Higher Education Marketing Blog

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann believes that people may fail to resist social media because there is no obvious or immediate downside (even if they may be a drain on your time).

We’ll have to wait until the final report is published to get all the details. In the meantime, it’s believed that mobile visitors to Facebook could see advertisingas early as March. Facebook has avoided selling ads on its mobile site or app thus far, but with its impending IPO, that looks set to change. The company is set to be valued at $100 billion dollars, a valuation that many expect will force the company into selling its users’ data.

What does this have to do with education marketing? Well, pretty much everything. A key to both your school’s marketing and recruiting strategies is knowing your target audience and then deciding how to best reach that audience. With more and more prospective students experiencing the Web through smartphones, and social media an increasingly important part of the overall Web experience, it’s becoming abundantly clear that schools need to have both a comprehensive social media strategy and a mobile friendly website or app. Don’t be left behind.

What do you think about the new study? Is Facebook and Twitter more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol?

Tags: Mobile Marketing, Social Media

Google Adwords (aka Pay Per Click marketing) gives your college the ability to choose the keywords you want your site to rank for, displaying ads on the first search engine results page. Google Adwords campaigns are an increasingly important weapon in education marketing, as they provide total control over your advertising budget and message.

We’ve posted some Google Adwords writing tips in the past, but there are some general guidelines your university should be following in order to make the most out of your Google Adwords’ campaigns.

 Here are some Google Adwords tips for College Marketing Coordinators:

Create keyword-rich ads
This probably seems obvious, but people often make the mistake of drafting keyword-light ad text. Show prospective students and searchers that your ad is relevant to their search. Decide what keywords you want to focus on, and make your ad text as keyword-rich as possible. Google will bold search keywords in your school’s ad, helping you stand out.

A way to make this easier is to use specific campaigns for each program and multiple ad groups, each with a short list of keywords (Instead of having one ad group with many keywords).

Avoid bidding wars
Yes, you need popular keywords. The more popular the keyword, the higher the search volume, which increases the potential website visits, leads, inquiries and e-registrations. This is what you want. However, popular keywords are obviously very competitive, which means it can increase the cost per click. You don’t, therefore, want to get stuck in a needless bidding war for them. We would, in fact, recommend avoiding bidding wars on popular keywords and to focus on long-tail keywords instead. (Note: Keyword popularity can be determined by using keyword research tools, such as Google Keyword Tool. These tools should be used in conjunction with Google Analytics to identify the keywords that actually convert to your website goals.)

If you’re having trouble competing for the most popular keywords, go back to your keyword research to find keywords with a lower search volume. You may think that you’re compromising, but in the long run, this diversification of keywords can actually help you lower your Cost Per Click.

For more on this, check out this helpful video detailing keyword research tips for Google Adwords:

Test, test, test
Create as many ads as possible, with different headlines, keywords and wording. Once these variations are written, you can rotate them in a single ad group. Doing so will give you a good sense of what text works best. Better ads will have better ROI and CTR.

Exact matches and negative keywords
You can control the position of your ad with exact matches and negative keywords. For the former, make sure to include both broad and exact matches for a keyword phrase, then set the bid higher for the exact match. Strategic use of negative keywords, meanwhile, can help your ad’s CTR and position.

Use/create landing pages
Generally speaking, it’s not a great idea to point an ad to your home page. Use a relevant landing page on your school site (we would suggest a program page or inquiry request) or create a landing page uniquely for specific keywords and campaigns.

It’s also very important to align the scent trail, ensuring that your message is consistent throughout. Aligning the message at each stop along the way, from the search query, to the ad copy and finally the custom landing page (and making sure you use the same keywords) can help you improve the conversion rate and usability of your program pages?

What other Google Adwords tactics have you used?

Tags: Education Marketing Tips, Google Adwords

Algonquin College is the latest Canadian school to launch a Facebook contest. The Ottawa-based college is using the social network to give students the chance to win $1,000 cash or $1,500 towards tuition (with other cash prizes of $750, $500 and $250). The contest dubbed, “I LIKE Algonquin”, asks full- and part-time students to submit a 15- to 30-second video on the Future Students Facebook page, which their friends can then vote on.

“We know that students spend a lot of time on websites like Facebook, and we want to encourage them to interact with Algonquin College when they are online. The more engaged students are with the College, the more they will get out of their college experience,” says Doug Wotherspoon, Executive Director of Advancement at Algonquin College.

The contest looks to be part of a strategic shift towards social media marketing for the school. Here is the tie-in video released by the school (it asks students, instructors, and staff, “Why do you like Algonquin?”):

The great thing about this video (which makes good use of the of YouTube to showcase the school’s facilities, lab and work stations) and this contest is that it utilizes social media in the best possible way: by focusing on the voice of current and prospective students. The idea behind the contest, in fact, is quite ingenious, as asking students to submit videos incorporates various social media platforms, and can really spread the school’s marketing message to a large number of people.

You’ll remember that the National Academy of Health and Business, in Hamilton and Mississauga, also recently offered a Facebook contest. What these contests show is that schools are starting to understand the importance of social media marketing, and the need for a comprehensive strategic social media marketing plan. If done properly, this can improve the quality of your school’s presence on each of social media platform, increase the level of engagement of the followers/fans and your boost your share of social media voice, all while sticking to your original marketing and recruiting goals. What’s not to like?

The Algonquin College Facebook contest, by the way, will run until midnight on Friday, Feb. 17, with winners
announced the following week.

What do you think about Algonquin College’s Facebook contest?

Tags: Education Marketing, Education Marketing News, Social Media

Google has introduced more changes to Google Analytics, adding two of the most requested features from the old version of Google Analytics that have been absent in the new interface: report email scheduling and PDF export.

Every standard and custom report will now have an email scheduling option, shown below:

Clicking on “Email” will provide you with the following email scheduling box:

Google is also soliciting feedback regarding which scheduled email reports should be used in the new version. PDF export for every report will only be available within a few weeks.

They have also created a new Google user forum that will be specific to Analytics-related issues and topics, giving users a place to discuss the product with fellow analytics users. Much like reddit, visitors can earn karma by answering questions and commenting, though unlike the popular social bookmarking site (the “Internet’s front page”) they can earn badges and special designations (like “Top Contributor”).

What do you think about these updates to Google Analytics?

Tags: Google Analytics, Google Products