Why You Should Provide Free Educational Offerings to Increase Applicants
One effective and valuable content marketing strategy includes free educational offerings for prospective students. This may include free workshops, lectures, or even courses. And while this type of strategy certainly requires more resources, money, and time than simply crafting a white paper, ebook, or series of blog articles, it can be well worth it.
Essentially, this is a way to “preview” your institution’s educational experience for prospective students, thereby solidifying your school in their minds and encouraging them to apply to your school when the time is right.
To help you get started with this type of content marketing, we’ve provided some key tips:
Develop educational offerings that resonate with your audience. Like any piece of content marketing, the key is to make sure that your educational offering is actually helpful and that it matters to your audience.
For example, if you are targeting prospective MBA students, then consider offering a free GMAT test prep course. If you’re trying to reach adult students who have been away from school for a few years, how about an academic skills workshop that covers study habits, academic essays, and note-taking? And for traditional undergraduate students, offering an SAT test prep course or a lecture (or a lecture series) on how to write a compelling personal statement essay for their applications could create significant interest.
The ideas are endless. But the point is to make sure you are truly serving your audience by creating a resource that helps them with a problem or obstacle that is in their way. The more you can position yourself as a helpful guide and teacher in their minds, the more likely they will be to consider your institution when they are ready to apply.
Ensure you can provide a high quality educational offerings. It’s important to make sure you can find an instructor (or instructors) and produce any supplemental material necessary for your educational offerings. It can be quite damaging to your institution's brand if you promise to offer a GMAT or SAT test prep course, for example, but don’t actually provide the necessary expertise and resources to benefit attendees.
This is why it might be best to start small. You can much more easily offer a one-hour workshop led by one of your admissions counselors than create a full-scale course. Having success on a smaller scale can also give you the confidence (and something to point to when needing to convince campus stakeholders) to develop a more robust series of educational offerings. Again, make sure you can offer high quality instruction that is helpful to your audience, no matter the scale. Otherwise you’re wasting both your time and your audience's time.
Determine a format that works best for you. The format of your educational offerings will depend on your programs, budget, and limitations. Offering a multi-week lecture series on how to navigate a business career at a local organization (for prospective MBA students) is very different than offering an hour-long online workshop detailing how to narrow down schools (for prospective undergraduate students).
However, keep in mind that the greater the investment on your part, the more likely you are to make a considerable mark in the minds of your audience members. If you have prospective students in a room once a week for a few weeks, you can have counselors available to talk about your programs, as well as marketing materials to answer their questions. This can happen to a greater extent in an in-person format than an online one.
An online workshop, though, allows you to have a larger class (physical locations will obviously have a limit to attendee capacity). It might be worth acquiring more, less-solid leads than fewer, more-solid ones because of your current budgetary and resource circumstances. Either way, it’s important to make sure the format of any free resource aligns with what your institution is currently able to provide.
Build a lead nurturing strategy. Offering both online and/or in-person lectures, workshops, courses, and other educational offerings can require a considerable amount of time and resources. That’s why it’s imperative to have a strategy in place for drawing attendees as well as nurturing them into applicants for your various programs.
Such a strategy means using email, landing page campaigns, social media and online advertising, and other marketing strategies to target prospective students. It can be quite effective to start with the leads you currently have for a given program and build an email campaign inviting them to sign up for your free educational offering. This is a great way to strengthen the quality of your current leads as well as move them along your buyer journey to becoming applicants.
Of course, once you have a group of attendees for a given event, encourage them to learn more about your programs. If you are holding an in-person class, consider having admissions counselors or currently enrolled students there to speak briefly about your school and to answer questions. Additionally, make sure you have plenty of print material on hand, encouraging them to get to know your school.
After the workshop, lecture, or course concludes, continue to reach out through email to those who attended, encouraging them to take the next step on their buyer journey. If you have succeeded in providing a high quality, helpful educational offering, participants will be more likely to consider applying to one of your programs.
By “previewing” your institution for prospective students and serving them well, they will develop a positive association with your school and its many programs—and that’s always a good thing when it comes to your marketing.
