Why Your Website is Now More Important Than Ever
Are you missing face-to-face engagement with prospective students at career fairs and campus visits? We are, too. And so are they.
Since those in-person events are off the table during the current crisis, your website is even more front-and-center in your marketing efforts.
While it’s important that your website provides news updates and helpful information related to COVID-19, it’s also critical that you're developing marketing-focused strategies online to make your school compelling. And you have the added challenge of creating a welcoming online environment in the absence of live experience.
How can you convey the beauty of your coastal campus exclusively on your website now that you can’t invite students to see it for themselves? How can you express the faith-based and communal feel of your school when they can’t be there in person?
Here are some strategies for bulking up the effectiveness of your website that now—more than ever—is critical to your school’s engagement and recruitment success.
Engage and Entertain—Don’t Simply Educate
It’s not enough for your university’s website to merely tell prospective students about your school’s programs and opportunities. This was true pre-COVID-19, and this principle is even more important now.
This isn’t to say that your website shouldn’t be providing valuable information related to academic programs, applying, financial aid, and more. Rather, to keep students coming back, you’ll need to provide engaging media—content that is savvy in design and entertaining. And of course it should strengthen your brand.
Santa Clara University is a great example of what this might look like. Not only does the school provide informative and now-necessary virtual visit videos (a must in our COVID-19 world), but they also feature a podcast. The podcast is extremely well-produced, professional, and engaging. It presents the perspectives and experiences of students, faculty, and staff, allowing students to listen to episodes easily—while they’re exercising, driving, cooking, etc. This keep Santa Clara University top-of-mind.
Calvin University is another good example, especially with their content-focused homepage. On this page the school features multiple videos in an expertly designed slide format. The videos “preview” by playing as soon as visitors arrive on the site, encouraging engagement. Visitors cycle through all featured videos covering different aspects of the campus experience.
But that's not all. Further down the page, there are featured showcases of student work, as well as an integrated social media module. From start to finish, Calvin delivers compelling and entertaining content to engage visitors.
Wheaton College is also producing content that entertains and engages—and in ways specifically related to COVID-19. The school features humorous class "trailer" videos in light of the required transition to fully online course instruction. This light-hearted “making the best” of a challenging and disappointing situation is a nice break from the more serious and direct “COVID-19 Alert” pages that are now all over the place on higher education websites.
Re-Consider Website Call-to-Actions to Drive Engagement
It’s important that your website is now taking into account how you present these alternate call-to-actions (CTAs). Likely, your website’s CTA strategy has been built around fostering in-person visits or attending events. It’s now necessary to clearly demarcate how students can virtually engage with your school to push them further along the sales funnel.
Distance might be the new normal for the foreseeable future, so it’s not enough to add a few lines of copy here or there to highlight your virtual tour or online calls with counselors. You need to reconsider the end result of the user experience.
Adding a paragraph of text to your visit page is a step. But it’s not going to be as visually engaging and compelling as a robust CTA strategy driving students to engage. Biola University, for example, has created an entire landing page called "Connect With Us Virtually." This page clearly guides students to connect virtually with the school in all sorts of ways with easy-to-follow steps.
Abilene Christian University also has a clean landing page to help students schedule phone appointments with counselors. This page may not be the result of COVID-19, but either way, it demonstrates clear CTAs for students to engage the university in ways aligned with our current situation. In other words, don’t just “throw paint” on your website’s CTA strategy to engage students. Rather, think through a new and user-friendly approach.
Capture and Convey Your Authentic Spirit
If you’re a faith-based school, it’s important that you’re able to demonstrate what makes you different from other schools, especially in light of the challenges we’re all going through. This means doing more than talking about your commitment to service and the importance of fellowship. It means using your website to truly demonstrate how your school is unique and committed to a faith-based and service-oriented worldview.
Turning back to Wheaton, they’ve devoted an entire area of their website titled "COVID19: Wheaton Responds" to demonstrate their faith commitment. This page does not offer a mere list of COVID-19 updates (that's still important, of course), but much more. The page features:
Articles written by students reflecting on what it’s been like to graduate during the pandemic
A Zoom-performed song by the Wheaton College Women's Chorale Virtual Choir, to instill hope and beauty
Videos of faculty and staff encouraging their community for Easter
A page like this makes it easy to see how Wheaton is different: it's a place committed to creating community and serving others, especially during a challenging time like today.
Point Loma Nazarene University, as another example, continues to offer virtual chapel services to their students, faculty, staff, and wider community on multiple days a week. While it’s not the same as attending in person, the commitment shows that the school values and believes in the power of communal prayer and worship—even when done virtually. In other words, it’s a tangible way to show that the school is committed to offering spiritual support and comfort during a time like this.
A Chance for Your School to Shine
This challenging time is an opportunity to demonstrate online what exactly makes your institution different—a place where students can feel loved and welcome if they decide to attend. And that, in light of the world today, is no small feat.
