Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | August 16th, 2023

Graduate School Lead Generation Strategies For Your Programs

Graduate school lead generation strategies are always at the top of the mind for higher education institutions – and for good reason too. Without a steady stream of leads, enrollment is sure to dry up.

But just what is the best way to go about this, particularly for graduate school and MBA programs? The good news is that plenty of strategies and best practices are readily available to help your institution generate new leads. Here’s a quick look at just a few of them.

Optimize your email workflows

Email marketing can be an excellent way to generate leads, but it’s important to do it effectively for the best results.

That means creating and optimizing email workflows that are triggered based on the actions taken by the recipient. For example, if you’re marketing an upcoming informational webinar, a workflow could include two or three follow-up emails to recipients who don’t sign up after the first email as reminders to them.

This is a great way to not only guide your leads along the marketing funnel automatically, but do it in a personalized and segmented way for maximum impact. By shifting from generic email content to personalized workflows, you can much more easily keep your leads warm and ultimately convert them.

Leverage LinkedIn to its full potential

LinkedIn is another great tool to use when it comes to graduate school lead generation strategies.

While posting informational content and enrollment deadlines are always good ideas, try to go beyond that for the best results. Position your institution as a thought leader and showcase the specifics of what’s happening at the school, such as guest speakers, alumni meetups, special events, and more. Message Ads and Sponsored Updates are especially useful features for getting quality content in front of leads quickly and effectively.

Invest in social media ads for graduate school lead generation

Similarly, paid social media advertising is yet another tested and proven strategy at your disposal.

By investing in paid ads on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and especially LinkedIn, you can get your most valuable content in front of users most likely to become inquiries, growing your lead pipeline with minimal cost and time. From promoting informational webinars and open house events to building an audience for your grad school’s blog, paid social media ads are an effective tool with lots of flexibility when it comes to graduate school lead generation.

Host virtual events

Nowadays, virtual events are widely accessible to just about anyone and offer a great alternative for prospective students who can’t attend in-person events. Just a few ideas include informational webinars, virtual open houses, conversations with current students and alumni, faculty meet-and-greets, and more. Given their low cost, wide reach, and many uses, virtual events should always be a lead generation strategy to keep in mind.

Implement graduate school lead generation strategies today for success tomorrow

With these graduate school lead generation strategies, your program can usher in a new generation of prospects and ultimately, grad school students. From higher education email marketing to higher education social media advertising, there’s a wide array of great tools readily available to bring in fresh leads on a daily basis. Need help with your grad school lead generation efforts? GPRS has the expertise you need to succeed. Contact us today to learn more.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | July 31st, 2023

Optimizing Your Top of the Funnel Recruitment Marketing Strategy

As an institution of higher education, attracting and recruiting new prospects is always top of mind. To do this, you first need to build awareness for your graduate school and MBA programs in a way that reaches your target audience efficiently and effectively. But what’s the best way to do just that?

Fortunately, there are many top of the funnel (TOFU) marketing channels and strategies at your disposal, each of which offers its own unique advantages and niche. With these strategies, your graduate program can generate awareness, provide information to your target audience, and bring in leads to nurture. Let’s examine a few of them in detail and learn more.

Increase your blog output and take search engine optimization (SEO) into account

First and foremost, your blog is a great tool when it comes to boosting your TOFU marketing strategy to build awareness and pique the interest of prospects. By blogging consistently and frequently, you can boost awareness for your graduate programs in search engines, convey valuable information to your audience, and boost your school’s authority and brand recognition.

As you ramp up blog post output, remember to keep SEO front and center as a way to optimize your content for search. That means researching and incorporating keywords into your blog posts, optimizing each blog post’s metatags, breaking up the content into brief paragraphs, bullet points, and numbered lists, and the like. By incorporating SEO best practices into your blog posts, you can supercharge your SEO and increase your grad program’s brand awareness very effectively.

Get active on social media

Social media is an outstanding tool for building brand awareness and engaging with potential prospects.

As today’s prospective grad school students are more digitally-engaged than ever, social media has become one of the most effective ways to reach them quickly and cost-effectively. When using social media marketing, it’s important to use an omnichannel approach that reaches as many social platforms as possible in order to reach your target audience. In other words, don’t just rely on LinkedIn, for example. Instead, leverage not only LinkedIn, but Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more to maximize your reach.

That being said, altering your messaging and content can also be very useful based on which channel you’re using. For example, video platforms like YouTube and TikTok can be great for testimonials and alumni stories given their visual format, while Instagram and Facebook are more often effective when it comes to conveying more general information about campus activities and events, career fairs, and the like.

Leverage video marketing effectively

Video marketing is a powerful but sometimes-underutilized tool for higher education institutions when it comes to TOFU marketing. Video is an excellent channel to communicate with your audience, especially on social media, and can be used to convey information about campus events, alumni testimonials, your institution’s recruitment process, and much more in an engaging way.

Optimize your top of the funnel strategy to build awareness

From blogging to videos, there’s plenty of great ways to build up your top of the funnel marketing channels and increase awareness for your graduate school programs. Interested in optimizing your marketing funnel and boosting recruitment? GPRS has the resources to do all that and more. Contact us today to learn more.

Insights from the Higher Ed Experts

BY Anthony Campisi | July 20th, 2023

How to Convey Value to Prospects

When prospective students start looking at graduate schools, they’re not just seeking any place to further their education. They’re seeking an experience that they hope will further their educational, career, and financial goals in life. So, how do you convey value to prospects to make your program stand out as an attractive place for them?

The key is to convey your value clearly. By effectively communicating what sets your program apart from so many others and what it has to offer prospective students, you can increase engagement and ultimately boost recruitment.

Here are a few ways to communicate value to prospects more effectively for your graduate school program.

Clearly convey what sets you apart

Every graduate school has its own unique value props – don’t shy away from using them as a key selling point!

Prospective students always want to see what makes your program unique. To that end, clearly describe what your program has to offer that others don’t, how it can help them achieve their career goals, how flexible it is, and how financially attainable it is. Be sure to highlight any unique learning opportunities, specialized areas, and important partnerships that can help convey its value and stand out above the rest.

Tell your story in a unique way

While communicating your unique value proposition is crucial, telling your story in an engaging way is also important as a way to set your program apart.

In simplest terms, that means focusing on your graduate school’s history, culture, and lifestyle to pique prospects’ interests. Just saying your program offers a good way to advance your career in a certain field isn’t enough to successfully engage prospects. Instead, focus on creating a captivating narrative, not just a laundry list of selling points. In particular, alumni success stories are a great way to do just that, as it humanizes your program and allows prospects to imagine themselves achieving the same success as your alumni have.

Use digital media and marketing

Finally, make a point to utilize your digital media and marketing resources effectively when communicating your value to prospects. It’s no secret that today’s prospective grad school students are the most digitally connected in human history. That means you need to reach them with digital media and marketing first and foremost.

Social media, email, blog posts, and your website itself are all effective channels to communicate with prospective grad school students these days and can also be used to host Q&A sessions, informational webinars, recruitment events, and much more. They’re also a great way to communicate alumni stories and student testimonials, campus events, and local career fairs to prospects.

However, paying attention to emerging trends and what works best for specific platforms is key. For example, video-based social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube are typically best suited to feature alumni stories and student testimonials, while email newsletters and blog posts would probably be a better way to communicate an extensive roundup of campus news and events.

Convey value to boost enrollment today

Need help conveying your grad school’s value to prospects? GPRS has the experience and tools you need to do just that. We can help convey your unique value proposition, craft your story in an engaging way and leverage your digital resources to reach prospects quickly and effectively. Contact us today to kick off the conversation.