Boost Your Enrollment Rates with Conversion Leads Optimization for Higher Education

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I want to welcome everybody to our hm webinar titled NextGen lead gen for schools digital marketing strategies for 2023 it's great to have you here thanks for taking the time aside um I want to tell you about uh your host here and that's us that's higher education marketing uh if you're not familiar with hm we are a fullservice digital marketing agency and provide digital mark marketing services for schools we focus only on serving the education sector and we serve schools of all levels all types all sizes so College Community College University K to2 Language School Career College and we serve schools worldwide and in multiple languages just we focus on that education Market Niche and provide everything you need to convert more students through online marketing so in addition to the digital marketing services is we have a CRM that's built for education and custom built for every organization we create it for we have a student application portal we provide Consulting an academy where you can learn more your team can really brush up on your digital marketing skills really everything uh in that digital realm we're happy to be here with you uh little bit of housekeeping to touch on uh while we're here in the go-to meeting webinar we're going to have your mics on mute that allows us to cover a whole lot more territory in terms of presenting for you though I know questions will come up I sure hope so and if they do when they do please go to your uh little sidebar menu for uh go to webinar and find the questions box type it in type in your question at any time so type it in during the webinar and then what I'll do is I'll go into the question box at the end and uh answer your questions if time permits I want to make sure you know the session is being recorded and you will receive that recording as well as the slide deck uh you'll receive that via email and you know one to two to three days uh so you'll be getting that uh as we conclude here today's presentation focuses uh you know as we've discussed it's really focusing on lead generation and it's important to talk first about you know kind of the state of digital marketing today what's what's new what's current and uh how it's important to be setting and tracking multiple touch points across those then we're going to go kind of categorically through the tactics and digital marketing toward lead gen and we're going to begin with online ads and what's evolved in that category SEO and looking at the new options for greater visibility and engagement social search which is uh this this upcoming really current trend of using social media as a search engine and utilizing utilizing that for SEO as well and then more effective lead gen than you might think we're going to go back to an old friend email uh and instead of saving reporting for the end we're going to kind of weave it throughout the webinar to show it in the context of each of these categories so let's begin with you know the state of digital marketing today and and in a very simplified way think of it this way uh in the past conversions came mostly from separate channels uh and we would measure email and then we would measure separately social media and then we would measure separately uh SEO and then we would measure separately search ads um today we see each of those playing a part in a single conversion so we're looking at multiple channels multiple touch points uh and I know that's been a reality for a while but it's important that we dig down into to that concept so we're going to break that down first and before we do as we always do in our hm webinars we're going to ask you I want to get your thoughts uh based on your school's experience how many touch points do you see before a potential student converts to enrollment and so converts means uh in this case I want it to mean that they actually sign up for enrollment they actually fill out the registration and enroll so how many touch points do you see and they may be digital they may be in person but I want to see your numbers uh as you kind of consider that there letting the votes come in the votes are rolling in quickly thank you for your participation okay say let's take a look at those numbers and see what you've said so most of you are saying the highend with a majority of you on on three to four so that's interesting um and then the rest of you kind of five or more and some of you not sure so you're you're not necessarily tracking so that's it's very interesting to know and thank you for sharing it it also helps uh each other right to see what other schools are experiencing and other educational organizations do you remember the good old days where you know you'd take an action online it would engage the user and then they would enroll or purchase or convert um times have changed right so we know of course they're going to see an ad they're going to look you up on YouTube they're going to do another search they might fill out a form but just a brief one so you can send them an email you can re-engage them and it may be five as we say you know more uh touches before they come to the point and now I I want to redefine what I'm going to Define as conversion from this point on so conver version in the regards of digital marketing is really someone filling out a form on your website or anywhere online so that you're receiving their contact information as an interested perspective student so that's what we're going to Define for digital marketing purposes in this webinar from this point forward what a conversion is they see the form they fill it out click submit provide their contact information so there's a lot of ways that we can do that we can generate that and it's important to understand the many channels that are involved here right so uh you know we'll Define these and you can go back to these when you receive the deck but you've got paid and organic search so ads on search or basically