Here’s our top 5 tips on how to attract new students after a year in lockdown.
1. Recreate open events virtually
Create an online portal, microsite or landing page on your website that offers all of the key information students would usually pick up at one of your open events. Make it personal and easy to find what’s important to them. Downloadable resource areas, a personalised online prospectus builder, virtual tours of the facilities, FAQs and options to chat with tutors online are all great ways of engaging with and attracting students digitally.
2. Take a personal approach
It’s still important for prospective students to be able to ask questions to tutors and past students alike. Why not facilitate this online by offering live Q&A sessions via your social channels? Allow different subject area tutors and students to take centre stage so they can provide genuine insight into what it’s like to study with you. Save those sessions as stories or record them for use on your website too!
3. Repurpose your video
Over the past year it may have been a challenge to capture new video content, so why not revisit past footage and repurpose it to show off your facilities? Incorporate some newly styled graphics, voiceover or music to put a fresh spin on your existing content. The same footage can be cut differently for your website and social channels to maximise its output.
4. Your students can help
As a result of the restrictions over the last 12 months, home filmed content and video calls have become a part of our new normal. Whilst the zoom quizzes might have worn off, it’s still provided huge potential for less ‘professional’ and more personal content to play a vital role. Ask your students to produce content for you; this could be short videos on their experience, their work, their future career, blogs or maybe they even have some great imagery of their own you could use.
5. Promote your new approach
Once you have all of the info up online, you’ll need to promote it. You probably do this digitally even when holding traditional events and promoting enrolments, but some paid advertising will help with this and ensuring your pages are ranking well organically.
The idea is simple really; get as much online as you can. Reuse and reinvent content you may already have and get your people engaging with your prospective students on the channels they use.
