Social Media Monitoring

Any social media strategy is useless if you cannot, at any time, track its implementation, that is, rely on specific analytics to know which efforts are worth pursuing and which initiatives should be stopped. Monitoring your social media efforts is essential to optimizing your strategy and maximizing your social media ROI. At Higher Education Marketing, we specialize in analytics and in helping our clients stay on top of their social media game.

Higher Education Marketing’s social media monitoring services can help you:

• Monitor and analyze all your social media key indicators including :
• The nature and level of engagement of followers/fans
• Your school’s share of conversation in your niche
• Your school’s share of voice online

• Leverage all social engagement analytics tools (Social Interactions analytics and PostRank Analytics) to pinpoint profit killers in your social media strategy

• Ensure consistency and quality for your presence on each of the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) from the point of view of your school’s personas (layout of profiles, specific features used)

• Lead in the conversation, solidifying your brand reputation and gaining the trust of the online community, thanks to:
• A fine-tuned online strategy to best meet your prospects’ needs on each specific platform
• Recommendations to boost interactions and engagement with your prospects
• An extensive listening grid as well as tools and tips to help your social media team manage your presence and content efficiently

• Regular reports and support using cutting-edge report software

• Regular tweaks for a consistently improved ROI

CATEGORIES: services, sub-services, sub-smm

Social Media Reputation Management

Students rely more and more on social media to find reviews, advice and opinions about their prospective schools. Today more than ever, enrolment depends directly on your online reputation and what is being said about your programs, your staff, your campus and even your student body. That is why it is essential to keep a close eye on conversations about your school in all the platforms used by your prospects.

Higher Education Marketing’s reputation management services can help you by:

• Monitoring your school’s reputation thanks to:
• General assessment of the online reputation and monitoring mentions of your school ranking high in the search results for your institution’s name
• Scanning of all social relevant media sites, blogs, photo-sharing sites, video-sharing sites and forums that may contain offensive content about your school
• Constantly monitoring the tone of conversation about your school, to respond to naysayers before any damage is done
• Using strategic SEO to create and distribute new, positive content about your school to get derogatory comments or negative mentions “bumped down” on search engine result pages.

• Creating conversation parameters for your school including social media policies for staff and students on blogs, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, forums and a protocol to respond to crisis in a timely and appropriate manner

• Measuring and identifying the volume and origin of all conversations (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) and potential influencers and the nature and level of engagement of followers/fans

• Qualifying the tone or sentiment of the conversation (positive or negative) about your school.

Contact Higher Education Marketing today to find out more about developing a custom-made, comprehensive social media marketing plan. Request a free strategic social media audit. 

CATEGORIES: services, sub-services, sub-smm

Social Media Marketing Setup

Higher Education Marketing’s Social Marketing Setup services include:

• Assessment of your institution’s social media presence, including:
• Target audience definition to determine your specific audience and ways to reach it
• Competitive analysis evaluation:  critical study of 2-3 of your main competitors across social media platforms
• Social media audit  focusing on the quality of your online presence and the level of engagement of your prospects
• Social media strategy proposal with recommendations on how to stand out from your competition online
• Recommendations and action plan: actionable recommendations to make your marketing vision come true thanks to social media

• Set-up and/or optimization of all your social media profiles according to your social marketing plan and specific marketing goals for each platform. This includes:
• Help setting up attractive profiles
• Assessment of branding efforts throughout the social media platforms and website for a consistent look
• Optimization of appearance, messaging, and user-friendliness of all social media sites on which your school is present

• Google Analytics for social media: By adding a few advanced segment filters to your Google Analytics, you can see the percentage of traffic that comes to your site from social media, and, you can see what this traffic did once they got there. Google Analytics can also compare social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), allowing you to understand which one drives the most traffic, has the best lead conversion rates, bounce rates and time spent on your site. In addition, Google’s Social Plug-in Analytics can help you analyse how users engage with any social plug-in that you incorporate into your school’s website (including a Facebook Like button, Google’s +1 button and Twitter’s Tweet button). Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the plug-in will provide a number of reports, including:

• Engagement: the number of pages viewed per visit, average time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics for visits that included and did not include social actions
• Action:  allows you to compare the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Likes, etc) for each social source and social source-action combination.
• Pages: allows you to compare the number of actions on each page of your site.

• Stimulation of blog, forum, and social media discussion and interaction regarding your school including:
• Optimization of your content strategy to best meet your prospects’ needs on each specific platform
• Recommendations to boost interactions and engagement with your school
• Groups, hashtags as well as tools and tips to help your social media team manage your presence and content efficiently

• Constant stimulation of online discussion and interaction about your school, university, or community college by creating social media campaigns that target your prospects.

• Leveraging the latest tools and efficiently manage your online presence and content. This includes tips to qualify the tone or sentiment of the conversation (positive or negative) about your school or get negative mentions removed, or ‘bumped down’, in search results.

