Building Stronger Student Relationships: Omnichannel Tactics to Boost Engagement and Recruitment

Need to Know

• Post-secondary institutions are competing for a small, selective group of students, making it essential to highlight their strengths to stand out.
• Institutions can effectively attract and retain prospective students by understanding their motivations and implementing targeted, personalized omnichannel marketing strategies at each stage of their journey.
• Simplifying the application process and providing personalized, relevant information throughout the recruitment journey will help your institution stand out, boosting enrollment and setting the stage for long-term engagement.

Post-secondary institutions are competing for a smaller, more selective pool of students than ever before.

As tuition rises, demographics shift students are showing a preference for programs that offer a clear path to career success.

Additionally, many schools face an enrollment cliff due to factors like declining birth rates, or students seeking opportunities in more prosperous regions in closer proximity to potential jobs. 

In response, colleges and universities need to be able to demonstrate their value over their competitors, using a combination of strategy, messaging, and personalization to not only attract students, but keep them engaged throughout their entire journey through to graduation.

Adopting a customer perspective can help post-secondary institutions better align their marketing efforts with each stage of the student funnel by answering the question of “what’s in it for me?” for students.

Though institutions may be reluctant to view students as customers, ultimately, they are purchasing the opportunity to get a degree with the intention of seeing a return in the form of a career or financial gain.

By delivering relevant, timely, omnichannel messages at each step of their journey, you can demonstrate the value of your institution’s programs and make your school stand out.

Keep reading to learn how to drive recruitment and engagement with key omnichannel tactics tailored to students’ needs and goals.

Build Awareness with Prospective Students

We would be remiss not to mention here that proximity and familiarity with an institution are both primary factors influencing student applications, while a smaller student segment will explore a broader range of options in their search for the right program.

That being said, in the Awareness phase of the student recruitment funnel, targeted omnichannel strategies can be a key differentiator for your school, which could be just the boost your institution needs to position it ahead of your competitors for both groups of applicants.

Most students today will learn more about your school through digital channels, like your website and social media. These platforms should give them a glimpse into your school's culture, helping them see themselves as part of it, and having a unified creative strategy across all of your channels is a key part of painting this picture.

Starting with an audit is a great way to learn more about the journey your institution is currently offering prospective students and identify any holes in your experience that could be updated to help distinguish your offerings.

For example, auditing your SEO keyword rankings can reveal opportunities to enhance the key ranking signals search engines like Google use to evaluate the competitiveness of your websites within organic search results.

You can also use this research to identify topic recommendations for new content, and suggest updates to your existing content based on your audiences’ organic search keywords.

Reviewing your past and in-market creative and its results across digital, social, print, TV, and out-of-home can help you identify opportunities for creative, format, and messaging improvements to maximize your reach and performance and ensure a cohesive approach.

The most impactful factor in total ad performance is arming ad platforms with diversified creative. Refreshing and refining your messaging and imagery based on engagement data, or using a Performance Creative strategy, is a powerful way to improve conversions and prevent ad fatigue by keeping creative fresh. This strategy helped our client Ivey Business School boost their click-through rates by 36%.

You can experiment with different formats, placements, and platforms to find the ideal mix for your audiences (eg. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat). Mixed-format campaigns featuring both static and video assets tend to perform better than single-format or static campaigns¹.

For example, campaigns that included video content for Ivey generated a Cost per Lead that was four times more effective than the campaigns that did not include video ads.

We recommend building campaigns that are customized to each audience and stage of the student funnel to maximize efficacy.

Understanding the platforms your audiences favour will be a crucial element of your success; reviewing demographic reports for social platforms should help you determine how to tailor your campaigns, which will vary significantly if they’re built for a platform like LinkedIn versus TikTok.

Paid media ads play a key role in both search engine campaigns and retargeting strategies. By targeting the right keywords, you can make it easier for prospective students to learn about your school and programs. Retargeting ensures that once a student visits your website, display ads from your institution will appear across search, social, and more to keep your school top-of-mind.

With 80% of prospective students turning to search engines for post-secondary information, this is a powerful way to stand out and capture student attention.

Digging into your analytics, ad platforms, and website data can provide further insights by allowing you to understand your current performance, spot data and tracking gaps, and identify key benchmarks as they relate to your digital initiatives.

Sustain Student Interest with Personalization

The content your users interact with on your site and socials can help you segment them into groups based on their demographics, location, or programs of interest.

