Higher Ed Marketers: Spend your budget wisely, position your brand, and save your program from extinction

For a higher education marketer, a relevant and metrics based interactive marketing strategy is the only way to keep up in the quickly evolving field of online education. As the owner of a consulting firm built around implementing efficient and effective marketing and recruiting strategies within higher education, I have found two articles that provide a fantastic overview on best practices for education marketers.

Noel-Levitz, a mainstay in the higher education consulting field for over 40-years, released a blog post highlighting the effectiveness of landing pages on campaign efficiency and student recruitment. The author, Michael Lofstead, states: “Marketers are inviting someone who had the courtesy to take them up on their call-to-action to “learn more” or “request information today” to wander around the school’s Web site—unchaperoned and unguided”. While slightly sarcastic, this quote hits the nail on the head. Driving traffic through the use of a call-to-action to a landing page that matches the users initial intention is a must. These landing pages should be simple and straightforward, but still provide enough insight about your university program to excite the potential student and get them interested in taking the next step. While landing pages to a great drop of incentivizing traffic to take the next step down the conversion process, driving the right type of traffic can have a large effect of the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

 Source: Pros Inc - Internet Solutions

An article by EDUniverse takes a look at the main two sources of high quality traffic for online masters programs: PPC and SEO. Philippe Taza does a great job of explaining the pro’s and con’s of each, but makes a point in that the direction you go is dependent on the current situation of your program. If your program already has the foundations in place on the SEO side, then implementing an effective paid advertising campaign might be the best way to go, and vice versa. Having the pieces in place to accurately measure the effectiveness of your interactive marketing campaign is essential to understand what traffic sources should be invested in.

After reviewing these articles, the following action items are highly recommended as a best-practice within Higher Education marketing:

• Landing Pages are Key - Landing pages help to convert your traffic to lead or sale at a much higher rate, and are key from an ROI standpoint.
• Implement a Tracking Solution - Understanding the quality of various traffic sources through analyzing analytics data can provide insight into what campaigns are working.
• Introduce Both PPC & SEO - Both are proven high quality traffic sources within Higher Ed.

In Higher Education today, marketers must utilize up to date marketing techniques to reach, engage, and convert potential students. Implementing these best practices in order to more effectively spend and analyze your marketing budget could be the key to keeping your program alive.

Robert Lee is currently pursuing his master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and is the owner of Circa Interactive, a Higher Education interactive marketing firm. Follow Circa at @circaSEO and Robert at @frothinEduSEO. 

MOOCs Designers - Is Your Course Engaging Enough?

As a MOOCs designer, connecting and engaging with your participants is vital to competition and success. As a graduate student in Northwestern University’s Integrated Marketing Communications program and 3rd year student on various MOOCs platforms, I encountered two articles in my research about MOOCs engagement that you can’t miss.

Not all MOOCs are created equal. In the article An Unique Approach to a xMOOC — Learner-Centric Course Design, Debbie Morrison introduced a course called Applied Sustainability delivered by Fanshawe college in Ontario, Canada. This course is unique in that it focuses on students and their learning experiences, as opposed to the traditional instructor-centered design that emphasizes faculty-delivered content. Rather than one expert instructor leading the course, there is an interviewer who travels to visit numerous subject matter experts in the field. The interviewer acts as the ‘host’ of the course, going on an exploratory journey along with the students to learn about applied sustainability. Students have access to a variety of open resources, primarily from the experts in the field, field trips with interviewer and the collection of curated resources on the website. Knowing the different levels of commitment of students from diverse backgrounds, the Fanshawe MOOC provided options to customize their learning by offering four options for course participation—Green, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

Image from Presentation Slide featuring student project, posted during Webinar with 
Contact North,with Wendy Wilson describing the MOOC’s development strategy

Since we’re talking about learner-centric courses, student feedback is a valuable reference for MOOCs design. In Melissa Venable’s article, How Can Student Feedback Improve Online Classes, she presented her students’ answers on how they would advise the MOOCs designers in terms of interaction and engagement. The typical online course includes static content presentation and threaded discussion boards – both have value, but neither offers a lot of inspiration. Students expect something different, like in-person alternatives through Skype or Google Hangouts, as well as timely and individual feedback. A good example that I know of is Machine Learning offered by Stanford University on Coursera. Its tutoring program connects students and tutors via live video-chat over Google Helpouts. Students would also love to have social networking opportunities. They welcome the possibility to post profile information and rate, “Like,” or vote up responses in a discussion or list of recommended resources. Students have suggested integrating social media-type functions within courses, so that they can get to know each other better.

In reading the articles mentioned above, I tried to crack the secret code to the success of MOOCs engagement, and came to the following conclusion. These are the three things that every MOOCs designer should seriously consider and act on immediately:

• Turn passive lecturing into active learning – The instructor of the course is more than the traditional professor that gives lectures. To facilitate students' learning process and encourage participation, he/she explores and learns with students.

• Personalize the experience – In order for every student to get the most out of the course and generate useful feedback for improvement, MOOCs should provide different options in terms of learning objectives and tutoring requests.

• Create a platform for socializing and networking – A passion-driven community is the best loyalty program. The shared passion and the links with various talents keep students coming back for more.

Everyone is over-loaded with information today, including MOOCs students. There are millions of courses out there, and why would students with limited time choose your MOOCs if you don’t truly care about their needs? Implementing these three action items helps you create learning experiences for students that are relevant and meaningful.

Josie Zhang is currently pursuing her master’s degree at Northwestern University Integrated Marketing Communications program. She specializes in data analytics and digital marketing. She’s passionate about technology, design, entrepreneurship and lifelong learning. Follow her to Questions and Comments? Contact me on Twitter at @hi_josieee, or on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/josiezhang