Contact Higher Education Marketing today to find out more about developing a custom-made, comprehensive social media marketing plan. Request a free strategic social media audit. 

CATEGORIES: services, sub-services, sub-smm

HEM Social Media Strategy Plan

HEM proposes a custom-made, actionable, easy-to-follow social media strategy plan to help your college or university achieve its marketing goals in social media. This comprehensive plan emphasizes an integrative approach to leverage all platforms relevant to your audience and your global social media marketing goals.

Higher Education Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Plan includes:

• A strategic meeting with your school and department stakeholders to define your marketing objectives and targeted audience, and to discuss your current social media efforts and decide on a strategy with measurable goals.

• Creation of personas to better grasp who the prospects are for your college or university, what their needs and expectations are, and how they should be reached

• Definition of 2 – 3 objectives your school wishes to reach with social media

• A social media audit (if you are already involved in social media) including:
• Quality of your school’s presence on each of these platforms (layout of profiles, specific features used)
• Level of engagement of the followers/fans: number of comments, number of people talking about a specific subject, reaction of the competition, etc.
• Nature of the engagement: comments, references, likes, retweets, direct reply, +1s, sharing, etc.
• Share of conversation in your school’s niche and potential influencers
• Content strategies that could be implemented by your school
• What competitor behaviors are worth emulating, and which competitor weaknesses can be exploited

• A competitive analysis (including at least one major competitor) including a thorough evaluation of 2-3 main competitors’ use of their websites and blogs to promote their social media presence and an evaluation of their share of social media voice for the targeted market

• Identification of the best channels for your school to attract and engage with prospects in order to stand out from competition

• A social media strategy proposal based on all findings and proposing 3 clear goals we suggest you start with

• An action plan to start implementing your strategy

Contact Higher Edu

CATEGORIES: services, sub-services, sub-smm

Mobile Marketing for Higher Education

Higher Education Marketing’s Mobile Marketing lets schools leverage the smartphone Web experience, providing templates, custom school apps, fit-to-screen mobile versions of program pages and more. This increasingly important tool can help your school develop a streamlined, mobile-optimized presentation of your content.

Mobile Marketing services provide:

• The opportunity to increase your audience and online presence by catering to new and specific viewer preferences
• The chance to connect with students and prospective students on a 24-hour, 7-day a week basis, whether they are on a train, plane or beach
• Unique mobile features and content that will help your school stand out among its competitors
• Cutting-edge tactics, tools and techniques that will make your school an innovative market leader

What does Mobile Markering for schools entail?

1. A mobile-friendly or mobile school website
   This can simply be an extension of the non-mobile school website, or a much more sophisticated stand-alone version that is optimized and designed for the mobile Web experience. The aim is to develop a streamlined, mobile optimized presentation of your school or program content that makes the mobile experience enjoyable and user-friendly.
2. Mobile Apps
   Apps are now the best way to streamline your content for the mobile Web, allowing your target audience to access content and information easily and directly on their phone. Furthermore,  apps can also present new revenue and marketing opportunities.

A strategic website audit can help you discover mobile marketing opportunities. Please click here for a free Higher Education Marketing website audit.

CATEGORIES: services

SMS Alerts for Higher Education

Why beat around the bush? Communicate directly with prospective and current students from different departments and recruiting segments! Higher Education Marketing’s Short Message Service (SMS) Mobile Marketing allows you to send information about events, open houses, admission, registration and more, directly to your target audience’s cell phones.

SMS Alerts Marketing provides:

• Continuous accessibility to prospective students
• Ability to deliver your marketing message directly to your audience’s phones
• High open rate compared to email
• Mobile to Web integration
• Social media integration
• Online SMS sign-up form
• Admin interface
• Back-end database capture
• Campaign reporting

Download a Higher Education Marketing SMS Alerts Case Study to find out more.

Why do you need Mobile SMS Alerts?

Close to 90% of SMS messages are viewed and read within the first half hour of being received. Implementing SMS Alerts into your marketing strategy, therefore, ensures that your school’s information reaches prospective students quickly and directly. This can give your Web marketing and recruiting untold flexibility and versatility.

Furthermore, every phone number that interacts with your school is stored in a database, which can be monitored in real time via an on-line reporting dashboard. This database can give you a better sense of your target audience, giving future marketing campaigns and keyword research a solid foundation.

A full website audit can help define SMS Alerts marketing goals and strategies. To request a free Higher Education Marketing website audit, please click here. 

CATEGORIES: services, sub-mobile

Website Design and Development for Higher Education

From brand identity landscapes to complete website creation and content management, Higher Education Marketing provides full Website Design and Development. These services ensure that your school’s website is fully optimized, with manageable and engaging aesthetics and content management systems.

Effective Website Design and Development can provide:

• Aesthetically pleasing and engaging website design
• Usable and user-friendly website architecture
• An effective and flexible content management system
• Social media integration

These services can provide schools with a necessary balance between striking and dynamic design and functionality. Contact Higher Education Marketing today to get started on your Website Design and Development. 

Why do you need Website Design and Development for Education Marketing?

Whatever your ultimate online goals are,  your website’s aesthetics and content management systems must be as manageable and flexible as possible, regardless of their scope and complexity. To accomplish this, you need a design and development partner to continuously refine your website design and tailor it to your specific needs and goals.

Using Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing can make necessary improvements, ensuring your website design is attractive, usable, and user-friendly. This is a key point, since a big part of your Web marketing success depends on how comfortable people are using your website.

If visitors are frustrated and unhappy, it makes it very difficult to develop your online presence and cuts off numerous programming and marketing techniques and opportunities, including integration into ever important social networks. And these days, if you’re not maximizing your online marketing opportunities, you’re not making the most of your website. What are you waiting for?

A strategic website audit can identify problems and enable easy-to-implement adjustments to website design and development. Please click here for a free Higher Education Marketing website audit.

CATEGORIES: services

Google Maps & Local Search for Higher Education

Get your school’s campus prominently and appropriately positioned on mobile and local search results. Higher Education Marketing’s Google Maps and Local Search Optimization services can increase traffic and help your school dominate the search engine results page.

Google Maps and Local Search for schools can provide:

• Relevant local search positioning
• Increased traffic to your site
• Improved lead generation
• Interactive map listings (on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Bing, among others)
• Prospective student targeting

Contact Higher Education Marketing today to ensure that your Google Maps and Local Search campaigns offer the best possible representation for your school and website, no matter the size.

Why should you use Google Maps & Local Search Services?

Higher Education Marketing’s Google Maps and Local Search services will establish what your key markets are and use specific keywords and Search Engine Optimization techniques to position your website on major search engines. This will help attract prospective students, alumni and more from target cities in Canada, the US, and abroad.

Relevant and effective Local Search positioning also guarantees that prospective Internet leads can quickly find your phone number and email address to inquire about your higher education programs. Higher Education Marketing will also work with various interactive maps (like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Bing, among others) to properly list your school, community college, or university.

A website audit can help establish key markets, keywords and SEO strategies. Please click here for a free Higher Education Marketing website audit.

CATEGORIES: services, sub-seo

Social Media Marketing for Higher Education

Most schools know they need to be in social media, but very few know what to do beyond the set-up phase. Oftentimes, schools lack time and resources to develop a social media strategy, build and maintain a presence and keep up with competition in social media. They end up feeling their efforts amount to nothing more than a waste of their dollars.

With close to 98 per cent of students involved in social media today, Social Media Marketing has become as essential to any higher education marketing effort as traditional marketing.

Custom-made Social Media Marketing services for schools can help you:

• Build online awareness about your school
• Increase traffic to your website and all social media platforms
• Improve conversion and lead generation
• Create a community for your students to join
• Position your school as a leader in your niche
• Create and foster a constant buzz about your institution
• Control your online reputation as a school

At Higher Education Marketing, we understand the paramount impact of Social Media Marketing on any school’s marketing efforts. We also understand how daunting the vastness of the task may seem. Wherever you stand in your Social media efforts, HEM’s à la carte services can help you channel your efforts and increase your efficiency in social media, measure and tweak your initiatives to continuously increase your ROI.

Get the Web talking about your higher education institution, providing “organic” word of mouth recommendations for your programs, campus, and services. Don’t be left behind!

Get started now!

Let us help you take your social media presence to the next level! Please click here for a free Higher Education Marketing website audit.

CATEGORIES: services

Google Adwords for Higher Education

Also known as Search Engine Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing gives your school the ability to market specific programs to different student groups and departments. Your school can run Pay Per Click campaigns on all major networks, including Facebook, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter and LinkedIn, among others.

Higher Education Marketing’s Pay Per Click Marketing services provide:

• The ability to choose the keywords you want your site to rank for
• Ads displayed on the first page of organic search results
• Total control over PPC budget and advertising message

Pay Per Click Markering for schools involves:

1. Comprehensive keyword research - Keywords are the key to any successful Pay Per Click Campaign and you can’t simply pluck these out of the air. Comprehensive keyword research is needed to test which keywords and phrases work best and to then decide which to target.
2. Careful and thorough bid management - Pay Per Click auction listings can be a rough and tumble world. Without continuous attention and adjustments, your bids will not be at their most efficient and cost effective. Carefully managing your bids can increase click through rate, target ads geographically, tweak ad copy, and maximize your cost per lead.
3. Consistent tracking, measuring, and reporting - Pay Per Click campaigns must be consistently tracked and measured to determine your click conversion rate, which clicks are making you money, and most importantly, which clicks are costing you money.

A comprehensive website audit can help define PPC marketing goals and strategies. Please click here for a free Higher Education Marketing website audit.

CATEGORIES: services