4 Content Marketing Tips for Higher Education

The higher education industry is becoming increasingly competitive. With over 7,000 schools across the US, your institution needs to differentiate itself from the others. Make your college or university stand out by creating remarkable content specifically for your potential students. Once you create content, you also need to make sure your potential students can find it. Here are four tips for content marketing in higher education.

Answer your audience’s questions

You aren’t going to be able to answer every single question your potential students have, but you can come up with a list of basic questions based on your buyer personas (or semi-fictional representations of your ideal potential students) and tailor your content to answer them. In this case, your buyer personas probably include high school juniors and seniors starting the college research and/or application process. Some questions they have might be:

• What kinds of scholarships am I eligible for?
• What do I need to do during the application process?
• How do I choose my major?
• How do I write a personal statement? How do I write a college resume?
• What are the benefits of studying abroad?
• How can I raise my ACT/SAT score?

Based on the questions your potential students are asking, create blog posts, social posts, emails, and premium content (checklists, videos, eBooks, etc.) that answer these questions.

Cater your message to the platform – and your audience

It’s important to understand what types of messaging work best on each platform you are using. On Twitter, keep it short, sweet, and to the point. On Facebook, you can be a little more long-winded and even ask your audience questions to promote interactivity. Social posts with images also receive more engagement than those without.

Also, keep in mind who your audience is. You might be speaking to both potential students and their parents, so tailor your posts accordingly. With a younger audience, you have the opportunity to be more creative with your posts and experiment with different content, like gifs. When creating messaging for parents, you’ll want to be informative and professional.

Make it easy for your content to be found

All this remarkable content you’re creating doesn’t do you any good if your ideal audience isn’t finding it. There are a few ways you can make it easy for your audience to find your content and ultimately, your institution.

First, you should identify keywords you want your content to rank for on search engines. These should be specific, long-tail keywords, as opposed to short-tail keywords. For example, a student who needs help with their college resume might search “help with my college resume,” as opposed to “college resumes.” Each piece of your content should focus on one main keyword – be sure to keep this keyword in mind as you write.

Keywords don’t just end with content creation. Make it easy for students to find your website (and the content housed there) by optimizing your website for SEO with relevant keywords.

Deliver your content

In addition to optimizing it for organic search, you have the ability to deliver your content directly to your students. Send a digest of your most recent blogs once every few weeks, delivering the answers to your potential students’ questions straight to their inboxes. You can also set up automated email workflows to nurture students with relevant content over a specific period of time. Once you set up a workflow, depending on the settings and parameters you use, students can automatically receive an email from your institution once every 10 days, for example.

Content is a powerful tool in the higher education industry. There are many ways that your institution can be taking advantage of it to make the college admissions process easier for your potential students and ultimately draw them in to apply to your institution. Interested in learning more about inbound marketing for higher education? Let’s talk!

Updated: Aug 03, 2022