StudyQA — What are the top digital strategies for 2019?

First of all, you have to be sure you’re creating a digital brand. We all know, students are researching colleges online, including on their smartphones. Take every opportunity to ensure they find you wherever they’re searching.

Higher Education marketing is all about branding, and every student must have an easy access from his digital device to your site or blog where he can see what’s unique about your different departments, whether it’s business or the arts or sports. Use a digital-first approach, it can enhance your brand identity through design, icons, colors and visual language.

Second, let your past success stories show your advantages. Get feedback from current students or graduates, talking about what they love about the college or how it’s helped them be successful. Post it on your website or blog. Your brand will be sold by stories of the students who have successfully graduated from your college or university. It’s obviously that a successful brand should be associated with high quality of education — and success of graduates.

Modern students come to expect from online sites a new tool. It is Chat bot. Of course, if you have enough time to answer quickly to all of interested students’ questions - you’re more likely to keep their interest. But it is hard to, that’s why a growing number of universities have started to use web chat bots to instantly communicate with students. Using chatbot platforms lets a college provide an automatic response to any inquiries before the chat goes to a live person.

Pay attention to Apps as well. If you have a mobile-friendly website - it is not enough. More and more universities are designing their own apps, where they offer features which are not available on a site. It can be useful to prove to be highly beneficial, because research indicates that smartphone users today have an average of 26 apps on their phone.

Start a blog, if you don’t have one already. It can help generate a lot of traffic for your website. Blogs remain one of powerful marketing tools for universities. You can write there about your institution,  new faculty and departments or even consider guest posts as well. You don’t have to post only a written article. What’s a higher effective content today? Videos! Don’t forget - we live in the YouTube era. Videos can often be much more effective than articles.

Available statistics show that up to 88% of Americans ages 18-29 use social media,  which is exactly why so many colleges and universities are using social channels to market themselves to prospective students. But choose an effective strategy, because not all social media strategies work the same way and produce the same results.

The fast-growing economy shows few signs of deterioration, and universities can’t rely on marketing just the same way they do in the past. Even those institutions which are not experienced a decline in enrollment number of students need innovative higher education marketing strategies in order to outperform competitors.