What's new, what's next, what's best, and how it all fits in to a successful digital marketing strategy… Get inside our head with these helpful resources—from blog posts to best practices guides—written by our team of experts.
No matter how hard you try, at some point your website users are going to attempt to access pages on your site that no longer exist — or never existed in the first place. Maybe they bookmarked a page you’ve since removed or simply made a typo when entering a URL directly. Regardless of how the mistake was made, your site now has to decide what to do with this lost user – and get them to a relevant spot on your website..
Enter the humble 404 page.
If you’ve developed a branding platform, whether it was done internally or with a vendor partner, congratulations. You’re ahead of the game by virtue of having defined the DNA of your institutional identity, distinguishing it from peers and competitors alike.
So…now what? As it concerns digital marketing and web content strategy in particular, a branding platform is a tremendous step toward meaningful differentiation, but it does not enable well-intentioned communicators to get rolling right out of the box.
First-generation college students are a critical demographic in the U.S. higher education landscape, comprising 34% of undergraduates in the 2011-12 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Stakeholders are the people or groups that have a vested interest in the success (or failure) of a project. Typically, a higher education website project is led by the marketing group. With increasing pressure on enrollment, most college or university website redesign projects are focused on reaching prospective students, making the key stakeholders for a website project the admissions groups — undergraduate, graduate, online, and continuing education.
Other stakeholders for higher education website projects typically include:
At the start of each year, we review website analytics data from a variety of colleges and universities to paint a broad picture of higher education website traffic trends. The data we reviewed spans from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018 and includes graduate programs, law schools, liberal arts colleges, universities, and adult programs. Whenever possible, we exclude internal traffic data to ensure the insights accurately convey the behaviors of prospective students, alumni, parents, and any other external visitors.
I’ve worked with higher ed for a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of wonderful things. But few things are more wonderful than a thoughtfully conceived strategic plan.
Sound dull? Hear me out.
An institution’s strategic plan is a roadmap to fulfill its ambition. Ideally, a strategic plan defines a vision for the future of the institution, then lays out highly specific, realistic, and measurable goals aligned to that vision — and a timeframe in which to achieve them.
Now if that’s not the definition of beauty, I don’t know what is.
As we dive into a new year, we recognize that higher ed marketers face huge challenges as well as huge opportunities to expand the reach of their brands and drive enrollment. But the wisest marketers know how to prioritize, influence, and advocate for marketing, based on where they see the opportunity to create the most value for their universities.
As we plan for 2019, here are the digital marketing priorities for leaders in higher education digital marketing and CMOs this year.
For the last four years, we’ve been developing and implementing website personalization campaigns for colleges and universities. The impact of these campaigns is two-fold — increased audience engagement and increased inquiries, applications, and deposits:
The marketing technology — or martech — stack refers to the integrated collection of software tools that digital marketers employ to deliver and optimize a comprehensive customer digital experience. The marketing technology stack typically spans across the website, email marketing, personalization, social media, and analytics.
As competition for students increases, universities and colleges need to consider implementing a higher education marketing technology stack to provide a full view of the prospective student journey and to optimize prospective student outreach.
When you think about digital brand storytelling at a college or university, you may initially think about stories of outstanding individual achievement: faculty conducting groundbreaking research, students having enriching learning experiences, or alumni making a meaningful impact on the world.
But beyond the incredible individuals who comprise your incredible institution, there is a different story lurking — in the aggregate.
Whatever you’re searching for in a conference, you can find it at HighEdWeb. Opportunities to connect with old friends, lively after-hours events (#karaokeplane), and innumerable sessions that cover every aspect of higher education digital marketing. But throughout the conference, HEWeb organizers remind attendees to keep their eye out for the golden nugget — a highly coveted, inspiring piece of information that you can take home.
In Gold Rush California, there were more than one.
Due to its flexibility, scalability, and ease of implementation, Drupal has long been the preferred CMS platform for higher education.
With personalization becoming an increasingly desirable feature in the marketing toolkit, more and more institutions are looking for ways to incorporate it into their existing Drupal sites – or to put it front and center for new Drupal projects.
Diverse. Connected. Early-adopters. Image-driven. Fiscally conservative.
Numerous lists across the internet simplify prospective Gen Z undergraduates into pithy attributes. Identifying these qualities might be helpful when thinking about how to shape messages for this audience, but they do little to help understand what Gen Z wants and expects from their online interactions.
We need to dig beyond the monikers to understand their desires.
Planning a website redesign can be daunting. There’s a lot to consider.
The more clear-eyed you can be heading into the redesign effort, the more focused it will be and the more likely you will be to achieve success. One of the best ways to gain this clarity is by prioritizing content strategy ahead of the redesign itself.
While content strategy should be a core thread running through any website redesign project, there’s a lot of content work you can do well before a redesign gets underway to more fully inform what that effort should look like.
Over the past 8 years, OHO Interactive has engaged with more than 32,455 higher education survey participants, and had the opportunity to interact with nearly 1,000 prospective students through individual interviews and focus groups.
When I talk to higher ed marketing communications professionals about how to create a content strategy, it sometimes seems like we’re talking about Excalibur — some exalted, unattainable relic that, if retrieved, could at last bring peace to the kingdom.
Developing and implementing a content strategy can feel overwhelming to many for a wide range of reasons, be they related to budget, time, staffing, executive buy-in, campus politics, or a perceived lack of knowledge.
“Where do I start?” I’ve heard people ask more than once.
Today, organic search is the no. 1 driver of website traffic, particularly in higher education (and healthcare.) Google dominates all search engines, and search is now a critical element of your visitors’ journeys.
Every organization must invest in ways to improve in their organic search health to not only stay competitive, but to ensure that their audiences can access the web content most relevant to them and when they need it most.
At this very moment, thousands of Webmasters around the world are microwaving sad, lonely Hot-Pockets for lunch.
They deserve better.
This year, you could win a chance to celebrate International Take Your Webmaster to Lunch Day in style with a $100 Visa Gift Card courtesy of OHO Interactive.
Don’t have a Webmaster? You can use your prize to treat your whole team to lunch, or perhaps even to post a LinkedIn ad to hire a Webmaster to celebrate with in 2019.
Google recently announced a new feature that will significantly impact the user journeys of your website visitors. And with 49% of higher education website traffic coming from organic search this new feature may disrupt what we know to be our prospective student journeys.
We surveyed marketing and communications professionals at 130 different higher education institutions to better understand the current state of higher education web teams. How are they structured? What skillsets are they adding? Are team sizes growing or shrinking?
We've analyzed the data to determine how higher education web teams are evolving, and what steps you can take to ensure your team is performing to its full potential. By filling out the form below, you'll receive immediate access to a wealth of information including: