, pictures and videos can all be used to make a good first impression.

Create Community Ties Through Content
You’ve properly branded and named your Facebook page, and you’ve put in a welcome tab. Now what? Now you need exciting content.

Your Facebook page should be a place for students, alumni, staff and prospective students to ask questions and comment, find out about upcoming events (it would be a good idea to create an events tab) and interact with the school (liking pictures, comments, videos, taking part in discussions, etc).

Remember that while people on Facebook want to stay in touch with what’s happening, they also want to have fun. To have a lively Facebook page that is fun and informative, try to:

• Create a variety of posts (including text, picture galleries, video, surveys, etc.)
• Feature articles and podcasts about subjects that interest your audience
• Highlight job announcements in relevant industries
• Set up and promote workshops, webinars and seminars
• Initiate light, fun discussion (e.g. ask “What are your weekend plans?” on a Friday and ““How was your weekend in one word?” on Mondays)
• Use pop culture references, where appropriate (e.g. funny/inspirational quotes from movies and music, life lessons from TV shows, etc.)

Be Engaging
Now that you have a fun variety of content to share, you have to engage your Facebook audience. Here are few things to keep in mind:

• Share relevant blog posts – know what is relevant to your Facebook audience and share it!
• Frequency – the more often you post, the more likely you will have more friends and more lively discussions.
• Ask questions – if you want a lively community of people commenting and discussing, you need to ask questions. Polls and contests, for example, can be a fun, interactive way to get people talking.
• Use multimedia – galleries, videos, audio recordings and more are all great ways to highlight the multitude of great things happening at your college campus. It also makes for a dynamic Facebook page.
• Reply to wall posts in a timely manner – This requires that you closely monitor what is being said online.
• Be positive – remember that the Facebook page is representing the school. Posts and status updates must always be positive and friendly.

What other suggestions do you have for a great Facebook page?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Social Media

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC) recently released the 2012 Horizon Report (the 9th edition of this report), which examines emerging technology that will have an impact on higher education over the next five years. The report, which also identifies key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, is considered a valuable guide for campus leaders and education marketing departments.

These findings were identified through a comprehensive review, analysis, and discussion process, that incorporated research, articles, papers and interviews. The board responsible for this review consisted of 47 experts from 9 countries: Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.

The report this year has identified six technologies that are expected to break into the education mainstream. Each one was assigned an adoption horizon (one year or less, two to three years and four to five years).

Here are the findings for 2012:

• Electronic tablet computing  (one-year adoption horizon)
• Mobile apps (one-year adoption horizon)
• Learning analytics (two- to three-year adoption horizon)
• Game-based learning (two- to three-year adoption horizon)
• Gesture-based computing (four- to five-year adoption horizon)
•  Internet of Things (four- to five-year adoption horizon)

Here is a video breaking down the findings of the 2012 Horizon Report:

As you can see, 2012 is clearly shaping up to be the year that education goes mobile.

We’ve discussed the reasons why you’re school should be going mobile in the past, but these new Horizon Report findings truly illustrate the need for a mobile marketing strategy. Put simply, if your college or university does not have a mobile-friendly website or mobile app, and it is not in the process of developing these resources, you are already falling behind your competitors.

Smart phones and tablet computers are expected to take over laptops this year in Web usage, and recent surveys show that 98 per cent of students already own a cell phone. The mobile revolution, in other words, has started, and educational institutions can no longer ignore it. A mobile friendly presence has become a necessity.

What are your thoughts on the 2012 Horizon Report findings?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: College Marketing Coordinator Tips, Education Marketing, Education Marketing News, Education Marketing Tips, Mobile Marketing

As we discussed in a previous post, sitemaps can help boost your online presence. Why, then, are they so underestimated?

The issue tends to center on the idea that if a site is well optimized, it won’t gain much from submitting a sitemap to Google (with the flip side being that a site with very poor navigation and on-page SEO has to submit a sitemap). There may be value to this point of view, but we tend to believe that giving Google extra clues about your site helps. Why not cover all your bases?

Here are some advantages to using a sitemap:

• Quickly inform search engines about changes
   A lot happens at your college, and it’s normal for there to be a lot of changes to program pages. Search engines, however, will not index those changes instantly. A sitemap, which informs search engines right away about changes, can potentially get changes indexed faster.
• Help with canonical URLs
  With a sitemap, Google can decipher what page is the main URL, which may help resolve certain canonical issues. Of course, a 301 redirect is a better solution, but a sitemap submission can also help the process.
• Improved website planning
  A sitemap helps you plan your site before you even start creating it. Think of it like a building. It’s a lot easier to build once you’ve created a structural layout. A sitemap can work in the same way, helping designers understand the number of pages on the site and how they are laid out.
• Forward-thinking development
  Most search engine sitemap programs are still growing, but as they improve, sitemaps will become a more important part of the indexing process. It’s beneficial, therefore, to already have sitemaps as part of your SEO arsenal.

