College students have a wealth of social platforms and digital content material to select from. And this creates an issue for greater schooling entrepreneurs – how can we get their consideration and reduce by the digital noise?
We’ve noticed educators are nice at offering info, however that is normally not sufficient to seize college students’ consideration. And usually suppliers’ digital choices usually are not related with their establishment’s different companies or communities of scholars.
At United Media Answer, we’ve discovered the key to driving, impactful digital options is the way you combine 4 key components:
Expertise
Expertise is just not an finish in itself. It’s an enabler. It supplies us with an all the time on, accessible and data-rich approach of interacting with college students. And the persevering with improvements in know-how throughout machine studying, different AI, VR, automated advertising and marketing and extra provides us new alternatives to interact college students by offering richer and extra personalised experiences.
Whether or not you’re growing an enterprise extensive resolution or supporting an occasion or one-off marketing campaign, your know-how resolution must:
- Be attuned to your college students’ digital world and digital behaviours
- Constructed for mobile-first customers
- Seize knowledge and supply analytics
- Combine together with your different know-how options and companies
Be single-minded about attaining advertising and marketing and scholar expertise outcomes.
Leverage your companies and knowledge
Larger schooling suppliers have already got a wealth of content material and companies for potential and present college students and alumni. These could be repurposed to work in a digital surroundings, be structured by person want and built-in together with your different digital platforms and CRM system. As digital options, they provide the advantage of being extra partaking, interactive and adaptable to a person scholar’s want than a printed or PDF prospectus or handbook. And these digital options may help put together and pathway your college students to your present companies for enquiries, admissions and worldwide scholar help.
We advocate growing an “on-line to offline” technique for the coed journey. This may allow you to have interaction and inform your audiences, assist direct them to your private companies, and supply a spread of learnings and analytics as you achieve this.
Engagement
Digital engagement is created by the mixture of three key elements:
Relevance: College students have completely different wants at completely different levels of their journey and as people they every will search info or help in a different way. The answer is to tailor content material to the stage of the journey and UX design that permits for a spread of person personas.
Content material: Use quick, bite-sized content material; keep away from lengthy complicated narrative; use video, infographics and different visuals. Consider your college students’ wants, language, on-line behaviour and frames of reference. Keep away from defaulting to structuring content material by your inner categorisations and companies. Guarantee your UX design lets customers rapidly navigate between guides on thematic subjects (e.g. what it’s like to check in your nation, discovering a job) and looking for pressing need-to-know info.
Story-telling: Persons are extra doubtless to reply to and keep in mind tales than lists of details or procedures. So use different college students’ private experiences to showcase the advantages of selecting your establishment and convey key messages to construct a constructive scholar expertise. Use storytelling to:
- Differentiate your establishment from others and construct your model
- Seize the expertise of learning at your establishment
- Give essential learnings and recommendation
- Handle expectations round challenges they’re more likely to face, whereas displaying these challenges could be overcome and can construct confidence
- Show constructive outcomes from learning together with your establishment
- Construct company within the scholar by sharing the experiences of others.
Peer to peer
College students hearken to different students. So get the help of fellow college students to share key messages. This may give credibility, authenticity and social proof to your messaging. Utilizing social media resembling Instagram, Tiktok (or Douyin), Wechat and RED spreads and amplifies phrase of mouth.
We’ve got discovered scholar boards and livestreaming with scholar voices, built-in into our digital options, to be notably widespread and efficient. In these classes college students could be supported by specialists out of your establishment or different organisations. Nevertheless, it’s the scholar voice and lived expertise that can assist construct belief and engagement together with your viewers.
At UMS we mix advertising and marketing management with know-how experience to develop digital options to interact college students throughout the coed journey:
We’ve achieved excellent outcomes for our shoppers with our digital options. Our case research together with growing WeChat Chinese language agent and scholar expertise mini applications for a authorities company, creating built-in advertising and marketing campaigns, constructing a WeChat mini program for scholar prospect engagement and lead era, and delivering a digital scholar engagement programme for a regional examine company. We additionally ship tactical help for universities, resembling live-streaming campaigns, growth of a mini program for livestreaming a College’s China open day, and occasion registration mini applications.
We have been fortunate finalists for our shopper digital work within the Advertising Marketing campaign of the 12 months and Pupil Help classes of the PIEoneer Awards 2024.
Get in contact to see how we may help you create an ideal scholar expertise in your college students. Contact jessica@umssocial.com
In regards to the writer: Jessica based United Media Answer, a full-service digital advertising and marketing company, in 2011. Working between China, New Zealand, Australia the UK and Europe, Jessica leads a cross-culture group of specialists, specializing in main abroad manufacturers and companies to reach the difficult Chinese language market. She additionally takes direct expertise from her worldwide examine journey in New Zealand earlier than founding the corporate there. UMS has labored to advertise many worldwide schooling organisations over the past 13 years and has places of work in Ningbo, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland.
