Do you remember that time, before the digital age, when you were constantly receiving bulletins from the university, and you really read them?
Before the digital era worked, today is no longer the case. The students are still applying to the university, but the way they find themselves, research and choose a university has changed. Instead of waiting for the answers to come to them, they are looking for information for themselves. Potential applicants and students are turning to the Internet for regular and predictable information, and now it is their job to make their school the answer they seek.
Inbound marketing is the answer to the eternal question on the part of managers: how to achieve an effective communication with the students, or even with the potential student?
Through a correct strategy of content marketing, the student stops being a generic person who has some interest in our service to become John of 3rd year of high school, looking for a University, or Mariana of 18 years and with interest in Health Sciences. You realize? Recognize your target market as an ordinary person helps us to better focus our marketing strategy. For this, we will delve into the subject of Buyer Persona.
A Person Buyer is the ideal model of our ideal prospect. It is not just a combination of more or less relevant data. For this, the Person is built, which has a name, age and interests.
When you are preparing your characters, you have to look at the characteristics of your most successful candidates. What do they have in common? How can you identify these characteristics? You can use the following questions to guide the creation of your character:
- – How old are they?
- – What sex are they?
- – Do they live in an urban or rural environment?
- – How many years of education do they have? What type?
- – Do they have work experience? What type?
- – What do they want to achieve?
- – Where do they want to be in five years?
- – What can your institution do to help them achieve these goals?
- – What would prevent them from attending your university (that is, what are their obstacles)?
You can obtain this information through a combination of market studies and interviews or surveys of current students and teachers. Depending on what your marketing objectives are, you can have one or two people, or as many as 10.
Since we define who we are selling, we can focus on their needs and concerns, locate them within the Buyer’s Journey, and know what you must offer at each stage.
If you are a strange person, that means, you do not know anything about us, we can attract you with a blog post or webinar of a topic that interests you. For example, to Mariana, our Buyer Persona of the example above, we can attract her with a blog or webinar article about Health careers with more work in Mexico, for example.
Once you become a visitor, you are likely to follow us on social networks, so we must also generate an attractive Social Media strategy for all, or at least, the most important markets that our research has produced.
The importance of Keywords
Together with our Buyer Persona elaboration, we will define different keywords that identify the interests of our person.
Search engines own a mountain of data about what people are looking for. These data can be used for your benefit. Once you have a list of long-tail keywords, you can enter them in a keyword planning tool. And look at the average of monthly searches, as well as the difficulty of classification for each term.
Those keywords must be present on your website, mentioned in your social media posts, in the ads for Google, as well as for Facebook, in your blog article … in short, that the keywords come to be the way in which you communicate with your student prospect.
As you can see, there is a good job ahead, even after developing your inbound marketing strategy. Therefore, I would like to offer you our free download our digital guide: How to make your first Inbound Marketing strategy, which I am sure will help you in the search of your goals.
Good luck!