The Buyer’s Journey and College Admissions

The buyer’s journey, or the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase, is important to any marketing strategy, in any industry. It adds context for messaging and allows you to properly speak to your audience in whatever stage they are in. For higher education, this becomes even more important – from students’ early research phases all the way through to enrollment. Let’s break down the “student’s journey” throughout the admissions process.

Awareness

The awareness (or research) stage is the first step in the student’s journey. Students are seeking educational, third party content to help them understand what they are looking for in a school. This research stage is paramount because it lays the foundation for the next two stages – consideration and decision. At this stage, a typical student is looking for introductory information about your institution. Where are you located? What kind of school are you – big, public or small, liberal arts? What programs do you offer? You need to be providing answers to these types of questions quickly and easily.

The two best places to house and answer this information are blog posts and quizzes. Blog posts are easily digestible and can be found fairly simply through proper SEO efforts. Students want to know the answers to their questions – fast – and blog posts can help put your institution at the forefront of their minds. For example, blog topics like “Top 10 College Majors” or “5 Things to Consider When Looking at Colleges” will add value to your institution in the minds of these potential students. Creating content with relevant information that helps them answer these types of questions will have the best results. Just don’t forget to put a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of each post that ties back to your institution.

Another great content tool for the awareness/research stage is a quiz. Lately, it’s seemed like we’re living in the age of quizzes. From Buzzfeed to Playbuzz and beyond, everyone is fascinated with taking personalized quizzes. Jump on this train! Create a few interactive quizzes to help students discover what they like and dislike. For example, students in the awareness stage are considering things like “do I want to go to a large public university or a small private college?” and “do I want to stay close to home or move across the country?” These are perfect quiz topics that will allow you to establish a relationship with the student and position your institution as a thought leader. It is also possible to turn the quizzes into lead generators by putting a form at the beginning of the quiz asking for an email address to start it or at the end asking for an email address to send the results to. Once you have their contact information, you can move them into the consideration phase.

Consideration

The second stage in the student’s journey is the consideration (or apply) stage. It’s important because it further establishes the relationship you have with the student, and possibly their parents, and gives them a better understanding of whether your institution is the right fit. During this time, students are more focused on solving their problem of where to attend college and are looking for comparisons of schools. They are armed with the information they learned in the awareness stage and are ready to start comparing and narrowing their decisions down.

There are a few ways to strategically handle the consideration stage. One way is to create infographics or charts to help lay out the information being compared. Visual elements are extremely popular and shareable, making them a prime opportunity to capture students’ attention in this stage. An example of this would be to create an infographic detailing the benefits of your institution, including quick facts and hot tips. Use this to remind the student why they should apply to your institution!

Another type of information students will be looking for at this stage is help with the application process. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have family members help educate them during this important time. Consider creating a college application guide that serves as a mentor, guiding students through every step of the application process. The guide would take them step-by-step and walk them through all aspects of the college application process. This content would be a powerful piece of premium content, which could be housed on a landing page. Remember to place a form and CTA on your landing page to gate the content, in order to capture students’ contact information in exchange for the guide. Once they are in your database, you can start nurturing those leads, or potential students, throughout the consideration stage and into the decision stage.

Decision

The final stage of the student’s journey is the decision (or enroll) stage. It’s important because this is where students are seeking validation. They’ve received either acceptance or rejection letters, will select a school and, ultimately, enroll. For those who applied to multiple schools and were lucky enough to be accepted at all or most of them, this is a tough decision to make. They need to choose just one school at which to enroll – but how?

This is where the lead nurturing aspect comes into play big time because their decision is based on the information you’ve been providing to them. Do they feel like they have established a connection and relationship with your institution? Do they know everything you offer that might appeal to them? These are the things that will help them make their enrollment decision. Once a student has applied to your institution, enroll them in a lead nurturing email workflow. Continue to market to them via workflows and use each email in the workflow to highlight the things that matter most to them. You should have this information based on what types of program pages they’ve visited, which blog posts they’ve read, etc. For example, the first email could be an introduction from your institution, greeting the student and providing CTAs for them to take an action with you. The second email could be focused on the most popular programs you offer. The next email could promote a specific blog post or piece of premium content they might be interested in – this will help push the student further down the funnel. Follow it up with an email about visiting your campus, where you can – hopefully – seal the deal! Sending students the right information can help them ultimately make their decision.

Mapping the buyer’s journey to the higher education admissions process so that it becomes the student’s journey is essential to the success of your inbound marketing strategy. Follow these three stages and implement different lead generation and nurturing tactics to attract students and entice them to enroll. Before you know it, you’ll see your enrollment numbers begin to increase because you have reached more of the right students than ever before.

Does this sound like something you want to do or learn more about? Download our whitepaper, Attract Your Ideal Student Base or contact us to learn more!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022