just kind of coming to you via your search results not concluding the ads direct basically meaning they have typed in your url directly maybe they have it bookmarked so they're a familiar return visitor then you've got paid social and organic social again ads on social media and then coming to you organically sometimes just through your feed what we're really referring to in this case though is cross Network and that's where users engage with you across multiple channels networks sources platforms you know before converting they're coming in lots of different ways as you may know hm is based in Canada and in Canada everything kind of simplifies to hockey so we want to communicate to you a marketing lesson we've learned from hockey and here it it is the lesson of the assist right you've got the player number one on the right who looks like they are on the fast break and they're going to score that goal but at the last moment they pass it off to player number two on the left player number two gets credit for the goal for the conversion they're the hero but none of this would have happened without player number one taking it on The Fast Break crossing the blue line and then making that crafty pass at the end so think the assist in sports in hockey uh when you think of that cross-channel conversion Google analytics 4 provides us a few different ways that we can track or attribute that credit for a goal or a conversion these are attribution models and what you can do is you can take one set of data so A month's data data for a semester U where wherever your conversions are coming from and you can plug it into these different conversion attribution models to understand new insights about your data um you can see they're they're basically uh described pictorially here in these little pictographs where last click attribution is going to be a data report that even if they've touched many different touch points before converting uh it's going to provide all the credit to the very last click before their conversion what led them to the form filling out the form click submit first click does the exact opposite it attributes all the credit to the very first thing that brought them to you um lyer shares the attribution credit across every one of those points that they might have touched search social email and then position based uh provides 40% of the credit at the very beginning 40 % of the credit for the last click and then shares the credit a little lower to a lower degree for the middle clicks time Decay allows you to see basically attributes more and more credit as we get closer to the conversion itself and then datadriven is where Google gets into its algorithms and understandings of what's performing best and most effectively within your organization and also in the world and they basically assign credit based on what they think was the most influential element of that so if you take the same bit of data and look at it through last click first click data attribution um it really helps you to kind of understand what's working for you what insights can we take from this H and what is this telling us and and I want to give you just a little bit of a glimpse of that without getting too deep um this is firstclick conversion path where 100% of the attribution goes to the first thing they clicked on they might have clicked multiple times there are other emails there are referral clicks but organic search gets that top one there at the beginning and they may have done organic search many many times they may have done paid and then organic many times but then in that last one paid gets the full attribution typically in first click paid and organic uh deliver those first click click attributions when you're looking at datadriven attributions um I've highlighted a couple here uh you can see there are lots of different clicks involved here you know more than five we see the we see regularly and it's hard to put a number on this but 12 or more uh clicks or uh touch points involved before a conversion these days it's it's very common to see 12 or more clicks and as you can see that's the case here and you know Google is using its algorithm to assign what it thinks was most you know converting in terms of the the touch point the specific touch point that gets the credit for that conversion and another very interesting way to look at this is to look at the conversion paths report in Google analytics 4 what we're seeing here is early touch points versus mid touch points versus late touch points and it's very interesting to see how organic plays such an important role and is much more a factor in the early touch points but then cost per click or search engine ads uh are much more effective as a late touch point conversion aspect so this is also available in your ga4 your conversions pass report uh and I recommend you take a look at that to understand kind of what's delivering for it what's most effective okay so it's time now to go into our individual tactics we'll begin with online ads for lead generation uh there's a spoiler alert Google search remains number one for student recruitment that's in uh really in our experience in the education sector that's always been and it remains but next gen you know what we're seeing really evolving in the past year and a half or a little more is that social social media ads are becoming way more effective here we'll show you how uh there's also a bit of a secret to success we'll get to that in a minute but first we have another Poll for you love to know on which platform do you typically advertise when it comes to lead generation student recruitment so when your ad objective is really solely to get the contact information of prospective students do you go to search like Google or Bing do you go to social Facebook Instagram LinkedIn or do you go other places when you're advertising for lead generation interested to know how that plays out for you guys so we're going to let the results come in another little bit thank you for voting thank you for joining us okay