While it has been established that a well-designed website is like a window to your business and serves as your very own space to portray your business in the best possible light, having a website alone does not suffice for competing online. The digital landscape is fast evolving and has become increasingly competitive with time, giving consumers a plethora of options to choose from, making buying decisions a tough call for potential customers, to include K-12 students and parents. An updated and seamless web experience with social media integration and a holistic digital marketing strategy for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to spread the word is essential to ensuring that the digital communication is comprehensive, thorough and uniform across all relevant platforms.
The 4 key components that goes into a well-rounded digital marketing strategy for all higher educational institutions or any business for that matter are:
Attraction
The first stage of an effective digital marketing strategy for your school, is to garner the right support from the right places. Directing traffic to your web page or other social media pages through various techniques such as search engine optimization, blogging and content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click ads and the like.
Retention
Once a potential customer has been directed towards your website, it is up to you and your website’s content that will ultimately convince them to stay or either switch over to a competitors website. For a visitor to stay you need to offer something value-added such as a newsletter or free case studies and marketing reports that will help them connect with you on a much deeper level.
Conversion
Once the visitor has engaged with your communication on a personal level, a poorly designed web experience or a social media strategy with loopholes can deter your marketing efforts and lead you to lose the customer before he checks out. Remember to optimize your web copy and check for any technical faults in your web design that does not hinder the check our process or is a hindrance in any manner.
Measurement
Data collected from various campaigns can help you track the relevant metrics and measure results against some established KPI’s so that you can tweak your digital strategy accordingly. A sound digital marketing plan incorporates timely data collection, analysis and amendments to maximize ROI. Measuring changes in industry trends, strengthened by extensive external research and knowledge is pivotal to delivering above par in the future, upcoming campaigns.
Prioritizing and ensuring that every facet of your digital marketing strategy gets the needed attention is key to succeeding in this constantly-evolving digital world. And that’s exactly what K-12 marketing agencies look for.
A design that engages
Design is a very vital component of a positive and uplifting user experience. Imagine visiting a website only to be bombarded with irrelevant ads and a poor navigation experience with lots of bugs. It would not only leave you uninterested but also make you opt for other alternatives, leading to a lower student and parent conversion and higher bounce rate. An appealing aspect of an engaging design is the website being mobile-friendly as it aids in accessing the site anywhere, anytime. A poor mobile experience just puts off the customer. Furthermore, the site should be user-friendly and allow the content to flow seamlessly arranging all relevant information in proper chunks to be easily viewed and comprehended by the visitor, aiding in purchase decisions, easily sharable on social media and precisely what the brand promises in their marketing communication. Here are some web design packages for you to choose from.
Traffic generation
Digital marketing strategy for K-12 education makes it a point to generate quality leads by attracting targeted traffic that is most likely to convert. Such strategies include proper planning and strategizing to ensure that the efforts pay off in the long run.
- Social media marketing: Leveraging the power of social media and building a credible following will not only bring your K-12 operation into the limelight and help increase brand awareness but it should also drive relevant web traffic to your internal pages. The millennial generation and their iGen/Gen Z children/today’s K-12 student, spends the majority of their time surfing social media platforms and having a conspicuous presence across all these platforms helps your business get noticed and ultimately generates highly profitable leads.
- Search Engine Optimization: Optimizing your website and profiles for search engines so that you rank higher than or at least comparable to your competitors is one of the sure-fire ways to capture much-needed market attention. Social media strategy for schools ensure that your operation always ranks on top and comes up on search engines whenever a student, staff or parent searches for it.
- Interactive media: With smaller attentions spans and lack of time, video content has become the most common form of disseminating vital information and engaging the relevant target audience. Short and impactful industry related videos do not only convey the message in lesser time but also evokes greater consumer interest.
- Content Marketing: Acquiring customers by creating and curating meaningful content and distributing it to relevant stakeholders (such as monthly newsletters, case studies, e-books and guides) is a highly effective way of engaging customers
Conversion
As we go deeper down the sales funnel, what matters the most is `conversion”. This is because if a potential lead does not convert into a loyal customer, all of the markets right from the advertising stage are in vain. Marketing campaigns that do not take into account the conversion rate optimization (CRO) are not very effective in the long run. A handful of reasons can be cited for visitors to leave your website and not convert, some of them being –
- Complicated and hard to navigate web design
- Non-professional copywriting that does not resonate well with the target audience(s)
- Lack of information and value-adding content
- Mundane, uninteresting and obsolete content
- Not mobile-friendly
When the CRO component of a digital marketing strategy is taken into consideration, any ripples are lessened to ensure that a well-rounded plan is in place to achieve organizational objectives.
Conclusion:
Now that you have (or are on the way to having) a strong, well-built and highly converting digital marketing strategy in place, your potential customers will automatically engage with your content, something that every K-12 marketing agency aims for. A holistic digital marketing plan will only bear fruit once the expectations of the audience is met consistently, through timely delivery of promised aspects. Trust takes time to build and in order for your visitors to completely trust you it is imperative that you follow a few simple rules to ensure you meet and even exceed customer expectations.
In order to keep your communication strategy consistent, plan well before time and chalk out a proper calendar so that you do not lag behind. Because if the digital marketing plan is not properly executed all previous efforts will go waste. Once you have your path figured out, stay true to a few rules of the thumb which will help you develop a synchrony with your organization so that you are able to sustain your overall efforts in the long run.
