Do You Need to Partner with a Higher Education Marketing Agency?

Marketing your school's offerings to prospective college students must be a huge priority, especially if your goal is to hit enrollment targets. A steady stream of interested students isn’t just helpful for filling seats in the current academic term, though. The success of your institution depends on maintaining an active campus community and keeping stakeholders and leaders satisfied.

Plus, higher education marketing is an enormous industry in its own right. Recent data shows that colleges and universities invest upwards of two billion dollars per year on marketing to new students. 

But the question remains—should you outsource to qualified higher education marketing agencies? If not, are there alternatives to help you accomplish your most important enrollment goals?

As you weigh the pros and cons of full service agency work, we’ll help you navigate the waters. Learn what these agencies do and how you can maximize your inbound marketing and enrollment efforts.

What Do Higher Education Marketing Agencies Actually Do?

A higher education marketing agency is a specialized firm that works with colleges and universities to reach incoming students. Agencies can offer speciality or niche services that cater to specific segments of a target audience, helping schools reach more students.

Higher education institutions may turn to marketing agencies when they need to compensate for a gap in their current team. For example, if a school is under-staffed when it comes to social media advertising, a short-term contract with an outside marketing agency can fulfill those responsibilities and bring in new leads.

Types of Agency Services and Work to Explore

With the advent of digital marketing and remote agencies, it’s easier for colleges and universities to partner with a qualified marketing team. This is especially helpful if the agency isn't local or near the school’s main campus. Most higher education marketing agencies offer a combination of the following services.

Digital Marketing and Content Marketing

Digital marketing generally refers to inbound initiatives that attract and compel prospective students. Digital marketing materials can describe activities like publishing content for a school's website. It might be crafting new blog posts, building a cohesive website content strategy, or providing email copywriting.

In the higher education space, digital marketing focuses on crafting valuable material for digital audiences. It's a strategic effort to build a library of valuable content and to disseminate it to potential students and stakeholders.

A higher ed marketing agency also assists with these efforts by conducting in-depth market research as a way to inform new content efforts.

Pro Tip: With Element451’s Bolt Copilot, get access to AI-powered to your own personal writing assistant. Draft communications, leverage smarter prompts, and intelligently craft more content in less time. 

Social Media

Schools often need assistance with managing social media profiles and pages. From post creation, publishing, to engagement, outsourcing frees up all the time that's needed to grow and maintain these channels. 

Forward-thinking colleges also use paid media to grow their target audience and establish greater brand recognition.

Digital Advertising and Online Display Advertising

For higher education clients, digital advertising helps to reach and interact with the target audience. Advertising often uses multimedia formats, such as banner ads, display ads, and videos on online platforms. 

To increase digital engagement and conversions, higher education marketing agencies use digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and email marketing. Additionally, the agencies create visually engaging and attention-grabbing advertising creatives that drive leads to school websites.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is promoting a school's brand, goods, or services through mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This marketing strategy allows schools to reach a larger target audience and increase their visibility in the digital world. It's also pivotal for younger generation of digital natives, who likely conduct most higher ed research on their smartphones.

A higher education marketing agency ensures that school websites are mobile-friendly and that their content is optimized for mobile browsing. They use mobile-specific banner ads, push notifications, and mobile apps to engage with their target audience.

Video Production

Producing marketing visuals, including video, requires advanced skills and production capabilities. Agencies might specialize in videos that can be pushed to web services, embedded in marketing materials, or posted to platforms like YouTube.

Engaging video content can help drive enrollment efforts forward by putting real-life scenarios in front of interested students. There's also growing evidence that personalized video messaging within admissions communication can help higher ed institutions better relate to new cohorts. Video is part of modern brand positioning that keeps schools current and competitive.

Data Analysis of Marketing Performance

Occasionally, schools need an outside party to review performance and engagement data that’s already in-house. Some agencies offer analysis as an added service for measuring results and offering new recommendations for important KPIs.

These services help schools in the higher ed space identify areas of improvement and gain insight into effectiveness. Additionally, agencies can provide resources and advice on developing strategies to increase student engagement.

When to Outsource Education Marketing to an External Agency

Making a sizable investment outside of your in-house team can feel daunting. Schools may be under increasing pressure to maximize available resources and “do more with less.” When marketing budgets and resources are tight, getting high return on investment (ROI) matters even more.