let's take a look at those results now and mine come in on a very small screen so I lean in aha so a ma vast majority of you are doing Le gen in Social very interesting so that's that's um way in line with the trends we've seen so we find that uh that's actually quite you know refreshing that what what's really come into the nextg element here is now currently your go-to um and what we'll talk about is what you get for that regard so let's uh pull back a little bit as we're defining lead generation we're thinking top of funnel we're thinking how do I get people in my system collect their information their contact information so that we can reach back to them and convince them that our schools is the one for them uh it needs to be just considered a lead magnet you want to make it easy for them to engage and the two ways you want to try to do that is to provide a low impact form so a form that they fill out that asks just a few few questions maybe the the fewest you possibly could ask because the more questions you ask the less likely they are to fill it out and also you want to try to offer as high a value offering as you might have in in hand already or if you need to create one do so these are just a few examples and you might have some examples to share as well um as we were saying um Google search Remains the number one method in terms of it's just most effective for lead generation and student recruitment for schools uh why because first of all it puts you in front of an audience that is already actively searching they are in the mindset of looking for basically what you have to offer the second element that we find really important to engage here is by making your ads program focused so if it's a business program you have one business ad you have a separate ad for your economics program you have a separate ad for your nursing program etc etc because this is going to put more specific information and more relevant information in front of that person who's searching and the third part of really getting the most and making search ads most effective for you is utilizing the dedicated Standalone landing page this is not just another page on your website it is a separate page the only way anyone any traffic can get to this page is by clicking on the ad that helps make it more granularly trackable and also this page is as program focused as the ad was you have multiple landing pages one for each program focused ad and also there's no menu bar there are no hyperlinks on this ad on this landing page because we want to Simply provide them information about that program that they searched for and then invite them to engage Ag and that's the form front and center on the right so that you can basically have them convert fill out the form provide their contact info and you've done your lead generation duty at that point so that's yes traditional but really I want to make sure you're taking it to this degree of granularity to really make the most out of your ads when we're going into you know what we've seen change in terms of next generation leion is social soci media ads for lead generation and while a a majority of you said this is where you're going for lead gen in many cases the majority of you go there because of numbers you get more leads um in the past and and not to distant past um social ads were great for generating leads but their lead quality was poor and it remains uh that remains a standard that you get more leads through social ads but they won't be of as high a quality when and this really kind of happened during covid and after covid as the E Marketplace and education really evolved and went through some real growing steps social media realized that was the case that um lots of people were filling out forms but there was low quality and then they saw an adjustment of people just not even filling out the forms because back you know just three years ago or so people were still using landing pages for social media ads and what we saw at hm is that as soon as you take someone out of the social platform they drop off uh they're in that social platform for a reason they've made that choice and your ad was a bit of an intrusion but hey I'm interested when they click on it if you take them away from their platform they're out they're not happy with that um removal from Instagram from Tik Tok wherever instead social has begun to provide these lead forms these instant forms which uh became the go-to right and really turned social into a lead gen operator for you because it basically turns the ad into the form it pre feeds the form so if your contact information or name and and whatever it might be is already saved in the in the social platform it's going to auto feed and just basically fill these pieces already these data fields all you have to do is Click next or submit and you're in they're also customizable so they really can be used to uh to do anything you want in terms of asking specific questions of those leads and that's turned first of all the volume back up in terms of the number of leads in Social and it's also turned turned the quality of social leads back up um and maybe higher than it's ever been so that's definitely nextg operation in motion and that continues to evolve one thing that hasn't evolved really in a long time is an old school secret to success and it remains integrally important and that is followup uh you can't just rely on an automated drip feed of emails to be your registration or enrollment tool you need to have and automation's good but you need to have this workflow type and what you see here as a follow-up workflow for a high level lead it's critical for your enrollment rates so we're talking Beyond just conversion and collecting the data now we're talking about getting this person into your classroom having a workflow like this and this is an aggressive one do one that your resources can support but you want to reach out via multiple ways that's email SMS phone inperson and automated to help to make that happen for you the other element in terms of