Importance of Relevant Landing Pages

What is the purpose of your graduate school website?

Do you (admissions/marketing) use it simply for its face presence on the internet?  Is it purely informational content?  Do you use it as a lead generation source?

Regardless of the answer, your graduate school website should still exist to serve the visitor and school to its fullest potential.

All too often, a visitor will click on a paid keyword link for “This University psychology graduate programs” and land on the school’s general homepage.  Or, a visitor will follow an admissions link on a school directory and end up (once again) at the homepage.

From a marketing perspective, the idea is to deliver the most relevant information to the prospective student as early in the search process as possible.  If a prospective student is just browsing psychology programs through search engine results, your school is probably missing out on a lot of potential leads by not delivering the correct content to them at the start of their website visit.  A targeted landing page is also a potential aid in decreasing FAQ call volume about specific programs.

Figure out the purpose of your website.  Direct your paid traffic to the most relevant and targeted pages possible.  If they search by school name > direct them to the homepage.  If they are looking for a specific program > lead them to the program’s page.  If you’re advertising a specific graduate subject on a directory > link to the subject curriculum or applicable page.

You may be able to look at your website stats and see that people are staying on your site for seemingly long periods of time and mistake that for engagement.  Are they on the right pages for the right amount of time?  Do they need to hunt and click through 4 or 5 pages before finding the content they originally intended to consume?

Using Twitter to Market Your Graduate Program?

Twitter is a great social networking tool that allows users to “tweet” or create posts and follow the activities of others.

Could Twitter also be used as a promotional tool? At first, it seemed like every blogger and entrepreneur was creating posts and linking back to his/her site(s) with the hopes of creating a new source of traffic and link juice.

The (quiet) debate continues over the actual SEO value of Twitter. It’s hard to actually get indexed, although some users have managed to succeed in this area. There is also an apparent unspoken set of outrageous conditions that must be satisfied before the links will actually turn into search engine power-ups.

However, the viral aspect still remains. Twitter can be a very good source to simply gain name recognition without exhausting a marketing budget. Beyond that, it can be a great outlet to turn an announcement into a truly “viral” marketing piece.

Twitter can be a good outlet for graduate programs to announce upcoming events, let followers know about any current advancements in the department, or simply follow their designated personas in their daily online lives. It can also be used in coordination with email marketing as a way to promote website content that struggles in search engine rankings.

Marketer’s Guide to Tracking Leads Online (Simple Version)

Many graduate program sites now serve more of a business purpose than basic school and contact information.  The “adapters” in the grad school realm are now attempting to lead site visitors down a lead generation path.  As the recruiting field becomes more competitive, graduate program Marketing Departments are reallocating  their  spending  and putting more emphasis  on internet marketing activities.

To the novice, this practice can be extremely overwhelming.  How much should you bid on certain keywords?  Is it better to put more money into ads on a niche site than spend it all on search engines?  Is a low CPC always the best option?

These answers can all be obtained for free (almost).  Currently, Google Analytics is offered as a free tool to help marketers answer these (and other) common online marketing questions.  Microsoft has a similar product in beta, and Yahoo! recently purchased IndexTools, which will both serve similar purposes.

The set-up is simple: 1. Sign Up for an account 2. Enter your website(s) 3. Paste the provided JavaScript code onto the web pages you wish to track.  After completion of these three steps, you will be able to view out-of-box reports that will help you understand who your visitors are and where they are coming from.

Beyond the basic implementation, graduate program marketers can also set up goals in the Admin console.  By using goals, a marketer can assign a dollar amount to a “lead” and track it back to the referring source.  This practice allows for a better understanding of what advertising outlets are worth the cost.  You may be paying $0.50 per click on a search engine which gives you 5,000 visitors/month, but notice that only 5 of those 5,000 visitors filled out a lead form or submitted a contact request.  You may also notice that the site which resulted in  $15 per click converted to 150 leads during the same time frame.

In the epic, and seemingly endless, battle for prospective graduate students, marketing departments must be prepared and armed with knowledge of how to best obtain enrollments.