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Website calendars pose one of the great challenges of higher education content management — there are a million options, every school needs one, but each school’s needs vary slightly, and nobody wants to own it. Who knows, if your college or university is like many others, a wide array of calendar tools may already be in place across your institution.

With over 85% of prospective students ranking the website as the top research tool during a school search, a critical part of any website project is connecting prospects with admissions counselors — by means of request information forms, campus visit forms, and admission microsites.

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.

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.