reporting on your ads it's the it's the difference of the data that you're looking at in the top three campaigns we're looking at Google ads so the main metrics we're looking at is number of conversions cost per conversion and conversion rate so number of conversions is nice and strong um you can see that if adjusts along with the cost per conversion and so while we're on a single platform that's going to be attributed to the topic of the course so cyber security is delivering a lot of leads at a lower cost per lead while digital marketing is providing fewer leads at a higher cost per lead so it's just just a more competitive Marketplace for digital marketing in this case during this month or this period of time and you can see the conversion rates adjust as well when it comes to Facebook notice first of all in in meta ads and it says Facebook but these could be shared Facebook Instagram we're spending a lot less per period of time we're getting fewer clicks but we're getting such a a greater audience Impressions the number of people seeing your ad is massive so the click-through rate is going to be a lot smaller uh for the reasons we've talked about right your at is an intrusion you might or might not get their interest now the number of conversions is quite high so that makes the cost for conversion a lot lower look at the conversion rate is through the roof right so when you look at ads and compare ads you want to look at all of these specific metrics understand a social ad versus a Google ad and how those metrics will be different but then you want to look at your conversions and understand which of them were higher quality leads um so that's an important measure to understand that's behind all of these metrics okay we're going to shift now to SEO and it's its next Generation Um first what remains is that keyword research and placement in your content on your website along with the metadata remains key that's still super important and effective for you um new elements like people also ask uh search engine result page Rich results are now driving users attention to the top of the screen and the way that you position your content in your website in content clusters can really work uh miracles to make your site easier to find taking a step back SEO is just so fundamentally important because it provides answers to what people are looking for uh it takes the ads out of the out of the equation which means they're more authentically going to choose you not just because of what you're promising in your ad this creates an opportunity for you to reach those prospects among different stages so it may be at the early mid or later stages SEO remains really important uh player here because they're coming to you typically because of content you have on your website uh and that's what's ranking you higher in the search results and having them click to read that article or learn more about how you offer what you offer because it matches what they're searching for because they're going to read content on your page that develops an element of trust in your case they trust you more you've built more credibility so it's that organic relationship that really plays an important role here what's begun to play um kind of a new role is the many many Rich results that are now available in terms of organic results and placing on a page so in addition to just having your your blog or your article or your program page come up as a result you're seeing so many other options that can be uh basically created into the web page so that you can be seen organically in more ways that one so these rich results like the featured snippet and people also ask these you've seen comment in searches and these are really becoming the nextg player in terms of SEO um these featured Snippets and people also ask these higher placements they're built intentionally uh they can be marked up in many ways based on a language called schema it's basically a universal vocabulary used in tagging Pages it's understood by every search engine and it intentionally places your ad in a place where it can be one of the or many of the people also ask so that's really the one of these rich results that we have seen drive more and more organic traffic meaningful organic traffic to your page there may be some rich results already uh either linked or really ripe for your page really potential Rich results so you can go to this link when you receive the deck and drop in your url to see if you have R Rich results uh really within close reach that you can uh code in and then you'd want to basically again uh go to the point of adding that schema adding that coding that's going to make your page visible in the rich results and the other element of SEO that really comes into play here is called content clusters and it is building your web pages in such a way that you've got a core collection of pillar pages and that might be a program page or a page that addresses a core topic that you have particular expertise in and then to build a series of related sub topic pages around it that link from the pillar page and also link among each other they're designed to position your website as an authority with many pages based on a single topic and you want to build them uh and include those internal links that are going to be uh really kind of keeping it's this is very much the user experience element in addition to the magnifying glass of being visible at Google because once once one user comes into one of these Pages they're likely to click on a link and go to other Pages other related Pages this is a really simplified example of the core page of how to play ukulele and then the sub topic pages with really likely articles that someone will want to click on to read and then click from ukulele songs for kids from there to go over to easy songs for beginners to strumming patterns you know it's very likely that they might cruise to C across each of these five pages now notice that the pillar page has has the majority or holds the highest number of searches monthly but