The year 2020 has been tough on all of us. Especially the students. While all of us have been forced inside, the students too are having a tough time coping up with the studies while being quarantined. While digital marketing has been there in the education sector for a while now, the importance has suddenly increased owing to the pandemic.
But, how has it aided the education sector in these difficult times? How has it helped it in coping up with the challenges of indoor learning? In this blog, I will discuss how digital marketing has uplifted the education sector. Let us begin.
First Impressions: What Is Education Sector Marketing?
If you do not know what Education Sector Marketing is all about, this section of the blog covers it all. Education sector marketing involves using digital marketing by educational institutions like schools, colleges, and other education establishments. These institutions use digital marketing elements like websites, apps, and other things. While using web marketing techniques is common by education institutions, gradually using the techniques of mobile marketing has also increased.
Some of the other popular digital marketing trends in the education sector involve Creating a website, updating blogs on various third party websites for promotion, using Search Engine Optimization for higher ranking, engaging the audience through interacting on various social media websites through Social Media Marketing, promoting through Paid Channels Search, using Email Marketing, and other techniques like Lead Generation, etc.
Why Does The Education Sector Need Marketing?
Let’s talk statistics. After all, stats help in emphasizing the need for anything accurately. According to a survey of Education Industry Analysis by the IBEF or Indian Brand Equity Foundation, India is the second-largest market for E-learning after the US, where it is expected to reach 1.96 billion dollars by 2021 with around 9.5 million users in the whole country, and further expected to reach around Rs. 2,44,824 crore (US$ 35.03 billion) by 2025.
So, these stats reveal a lot about the need for using digital marketing in the sector of education. To make the concept clear, here I enlist some of the benefits of using digital marketing for the education sector.
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Helps in establishing Brand Awareness:
The basic component of digital marketing is the internet, and it is used in every corner of the world. Using the technique of digital marketing will enable you as a brand to reach out to customers who need your service even in the remotest of areas. Similarly, in the realm of education, it helps in extending the service to the customers of the target market easily, hence, building up brand awareness.
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Higher Affordability than the Traditional method of marketing:
As a business, you would want to use a method that is affordable, yet effective for marketing. Digital marketing solves it immediately. Using old techniques of marketing like flyers, radio ads, TV ads, billboards, or newspaper ads is quite more expensive than digital marketing. Leveraging digital marketing will help in getting more conversion rates at a lesser cost than the traditional methods of marketing.
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Helps in getting you a personalized approach for marketing:
Adding a personal touch to your marketing techniques is all you need. Traditional marketing does not offer you that. For instance, using digital marketing education systems like law schools, medical schools, or business schools will help the students to realize their goals by gathering data through the activities of students’ based on their interactions, or engagements on various online platforms.
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Higher chances of conversion rates:
As you have read the second point, you might have encountered the word conversion rate. Digital marketing leads to better conversion rates through features like geotagging which involves adding geographical identification metadata to different media channels. Building a graphic design for targeting the audience in a better way to suit a particular demographic environment. This will lead to better conversion rates by reaching out to the target audience in a better way.
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Comes in handy as an unconventional tool for communication:
Communication with your target audience is perhaps the most important way of engaging them. Digital marketing helps you a lot in that. Elevating the presence of your education institution online will help you in establishing a channel of communication for both existing and prospective audiences. Online marketing will also help you in amplifying the social media presence.
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Has a better chance of trackability and modification:
I would say this is perhaps one of the best benefits of leveraging digital marketing for your education institution. With changing times, modifications in your marketing techniques become a necessity. With digital marketing, you won’t have to worry about modification from the basic level as you can easily modify your campaigns if they aren’t fruitful for you. Similarly, you can track the outcome of your techniques if they are proving beneficial for you or not through various analytics tools.
These are some of the benefits that using digital marketing entails for your industry. In the next section of the blog, you will get to know some of the digital marketing techniques best suited for the education industry.
Worthwhile Digital Marketing Techniques To Leverage
While all techniques have a charm and benefit of their own, there are some that stand out. Here are some of the techniques that you can leverage for maximum benefits:
- Search Engine Optimization will help you in getting a better presence on the search engine websites and assist you to reach out to your target audience easily. Using SEO tactics like improving the HTML code, building a strong backlink profile, and writing content-based keywords will help you in boosting your online presence. A tip I would like to give you is always to research the keyword suited for your education industry to get more outcomes out of it.
- The next technique involves using Chatbots. They are used by almost every industry to add a personal touch to communicate with their target audience. In the education sector, they become more important as most of the customers using your service might have queries and you cannot be present everywhere to suffice to them. That’s when they come in handy.
- Email Marketing is the next technique you can use for better results. Create a list of your subscribers and find out the people who are ready to become your prospective client or student here.
- Social Media Marketing is the next best thing to use. Each of the social media platforms has its benefits, for instance, using Twitter will help you gain customers through ‘hashtags’, and using Instagram will help you attract users through photos and videos. You can use them both for direct and indirect methods of promotion. Isn’t this the best of both worlds!
Wrapping Up
Digital marketing is like King Midas. Why do you ask? Whatever King Midas touched, turned into gold. Similarly whatever digital marketing touches, it helps to reap the maximum benefits for you. And the education sector also prospers because of it. If you want to gain maximum benefits, hiring a digital marketing agency having a good understanding of the techniques best suited for the education sector will surely help you out a lot. Turn your investment into gold through digital marketing now.