How to generate maximum admissions in education sector by funneling relevant leads

You’ve printed flyers, you’ve sent out mailers, you have engaged your social-media followers, but you’re still not getting the lead flow you expected for your institution. Well, there are hundreds of ways to generate leads, so don’t worry.

If everything was easy like your college or institution could send a message to the interested students, have them join, and that would put an end to your marketing efforts. Interested students would flock to your college, take admission, and stay there for years. But, unfortunately- things are not this simple.

Before a student joins, he or she should know what your college or institution offers, and above all, they should trust you.

They should be interested in your name and also in the product or service that you offer. Once that is done, it is up to you to make them familiar with your classes, campuses, faculty and other facilities.

The most important thing required to get maximum number of students enrolled in your institution is to market about your institution effectively. The first step to market in a better way is to understand your potential students’ journey.

Why it is important to understand the Admissions Funnel?

Admissions are one of the most significant events in the academic life-cycle of an educational institution. Last 2 decades have noted an increase in the number of higher educational institution across the country along with a new breed of the 21st century students and parents. These students and parents are well-informed and have various career choices to choose from, like for example, Mass Comm, Law, Liberal Arts and many more. Moreover, they do a thorough research online before making a final decision.  

Therefore, we must understand the fact that our audience is educated thus, making the “Admission Preparation” a vital aspect for attracting best students.

Here, we will focus on different practices and techniques to:

• Generate highly quality leads
• Aim different priorities i.e. hot, warm and cold leads

Education Marketing

The main objective here is to show, rather than telling students that taking admission in your institution is worth every penny. Similarly, like any kind of sales funnel, the admissions funnel is regarded as a useful method to plan the journey of your target students.

For a better understanding, we have categorized enquiries into three different segments which can rise from different sources.  On a priority basis we can classify them as Prospective, Enquiries and Applicants. Students who know about your institution and want admission is categorized as hot leads. Those who have made a list of colleges in which yours is also one of them fall under the category, warm leads. Last, but not the least are cold leads. This category includes those who are not looking for any specific college to be in and are ready to join any institution.

Prospective

These are students who will ask you all the questions during their first call. Generally, these students get admitted by clearing any of the entrance tests. Hot enquiries generally include telephonic calls, direct walk-in, website and calls from many other sources. These are the right leads who are looking for you. A perfect situation is when an institution can convert 80% of these enquiries. The question is how to do that? The answer is simple. By optimizing your website, your brand and sales conversion.

Website:

In today’s world, website is considered as one of the most significant marketing tool for a company. Consider your company’s website as an online spokesperson which you can use for informing the students about your educational institution and courses.

Prerequisites:

Always appoint the best and invest deeply for developing a great website. Your website should feel and emphasize the vision and culture of the institution. Some important points to consider while designing your website include:

1. Fast loading time. It means your website should take maximum 2-3 seconds to load.
2. Your website should be easy to navigate for the users.
3. Mobile responsive
4. A strong Content Management System
5. A lead generation form to capture the details of potential students
6. Landing page optimization

Optimize your Website: To optimize your website you should implement or incorporate the following things:

1. SEO – Search Engine optimization

2. Google Adwords/ Keywords optimization

3. Instant response to the enquiries through automations and API’s

6. Landing Pages

7. Student Dashboards

8. Online Payment options

Branding:

In simple language, branding in education is the way what students think about your college, view their quality subjectively and the way parents look for admissions or the way counsellors conduct the whole admission process. In today’s world, starting from the first call to the last joining procedure, each and every aspect of an educational institution is taken into consideration. For a university/ college that has a predominant set of admissions coming from regional students, branding can be considered as the first and in fact, the best mode of marketing.

Few of the offline channels used for marketing include:

• Advertisement hoardings
• Ads in newspaper and magazines
• Banners and leaflet insertions
• Radio & TV ads
• Advertisements

Enquiries

There are different paid and non-paid channels which are readily available in the market for generating enquiries. Mostly coming from data backgrounds i.e. JEE, CAT data sold in a cheap way these organizations will connect you to enquiries depending on the current criteria like for example, course information, fee structure, location and many more.

Social Media

Today, social media is regarded as one of the most prominent online modes to generate enquiries. Through this medium you can generate all types of leads. If explained in simple language, people under the age group of 16 to 27 spend on an average of 3.5 hours per in social media, therefore engaging them becomes important for spreading awareness and generating leads.

Prerequisites:

• Look for a good digital marketing company. The similar factor of branding plays a vital role here also.
• Share all important information periodically like last dates for filling up the application, admission or events etc.
• Utilizing real institutions and images
• Using the appropriate hashtags related to your industry
• Track, analyze and improve your Social Media posts

Applicants or Walk-ins

This category of leads can be from any of the above mentioned channels. The best way is to offer the basic info, send SMS and email to convert those to warm enquiries. In such a scenario you can always try drip marketing. It is important to identify and separate cold enquiries in a different list as these consume too much of time. These enquiries are one of the few reasons why most of the organizations fall short of their numbers at last.

Always keep one thing in mind. Nowadays, audience is highly conscious, aware and selective! So, if you want to get the right numbers- you need right marketing. This is where Webeaz can be your partner. Join hands with us and we promise you will never be short of leads for your institution.