You’ve invested in building academic program pages on your website. You’ve spent money on paid advertising campaigns. Your analytics reports show traffic to your program pages, but students aren’t applying to your programs.
What happened?
Chances are, you have either:
All too often, academic programs commit all three of these sins. They’re overly verbose, don’t speak to real-world value, and don’t include the information students need to feel confident making a commitment.
Here are the next-level tactics that you can use to transform your website into a recruiting machine:
Many higher education institutions turn to professors or administrators to fill the pages of their program sites. After all, who knows the programs better than those who teach them? That makes sense on the surface, but it presents a very common challenge.
While often great writers, professors and administrators are almost never trained marketers. Your website needs to be a carefully-crafted tool, designed to facilitate prospects’ decision to apply to your program. That means your pages need to be:
Too often we don’t think of academic program pages as marketing tools, but that’s what they are. Check out a marketing website you admire and note the way the content is presented. The text is concise and compelling, right? The paragraphs are short or broken into easily readable bullet points. That’s what your program pages need to look like.
Take a look at your academic program pages with fresh eyes. Are they scannable? Exciting? Do they sell your programs?
Pretend you are a prospective student as you read your pages. Now make a list of the selling points of your program. Are those points crystal clear? Are they appealingly presented? Are the calls to action obvious? Do they clearly and concisely present the information prospects need to start an application?
Recruiting students today is a science wrapped in art. It is not for the faint of heart or those who do not understand the nuanced needs of prospects. Would you pick up a hammer to drive a screw? Of course not. So choose the right professional—a marketing professional—to write your copy.
Today’s students seek assurance of a tangible return on their investment before they will assume the cost of a higher education program. And they have good reason; a recent study (EducationData.org. "Student Loan Debt Statistics, 2024) tells us that the typical college graduate from a four-year program carries a student loan debt load of $32,637.
Many higher education institutions have operated in a high-demand environment for decades. Career value, unfortunately, was not considered important in the past and many popular degrees performed poorly in the real-world job market. But the world has shifted, and tying programs to careers really matters today. If the program graduate either can’t get a job or can’t find employment equivalent to their degree level, any amount of student loan debt is unacceptable.
It’s not surprising that prospective students are looking for assurance that your program delivers results.
Prompted by the pandemic and employment crisis, many higher education institutions are in the process of evaluating their programs to ensure they prepare students for actual employment. Savvy students are demanding evidence that academic programs will prepare them for the types of employment they consider satisfactory. They want to know:
Institutions are understandably reluctant to make promises about post-graduation employment. However, concrete data on jobs and careers is now available from third parties, and introducing prospective students to this data without making promises is both safe and exactly what students need to make a decision.
Earlier we mentioned that program pages often provide far too much information while leaving out the very information prospective students need to feel comfortable making a commitment.
Remember: a degree program is a hefty investment of both time and money. Students need to get all their questions answered if they’re going to commit. If your program does not provide the information necessary to promote a level of confidence, and a competing program does, you’re going to lose that student.
Your program pages should answer the following questions:
The answers to these questions should be easily accessible within a click or two and without leaving the program page section of the site.
Here’s the good news: if you’re getting traffic to your website, you’ve already got one piece of the puzzle in place. Congratulations! Now, you just need to revise your program pages to ensure they are scannable, relevant, comprehensive, and complete with appropriate calls-to-action.
Of course, if your website is not effective and you don’t have a year or more and $100,000+ to develop a new website that integrates these principles and comprehensive career data, read on.
If you need assistance with any of these steps, we’re happy to provide the following:
