steps to improve your student acquisition strategy

Marketing is essential for educational institutions to generate leads and enroll qualified students. You need a campaign plan that will help you succeed.

You need to meet your students where they are at in their decision-making process. This means moving beyond standard promotional campaigns and landing pages that fit all. You can improve your campaign results, streamline user experience and increase ROI by implementing a dedicated ad to landing page strategy. Continue reading to learn four ways you can get started.

Step 1: Personalization

Personalizing your landing pages is all about creating an experience for visitors that encourages them to take the best action possible.

You should direct your audience to a relevant action, whether your brand is focused on adult education or continued learning.

How to customize Education landing pages

• Use data to personalize your messaging. For instance, if a visitor belongs to a certain age group or is in a particular career field, emphasize the benefits of your education and training program.
• Use interactive elements, such as quizzes and assessments, to provide visitors with personalized insights or recommendations based on their responses.
• Make the layout and design of the landing pages appealing to the target audience. If your brand is geared towards younger students, for example, you can use vibrant colors and graphics that are playful to create an engaging and fun experience.
• Use dynamic content for different messages or images depending on the visitor’s location, interest, or browsing behaviour.

Step 2: Create informative landing pages without distractions

Your design must be in line with the message.

Your landing page should be designed to make it simple for visitors to respond to your call to actions, to prove your value and to reassure them that you will provide the services they need.

From the images you select to your layout, everything should convey a sense that action is possible. Your audience should feel confident after viewing your page that their future educational is in good hand.

How to make it easy for people to take action on your Education landing page:

• Use a simple flow to your page layout so that viewers are not confused about what you want them to do.
• A carousel or infographic is a great way to highlight all the ways that your brand can help students succeed, without them having to read long copy.
• Consider a longer funnel strategy if taking action requires more conversion steps. Start with simple information and continue to convert your audience down the funnel.

Step 3: Establish trust by obtaining testimonials

It is important that prospective students are confident in their decision to enroll before they commit time and money. Share a recent student’s (or a family member of a former student) success story to show their potential.

Social proof such as testimonials and reviews can be used to highlight your best features. They can also humanize your brand, help create an emotional connection, address any concerns or objections and help potential students feel more confident in choosing your school.

How to display testimonials on a landing page devoted to education:

• Video Have your students record videos testimonials to humanize your brand. This will reassure your visitors that your testimonials are genuine.
• Scroll box: By using a scrollbox and adding pictures of the people who have provided testimonials, you can include multiple testimonials on your landing page without taking up too much room.
• Backlinking Provide a link to your school’s positive reviews found on other sites and rating platforms. This will empower visitors to conduct their own research.
• Logos Highlighting logos or awards/acknowledgements that your brand has received is an effective and simple way to build trust, without using too much text. These logos should be clickable to allow visitors to continue exploring the findings.

Step 4: Highlighting the Larger Picture

Landing pages are part of the educator’s ongoing work. Every landing page that you create gives you valuable insights into the behavior of visitors. These insights will help you to attract more members to your call-to-action.

You can take your landing pages to the next stage by measuring outcomes and scaling them up. You can increase conversions by targeting new audiences, and testing your insights on them. You can also grow your community and control your advertising without increasing headcount.

How to test the Education landing page:

• Start each campaign by identifying a CRO or metric to test.
• Set your test parameters as early as possible by defining a hypothesis.
• Track your audience data and monitor it as you test. This will help you to determine what types of viewers respond well to various page elements.
• Use tools like Heatmaps in order to determine where your visitors spend the most time on your site.

Outro:

The home page is not enough to generate campaign results. Implementing the four strategies discussed here will help Education providers transform their landing pages to high-conversion machines.

You now understand the importance of a landing page strategy. It’s time to personalize, track and optimize your journey from ad to landing page. Instapage allows you to create customized, relevant landing page for each adgroup and audience. It offers hundreds of templates, and in-app testing is easy.

Want to see our work in action? Learn how Statwax a digital agency specializing in student recruitment and enrollment at higher education institutions used Instapage for a 21% decrease in cost per click.

You can also register today for a free 14-day trial to see how Instapage impacts your campaign!

Author: tess pfeifle