The education and learning industry is very powerful globally and has inherent needs. Any educational center needs a longer-distance sales process than perhaps retail. Hence, inbound marketing strategies must adapt to that reality and seek to convince potential clients by giving value to the training offer of the center, school, institution, university, among others.
In addition, the time to generate more sales is concentrated in a few months of the year, and the content and lead capture strategy should be reinforced during these periods.
Let’s see how to use inbound marketing in the education and learning industry. Let’s start!
The Pillars Of Inbound Marketing
First of all, a brief review of the pillars of inbound marketing:
- Buyer Personal: It is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client. Analyzing their characteristics well (both sociodemographic and psychological) will allow you to understand their needs and adapt your content to them.
- Customer journey: Each user goes through a process before doing any conversion. And it goes through different phases, from the moment it detects that it has a need until finally choosing us as the best solution. These phases are knowledge, investigation, and decision.
- Content Marketing: It is a long-term strategy that provides free value to a specific target with the aim of accompanying them in all phases until they Reach The Conversion: Remember: personalizing content is the key and marketing automation will help you a lot.
- Lead Nurturing: Within the framework of the accompaniment of users are lead nurturing strategies. In short, it is the process of preparing and accompanying leads throughout the buying cycle. They are the key to nurturing the relationship with your customers and achieving loyalty with the brand.
- Analysis and measurement of results: Every strategy, whether paid or not, has to be measured. Only in this way can we optimize our actions and improve results. Remember to check KPIs to be able to do a proper analysis!
Benefits Of Inbound Marketing In The Education Sector
- More visibility and better reputation: Having an inbound marketing strategy in the education and learning sector will 100% improve your online presence. You will turn the website of your company or institution into an attraction engine and you will position yourself as a benchmark.
- Increased sales: The strategy will have a return, and surely you will see it reflected in sales and subscriptions. At this point, we see the importance of the analysis and measurement of results that we talked about earlier.
- Unify communication on all channels: There must be a planning of how to act with all the contacts in the database, for example, email + call + advisory meeting. Users who come to us through the web, social networks, or other channels will have a clear and homogeneous vision of who we are.
How To Apply Inbound Marketing In The Learning Sector
Knowledge And Awareness Phase
In the knowledge and awareness phase, the objective is to supply the user with all the information they need to know. Think that they are searching among a sea of possibilities: courses, schools, educational centers, online or classroom training, etc. So it would be ideal if your center were among the first results of that search.
For this, we recommend you work on SEO on-page to optimize the loading times of your website and blog. Google penalizes pages with very slow loading times. We encourage you to do a full technical audit to optimize all factors that influence loading speed.
Also, work your SEO and SEM strategy. They are two tools to attract traffic to our website from searches. A very common mistake is to define both strategies separately.
The same keyword research that we do for our company can be used for search engine payment campaigns and to know what keywords we bid for, as well as to develop the content strategy based on the actual searches that our buyer persona usually conducts. Both campaigns can complement each other because what you see that works, on the one hand, you can implement on the other, and the same with what does not work.
Consideration Phase
In the consideration phase, the user has done a previous investigation. You already know what the market offers and now you have to decide which center you are going to stay with. Where will you study or take a course?
So at this point, we have to be relevant to our potential consumers. We have to appear in their lives so that they don’t forget how much we have to offer them. And not only be present but offer them unique and relevant content to differentiate ourselves from the competition. For example, you can start by offering more specific content about your services. In this phase, we recommend you make a more personalized type of communication.
You can do social ads campaigns to constantly appear in the lives of your potential customers. Otherwise, if you want to continue with an organic strategy, these are the best recommendations:
- Work on your lead nurturing and email marketing.
- Create downloadable content, such as ebooks, reports, studies, etc. Especially that it is valuable content. Its ultimate goal will be for users to leave their data. So it has to be relevant to them!
- Think outside the box: Think of innovative formats, to differentiate yourself from your competition: podcasts, videos, webinars, etc.
- Create and optimize CTAs: Calls to action. Optimizing this item is one of the fastest and most effective ways to increase conversions. In addition to experimenting with the text, try different colors and locations for the button.
- Optimize your landing pages: This aspect is of vital importance in conversion rates. Do A / B tests to find the most effective variants.
- Optimize your forms: The recruitment firms must be able to collect enough information from the user to know if we are interested as a potential client, but always with the minimum number of fields possible. Make sure your leads fill out all the fields on the form. Do you hesitate to give any specific information? If so, could you ask for it in another way or with a later content?
Decision Phase
In this decision phase, the user opts for a teaching option. Do not stop working on your strategies to choose you. And, when you have done it, it’s time to build loyalty and take care of it! Prescribers can become decisive for conversions. You must generate a good brand memory and a good user experience.
In the learning world, word of mouth is the best recommender there is. Many parents or students go to people who have already had an experience with the educational center in which they are interested.
When the user is already registered, be sure to create content by questioning them and seeking their participation. You can do it through social networks, surveys, etc.
