Claim Your Competitive Advantage in the Online Marketplace
Competition in Online Education has exploded as institutions across the country are trying to grow enrollments.
As students increasingly look to leverage higher education for career advancement, your competitive advantage is helping them to see your Programs can prepare them for career advancement.
Claim your advantage. Make the Program-to-Career pathway clear and compelling by building it into your website. Follow up with strategic digital marketing to get prospects to your Programs.
You Need
- More applicants — and higher quality applicants
- Higher matriculation rates
- Lower marketing and recruiting expenditures
Your Challenges
- Every university has moved its programs online overnight. Everyone’s enrollments for next fall are uncertain at best and likely in jeopardy. Everyone will be recruiting online students to meet their enrollment numbers. And it is only going to get more competitive!
- Now, more than ever, prospective students require assurance of a return on their investment. They are not willing to enroll in higher ed programs unless they are convinced the investment will pay off in tangible career opportunities.
- While prospects are thinking about their careers, your website is focused on your programs.
Your Solution: A Clear Program-to-Career Pathway
Meet prospects where they are by giving them the information they need to explore both careers and programs.
Make it obvious that your program results in tangible career advancement using trustworthy, current data. Leverage that data in the nurturing process to become a trusted partner in managing their career.
How It Works
Choose one, two or all three of the tools in our Academic Program Toolkit to gain your competitive advantage!
Tool #1: Program Pages that Shine
We start by carefully constructing Program pages so they present the information prospective students need to feel comfortable enrolling.
Your Program pages need to:
- Provide compelling information about coursework, faculty, and other distinguishing Program merits
- Show the clear link between your Program and desirable career opportunities
- Engage and excite the prospective student while removing obstacles to enrollment
- Establish an emotional connection between the prospective student and instructors so the student knows they will get personal attention
- Lead the prospect through all the necessary stages—discovery, engagement, application—with clear Calls to Action and an evident path from interest to enrollment
- Be easy to find—both by search engines and on your site
Question: Do You Have Program Pages?
Many colleges and universities have not yet invested in providing deep content on individual program pages.
You need Program pages to:
- Put an effective sales funnel in place. Program pages are essential for piquing interest, answering questions and providing incentive to apply and enroll.
- Communicate Program value as a voice for the Department.
- Provide essential SEO real estate.
Question: Are Your Program Pages Compelling?
Every Program page must answer the following vital questions:
- What makes this Program special? Why enroll in this Program instead of another?
- What careers will this Program prepare me for?
- Am I eligible?
- How much will it cost?
- What are the application deadlines?
- How do I apply?
After enhancing your Program pages, using UX best practices, we make sure your Programs are easily accessed.
Takeaway: The end result is exciting Program pages that convert. Why? Because they provide the deep content students need to make a decision.
Tool #2: Integrated Content about Relevant Careers
Draw them deeper Into your website with our searchable careers database, which integrates career content to make the Program-to-Career pathway evident.
Our searchable careers database attracts prospective students to your site as a career-planning platform. Students come to see your site as:
- An authority on careers information
- A comfortable place to explore careers and related programs
And we all know that Comfort + Authority = the trust you seek to establish with prospective students.
Question: What Career Information Are Students Seeking?
We accomplish this by giving students the information they want about career opportunities through Careers pages specific to each Program. The Careers pages provide information such as:
- Salary ranges, both state and national
- Job demand
- Education & experience requirements
- Skill requirements
- Industry & common employer information
- Similar & related job titles and career paths
Most importantly, prospective students want to know if your program will deliver the credentials they need to land the job they want.
Check Out a Few Sections of Our Careers Pages
Takeaway: Careers pages attract students to your site and invite them to get answers to their career and education questions, establishing you as their trusted resource. Trust is essential for prospective students.
Tool #3: Marketing Campaigns Utilizing Careers and Program Specific Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads pull statistics from our digital partner’s careers data API for individual program ads. Dynamic ads speak to your target audience and help students find your site.
To maximize ad effectiveness, we employ ads utilizing career-specific data to direct students to your optimized Careers and Program pages. This gets warm leads to your Programs.
Typical Ad Campaigns
When setting up ad campaigns, we typically recommend:
- Program-related ads that send the student to your Program pages using Program-specific ads (i.e. Get a Master’s in Accounting)
- Career-related ads that help students who have visited your Program or Careers pages find related Program pages through Career-specific ads
How Does Remarketing Work?
Remarketing allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website or used your mobile app. Dynamic remarketing takes this a step further, letting you show previous visitors ads that contain products and services they viewed on your site. With messages tailored to your audience, dynamic remarketing helps you build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back to your site to complete what they started.
Our ad campaigns:
- Entice prospective students through contextual ads that provide data they find interesting and helpful
- Can be used for remarketing, such that a student that visited a Program page will then see related ads, providing enticing statistics
Easy to Use & Effective
Our ads are:
- Easily customizable
- Simple to manage and modify
- Tracked and supported by analytics
- Brand-compliant
Takeaway: Dynamic ads speak to your target audience and direct students to your Programs.
Results
Utilizing our three-pronged Academic Program Toolkit has resulted in up to double the application and matriculation rates for our academic programs clients.
“We have been really impressed with the preliminary analysis that Verified Studios has been able to provide. We’ve seen growth in prospective students and enrollments, which we attribute largely to Verified Studios’ work.”
—Amanda Edwards, Leadership in the Public Sector, NC State
“Verified Studios not only launched an effective site for us, they helped us evolve the site over time to make it more refined and easier to navigate.”
—Dr. Richard Ebersohl, Renewable Energy Assessment Online, NC State
“Verified Studios was great to work with. They were very responsive to inquiries, and collaborative in their work process. For example, we came to them with rough sketches and ideas, and Verified Studios fleshed out wireframes and actionable plans. We are very happy with the results we’ve gotten thus far and look forward to seeing what happens as we expand our work with them.”
—Matt Tate, App State Online Marketing Coordinator
Ready to Get Started?
Cast the SEO net far wider than ever before and capture your target audience. Find out what our Academic Program Toolkit can do for your programs.