if you count and accumulate each of the four in the subtopic and bring bring them all together that's more monthly searches than the pillar page itself so you're again really putting yourself as a magnifying glass as your school on that key topic when it comes to reporting for SEO and organic lead generation you want to first of all look at your organic search and you want to compare it um in one time period versus another and in the more recent time period are you growing in this case we're growing 20% 21% in new users 10% in overall sessions so that's an important element is to see growth from period to period you also want to see event count overall so events are those Clicks in your website that are important to you and in this case we're looking at we've identified a specific register now click so notice how not only has our organic traffic jumped period over period so has our clicks on register now and that may be a placement of that call to action on one of those either pillar Pages or subtopic Pages um and also you see all conversions overall so the types of clicks that would be indicative of a really interested perspective student that's increasing as well so these are the data points you really want to look at to see if your efforts at SEO and content clusters specifically are working and when it comes to seeing if your Rich results are engaging as well go to your Google search console and you can see the examples of the under item name those are the questions asked so basically the people also ask element these are the questions and you can see we did this on May 18th and it had shown recent uh clicks and traffic coming from these specific links so your Google search console is an important one in that regard I want to ask you how involved you guys have been uh in using content clusters or Ser features like people also ask to boost your SEO so here's our last Poll for the day you can vote again thank you all for being here and we want to know if you're using content clusters please click on yes no or not sure and also regarding if you're using things like people also ask the votes are flying in thank you guys have been this is a good time to um remind you you will get a recording of This webinar and you'll also get the deck the slide deck u in your email in the next few days so wanted to make sure you got that let's go ahead and look at the results and I look at my little screen yeah so this is the one one kind of element that you're not sure I totally get it some of you are are definitely engaging in this which is awesome but it's a it's a good thing to go back to to look for these kind of added opportunities because you know this is how we search and how we look uncover answers um in every other search that we do consider that the folks looking for your school are doing the same so okay so let's go into social as a search engine you know while Google is still number one as the place to search uh people are starting to use social platforms like Instagram Tik Tok as their search engines so social SEO is required to be found in these types of searches now this graph shows that 16 to 24 year olds are already using social as a search engine more than they are using Google or bang or whatever the other engines might be um it's really closed for 2 to 34 year olds almost as many with social media as there are with search and you can see it coming that these will just continually gain in terms of social becoming a search engine so how does this play out it's basically people going in to Instagram for example and clicking on the search bar and basically conducting their search there they they live on social so why would they go to why would they go to Google or some other platform to ask their question when their question can just as easily be answered here and in some cases in their eyes what they see on social is going to be a little more genuine maybe a little more authentic than what they see on the search because it does you know it's not necessarily going to bring up ads in Social search at this point so the 16 to 24 year olds are certainly leading the way in this uh as an action and what you want to do is find your keywords and what's ranking for Google is really going to be the same here essentially uh and find your keyword placement and add them to your captions at the top in the blue so experience of being an international student this is where you want to use your keyword optimized words because that's what's going to show you as results in the placement of that search so um hashtags are still helpful for sure but you can see that the keyword optimized captions increase reach by 30% double engagement so that's really super strong and this is where you want to be visible it's in those captions in terms of reporting here go to your Google go to your Google analytics go to your acquisition and Source medium report and you want to look for your Facebook referrals so you've got the middle one which is Facebook paid ad campaign or cost per click so that one is an ad campaign we're talking organic SEO in Social and it's your referrals that are showing first of all users engage sessions and then again it's important to go to the far right of all of your data and look at the events so the again the events are the clicks on your website that are defined as your most indicative of a truly interested perspective student and that's where you want to see if your social search is really paying on off there so we're going to end with email which is again a kind of a standard partner always been there and I sure hope you're bringing it back because email generates higher conversion rates and generates higher return on investment basically because it costs so much less to be engaged here to do this it just takes your time and I'm G to give you a couple of quick examples of how you want to put email to work for you in lead generation and that is in the consideration stage send an email email first of all it's welld designed it's it's nice and Visually deliverable um you're addressing