4 Steps to Improve Your Student Acquisition Strategy

For educational institutions, marketing is integral in generating leads and enrolling qualified students; you need a strategic campaign plan to succeed.

It’s time to start meeting your prospective students where they are in their own decision-making processes, and that means going beyond standard promotions and one-size-fits-all landing pages. With a dedicated ad-to-landing page strategy, you will improve campaign results, streamline the user experience, and increase return on ad spend (ROAS). Keep reading for four strategies to get you started.

Step 1: Personalization

Personalizing your landing page is about creating an experience that helps visitors take the action that best serves their needs.

Whether your brand focuses on adult education, continued learning, in-classroom support, edtech, tutoring, or higher education, you should guide your viewers toward a related action step.

Ways to create personalized Education landing pages:

• Leverage data to personalize the messaging. For example, if the visitor is in a specific age group or career field, highlight how your education or training program is beneficial.
• Include interactive elements, such as quizzes or assessments, that provide personalized recommendations or insights based on the visitor’s responses.
• Customize the design and layout of the landing page to appeal to the specific audience. For example, if your brand focuses on younger students, use bright colors and playful graphics to create a fun and engaging experience.
• Utilize dynamic content to show different messaging or images based on visitors’ location, interests, or browsing behavior.

Step 2: Create informative and distraction-free landing pages

A personalized narrative will start to generate trust, but your design efforts must match the messaging.

Your landing page design should make it easy for visitors to convert to your call to action, prove your value, and reassure visitors that your organization will provide what they need to thrive.

Everything from the imagery you choose to your layout should drive home a sense of achievable action. After viewing your page, your audience should feel confident that their educational future is in good hands.

Ways to create easy-to-take-actions on Education landing pages:

• Create a straightforward flow with your page layout, so viewers don’t get confused or lost about what you’re asking them to do.
• Statistical evidence in the form of an infographic or carousel can be useful in highlighting all the ways your brand helps lead students to succeed without relying on them to read dense copy.
• If taking action requires additional conversion steps, consider a longer funnel strategy, starting with simple information to build leads and continuing to convert your audience as they move down the funnel.

Step 3: Build trust through testimonials

Education is often a significant investment, and prospective students need to be sure they are making the right decision before committing their time and money. The best way to highlight their potential for success is to share a current student (or family of a student) who’s happy with choosing your institution.

Social proof, such as testimonials, reviews, and ratings, can help highlight your best features, humanize the brand, create an emotional connection with potential enrollees address concerns or objections, and ultimately help them feel more confident about choosing your school.

Ways to present testimonials on your education-focused landing page:

• Video: Having your students record video testimonials helps humanize your brand and reassure visitors that the testimonials are legitimate.
• Scroll Box: Using a scroll box and including pictures of those who provided testimonials allows you to include several testimonials without sacrificing too much space on your landing page.
• Backlinking: If your school has positive reviews on rating sites or other platforms, provide a link so visitors can feel empowered to do their own research.
• Logos: Highlighting the logos of brands you’ve partnered with or the awards /acknowledgments your brand has achieved is a simple and effective way to build trust without too much text. Bonus points for making these logos clickable so visitors can continue to explore the findings.

Step 4: Highlight the Bigger Picture

An educator’s work is never done, which extends to landing pages! With every landing page you publish, you gain insights into visitor behavior and activity. These insights can help you attract more engaged members to your call to action.

Measuring outcomes and scaling up is how you take your landing page efforts to the next level. By targeting new audiences and testing your insights against them, you can increase conversions. Furthermore, you can grow your community, and take control of your advertising efforts without expanding headcount.

How to test your Education landing pages:

• Begin every campaign with a metric or CRO element in mind to test.
• Establish your test parameters early on by setting a specific hypothesis.
• Monitor and track your audience data as you test to understand what kinds of viewers are resonating with various page elements.
• Leverage tools such as Heatmaps to find out where your audience spends the most time on your page.

 

Education providers can’t rely on just their home pages to drive campaign results. By implementing the four strategies shared here, Education providers can transform their landing pages into high-conversion machines.

Now that you understand the value of a dedicated landing page strategy, it’s time to create, personalize, track, and optimize your ad-to-landing page journey. With Instapage, you can create personalized, relevant landing pages for every ad group and audience with hundreds of templates and easy in-app testing.

Want to see us in action? Read how Statwax, a full-service digital agency that specializes in student acquisition and enrollment for higher education institutions, used Instapage to get a 21% decline in their cost-per-click.

You can also sign up today for a 14-day trial and see the impact Instapage has on your campaign results!