Here is more from Google on the topic of sitemaps:

What are you thoughts on the sitemap debate?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: College Marketing Coordinator Tips, Education Marketing Tips

With so much talk about mobile marketing and strategic social media plans, it can get easy for college webmasters to forget about some basic SEO fundamentals that can help increase your online presence. A great example is sitemaps.

As indicated by the name, sitemaps are a map of your site, showing the structure of the entire website (including sections, links etc) on a single page. A page like this can make navigating your site easier for visitors (think of them like tourists in a foreign city), but it can also play an important role in how search engines interact with your program pages and the prominence of your online presence.

Sitemaps and Search Engines

Sitemaps communicate with search engines, telling them what parts of your website to include and exclude from indexing. Basically, it tells search engine crawlers where you want them to crawl. To best accomplish this, schools will often have two sitemaps: one for humans and one for spiders. This ensures that both serve their purpose in the best way possible. This isn’t to say that you necessarily need two sitemaps, but since Google does not penalize you for doubling up, it’s not a bad idea to go the extra mile.

There, are, however, some different options, specifically HTML and XML sitemaps. An HTML sitemap is the old school sitemap for users to find all the pages of your web on one single page. In many cases, university websites may require many HTML sitemaps. XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemaps are an update on this older method, allowing web developers to submit a sitemap directly. They are also more precise, as they do not allow errors.

Here is Google’s Matt Cutts discussing HTML vs XML sitemaps:

Sitemaps and Page Depth

“Depth” in this case, refers to the amount of clicks it takes to get to a page from your home page. A page depth of 3, for example, means that moving from the home page to a specific page requires 3 clicks.

Crawlers, on occasion, will fail to crawl pages with high page depth or heavily Rich Internet Application (RIA) elements. Therefore, if your site’s page depth is more than 3 or 4, a sitemap is needed to get all those pages crawled.

Submitting Your Sitemap with Google

An easy way to submit XML sitemaps is to use Google Sites. Before it will generate a sitemap, however, you must verify your site. Click here to find the necessary steps to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you have done that, you can submit your Google Site’s sitemap with the following steps:

1. On your Webmaster Tools home page, select your site.
2. In the left sidebar, click Site configuration and then Sitemaps.
3. Click the Add/Test Sitemap button in the top right.
4. Enter /system/feeds/sitemap into the text box that appears.
5. Click Submit Sitemap.

Has your school submitted a sitemap?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: College Webmaster Tips, Education Marketing Tips

Some interesting changes happening in the Google world lately. First comes news that Google Analytics has updated the list of default search engines curated by Google. The update has included the following search engines in the default list:

• http://rakuten.co.jp
• http://biglobe.ne.jp
• http://goo.ne.jp
• http://www.startsiden.no/sok

Google has also fixed an issue with the way search engines are recognized. Previously, URLs with the word “search” and a query parameter “q” were attributed to the search engine search.com. The fix will lead to more accurate reports.

Nine New Languages for Google Analytics

Meanwhile, Google Analytics has added functionality for nine new languages: Arabic, Croatian, Hebrew, Hindi, Latvian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian. These additions bring the total number of languages available in Google Analytics to 40.

This is what the company had to say:

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts. Happy data mining!

Googleplex’s Experience Center

Possibly the most exciting news out of Google, however, involves the company’s vaunted Googleplex, the company’s Mountain View headquarters. According to reports, the company is developing a 120,000 square foot “Google Experience Center”. This center will house a private museum and labs for “secret projects” and Google’s @Home automation development.

The Experience Center will likely end up serving as a place for the company to present and share new ideas with the industry players, and to demo products for enterprise and government customers.

Click here to see a gallery of the Googlepex offices.

What do you think about these developments?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Google Analytics, Google Products

A new study is suggesting that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter may be more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. The study (conducted by a team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business) which involved 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany, analyzed addictive social media habits by polling participants, via smartphone. Participants were asked seven times a day (over the course of a week) whether they experienced a desire (to visit a social media site) within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. Desires were then gauged on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

Of the 10,558 responses recorded, 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported. The study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, but preliminary data the high rates of “self-control failures” related to social media services.

Continue reading →

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Mobile Marketing, Social Media