your audien's motivations questions concerns and pain points in the content you're writing here you want to keep your messages brief and worthwhile this one especially does really well at providing multiple calls to action again you might get them at an early stage with something like H here's some helpful resources click here um or you might get them at a consideration stage book a meeting or schedule a chat with a member of our team or you might get them at the decision stage apply now so keep in mind creating your emails Each of which to provide multiple calls to action now at the later stages you may want to focus on a single call to action start your application so it's very important to go you basically to help lead them and in this case this might be the fourth or fifth of a drip campaign the first first one was about your campus the second one about your class experience the third one about your instructor now we've gotten to the point of hey want to start your application so you want to push them forward using your email uh along that Journey from inquiry to enrollment and when it comes to measuring the effectiveness this is where it you know it's kind of not surprising but sometimes it's surprising at how effective email is at re-engaging those who have filled out that form initially provided their their contact info and you want to go again to the events or goal completions uh where the goal conversion rate is super high in email versus uh really any other platform that you can do so our core takeaways we're just about at our end of time here you know cross Channel multi-touch Point conversions are more than ever a reality and it's the way to go it's the way to really um understand that you're going to be able to draw them in without just one siloed approach social media ads are evolving in leaden Social search is eclipsing search engines email follow-up remains key it's at this time that we always offer our free digital assessment so if there is any one of these channels or all of these channels that you want us to give you our thoughts and insights on we'll provide you our recommendations of where and how you can optimize your efforts please reach out Philipe and I are available to uh we'd love to get your email and just or or call and uh have a chat about what you're doing and what you wanna what you want to get more out of in terms of your digital marketing so I'm now going to bring out the questions so please type in your questions because I'm interested to uh be able to try to answer them here aha the everpresent chat GPT question comes up besides social and search do you have any insight into the new chat gbt or Bing for that matter uh as a disruptor for search so the the things about chat GPT we have not yet seen it become the the alternative to search or social uh it has not proven itself to be uh as um I guess the word is uh timely and I don't mean to say that in a bad way but your programs and your offerings some may be relatively Timeless but there's always Evolution there's always change at your school and uh chat GPT is more of a of a historical Gathering of a great deal of knowledge whereas you know immediate search is going to be more timely updated in terms of your costs your start date that type of thing is going to be again better deliverable via SE social and search um and people aren't going to chat GPT for that kind of a for that kind of a question quite yet now that's to be considered in that um being with AI and Google also has ad campaigns that really utilize AI a great deal in performance Max and Google 360 where there are different evolutionary elements and types of ads within those two platforms that utilize AI so it's it's built into some of the the ad offerings you can do and provide but it's not being seen yet as an option to search and social great question more questions coming in bring them on so I have one here you know the question being if I could choose one or the other which one should I do for for lead generation and one or the other being um one of the one of the other being social res search and and really what we would encourage you to do is go to your Google analytics first that's going to help you understand where you're currently strongest where you're getting the most traffic from is it from your ad efforts or is it from organic search uh is it from email and what we would recommend if you could really focus on one is stick with your highest performing method of lead generation uh and kind of double down on that as opposed to Fanning out because you know it's most effective so it's if you're going to allocate time or money go to what's working initially and it's basically those enrollments that can increase the funding to be able to allow you to Branch out so if you were to have to choose go from there um I have another question here where can we find sources of where traffic comes from again in ga4 ah okay so you want to go to your acquisition reports and then to the source medium report uh basically uh you're going to filter traffic by Source medium in the acquisition report so um if you have questions about ga4 and I'll end on this topic um starting July 1st Google is switching from its existing Universal analytics UA and it's switching on July 1st to a new platform that the two platforms are not going to speak the same basically measure the exact same data so you're not going to be able to look at your historical data as it applies to your new data um so it's important that you make the switch if you haven't already Philipe and I can help guide you through that as well if you want to reach out to us to learn more we can we can do that switch for you or we can help your team make that switch happen we're do we're doing that quite bus now with many many schools so if you're um if you're not quite yet signed up for ga4 and setup please let us know I'm going to wrap it up with that we thank you very much for your time hope you have a great rest of the afternoon and we appreciate you spending some time with us have a great day