When prospective, current, or alumni students visit your website, it’s an opportunity for you to collect data to help personalize your messaging across channels for each group.

First-party data is shared directly with you by users and includes personal information like their name and email address. It’s a key component of successful segmentation and messaging that is not only targeted, but actually relevant to diverse groups of students throughout their student journeys.

This can include information about their extracurricular and academic interests, as well as their preferred engagement channels.

For example, once prospective students start the application process, the information they share should be leveraged to tailor content that is helpful to them every step of the way, providing key dates such as application deadlines and helpful details about learning opportunities.

You more than likely have some first-party data about prospects your team has met with at higher education fairs, or from your mailing list. You can gather additional information through newsletter opt-ins, or gated downloads of high-value assets such as enrollment checklists.

Segmentation gives you the ability to deliver more relevant, personalized messaging in your campaigns, and plays a significant role in forming positive associations with your institution. It can be taken a step further with lookalike audiences, which allow for campaigns to be served up to people performing similar behaviours or who are in the same demographic as your newly enrolled students.

Almost 80% of students feel tailored messages convey that post-secondary institutions have a genuine interest in their success.²  

Personalization is just one more way to help students picture themselves at your institution, which is important, as 75% of them say that feeling they belonged at a school had a strong influence on their enrollment decision.³

From tailored website experiences to targeted emails and social ads, we recommend using dynamic personalization whenever possible.

The Awareness phase is also a good time to launch nurture campaigns with relevant information for your segmented audiences — but be selective with how much you share, as too much information at this point can cause students to disengage.

Share Key Details in the Decision Stage

In the Decision stage, your prospective student audience will likely be seeking more in-depth information about the application process.

Based on their engagement, you can adjust your ad targeting and optimize your creative campaigns to drive more tangible outcomes, such as booking a campus tour or attending an open house.

With your audience diving deeper into your website, having an intuitive user experience is critical. Your site’s navigation, search and online tools should be built around your prospective student journey (as opposed to all audiences), with a focus on helping students make a decision and enroll at your institution.

Mapping out their online journeys is one way to identify friction points and areas that could be improved to help convert prospects to enrolled students.

Personalization is also important in this stage, as understanding what insights students need to make their final decision is crucial. Providing personalized information at key moments can encourage them to take action rather than continue to evaluate other schools or programs.

Help Students Take Action

During the Action phase, students’ evaluations will be complete, and a selection will be ready to apply to your institution.

Your top priority should be continuing to make prospective students feel valued to reaffirm their decision. Making sure that you’ve given them the right information to simplify the process as much as possible is a key part of building a foundation for their future student experience.

If it’s relevant, sending students information on how to simplify the application process is one way you can provide value at this stage.

Taking a personalized approach here could make the difference between students selecting your institution over your top competitor. Having your team available to answer questions about their specific application process, and knowing what information students will care most about is essential.

Creating online help aids is another way to anticipate prospective students’ needs, and then present a simple solution.

For many students, selecting a post-secondary institution will be the largest life decision they have made up to this point, which brings with it a lot of stress. Many students will be finishing up high school, with numerous deadlines and applications looming on their horizon.

A helpful checklist or resource featuring information about what to expect in the first weeks or months of their post-secondary experience can help ease this anxiety and set your institution apart.

Having answers easily available through site search features, or chatbots can help create an authentic experience for prospects and can also help alleviate these anxieties, presenting your school in a very favourable light at a critical point on their path to becoming a student.  

You can further drive enrollment conversions with platform enhancements, such as Google Analytics 4 tracking implementation to enable richer reporting results.

Knowing what drives students, and being able to provide them with timely, relevant information, is key to attracting and keeping their interest. A strategic omnichannel approach can ensure that your institution stands out and provides the best possible value to your students.

But application isn’t nearly the end of the student journey — it’s just the beginning of their long-term investment in their studies.

In our next post on this topic, we’ll discuss how to nurture student engagement beyond application, through to graduation and beyond.

Ready to build a student journey that boosts recruitment and engagement? Contact our Northern experts today to get started.

_¹ Analysis of 11 Meta conversion lift (randomised controlled) studies, 2020.
_² https://www.salesforce.com/form/sfdo/edu/connected-student-report-first…
_³ https://www.salesforce.com/form/sfdo/edu/connected-student-report-first…