There are, however, times when recruiting outside is important. This is true if your school or admissions marketing team is facing any of these challenges:

• You need to fill an unexpected gap in your higher education marketing teams due to employee turnover, hiring cycles, or lack of resources.
• You’ve identified a specific issue in performance and need third-party help to identify and fix the problem.
• You’re looking for specific skills or digital marketing strategies that aren't available on your in-house team, and you’ve identified an agency with proven success in that area.
• You have the available resources and budget to make such an investment possible.

Benefits of Using a Marketing Agency for Admissions and Enrollment

Of course, if your admissions marketing results seem like they’ve hit a plateau, getting a fresh perspective could be the move you need to make. This is especially true in a crowded market like higher education, in which fierce competition is only growing due to a number of challenging factors.

There are several advantages to leveraging an outside marketing agency for your higher education enrollment needs.

• Obtaining a third-party review of your current activities and programs
• Getting access to expert-level help and advice
• Leveraging knowledge of the broader higher education market (including recommendations for standing out from the competition)
• Accessing flexibility when it comes to new and innovative marketing solutions

The top higher education marketing agencies in the United States are known for delivering results, driving website traffic, and helping attract more incoming students. And while it’s certainly not the only way to grow or move forward, fresh insights can keep your marketing program from stalling out.

How to Choose the Right Agency for Positive Enrollment Results

Remember, any marketing agency should be considered a partner on your marketing journey. Your campus-specific goals, motivations, and values should drive the process and the activities from start to finish.

As you do research and seek out agency options, consider asking the following questions, both on your higher ed marketing team and of the agency you intend to select.

• What is the available budget for marketing agency projects?
• Are there specific initiatives to address first? Which items are top priority?
• What tangible benchmarks do we want to achieve during the designated contract time? (i.e. a certain number of new student inquiries in a given time period)
• What is the process for “passing the reins” back to the internal team?
• What are the options if a project stalls or the results aren’t as expected?

When working with any external team, transparency is one of the most important things to keep in mind. Regular updates, insights into project status, and marketing results are critical for knowing what’s happening at all times.

Are There Alternatives to Using a Branding and Marketing Agency?

Collaboration with an outside firm can be beneficial, but it’s certainly not the only way to grow or reshape your college’s marketing and brand strategy. An in-house team, equipped with the most modern tools available, can often accomplish powerful results when reaching and recruiting new students.

If outsourcing isn’t on your radar this year, consider choosing an intelligent student CRM platform like Element451. In many ways, a highly functional digital marketing platform or CRM software easily accomplishes similar results by alleviating manual team effort and automating several important processes, like data collection or outbound marketing.

Plus, when your CRM leverages the power of student engagement and personalization, the results can be just as impressive—if not better! Timely and conversational support to incoming students makes the experience unique and special.

When you have a powerful student engagement platform in your tech stack, you can accomplish your marketing goals easily. When combined with a research first approach, you'll be more equipped to build brands and reach prospective students easily.

Advantages to Staying In-House with an Engagement Platform

When you keep your marketing initiatives in-house (among your own recruiting, admissions, or enrollment team), you’ll be able to oversee processes more directly. Additionally, you can change course or pivot at any point, without needing to check with external players.

Benefits to a Customizable Student Platform

Plenty of institutions trust engagement platforms and CRMs to reach tens of thousands of students regularly. The "wins" are clear:

• Save big on outside operational and technology costs by investing in a service that you can continue to use with a license
• Get immediate access to real-time marketing data and performance metrics
• Keep student data more secure with internal policies for data protection and communication
• React immediately to pressing needs or marketing requests, without having to pass this information on to a third party 

The decision should always start with knowing where your school currently stands, and which steps you want to take to proactively grow.

Accelerate Enrollment Marketing with Element451

At Element451, we work with schools and teams of all sizes, including community colleges and independent schools. While some have limitless resources for growth, other teams know the importance of being resourceful. Regardless of where you stand, having powerful student engagement tools in your pocket is the key to successful initiatives—and we believe that it always will be.

Get more return on your marketing investment this year, and choose a powerful platform that’s delivering proven results to institutions from coast to coast. Element451’s all-in-one CRM platform for higher education is intuitive, AI-powered, and highly personalized to your unique student personas. 

>> Schedule an Element451 demo today. <<