Today’s Internet marketing strategies should include diverse features, such as content, a social media presence and an interactive website. It’s also important to make sure your Web-based platforms are mobile friendly, especially as the number of potential students who surf the Web for career colleges on a phone or tablet increases.
It is also important for your Internet marketing strategy to have a personalized approach. Understanding one’s audience is one of the first steps to developing a marketing plan and its one of the reasons why Paradigm Digital’s approach is so successful. Through exhaustive research and analysis, we develop an Internet marketing plan for your career college that is unique to your audience.
“Personalization is the process of targeting content to individuals based on one or more of the following: who they are; where they are; when, why, and how they access content; and what device they use to access it, according to Scott P. Abel of The Content Wrangler,” wrote Ann Gynn in an article for the Content Marketing Institute. Gynn adds that nearly 95 percent of all business to business organizations make some attempt to segment their content based on their audience, according to CMI’s 2014 B2B Content Marketing research report.
In her article, which has been cited before on this webstie, Gynn offered some tips on personalized marketing. One suggestion was to gathering data on prospective clients.
“Content marketers must have access to information about individuals, not persona groups,” Gynn writes. “It requires content and technology.”
The second suggestion was to continue to track customer, or in your case potential student, interests.
“Use your marketing automation tool to monitor what your audience is interested in and personalize further communication based on this,” Gynn writes.
Paradigm Digital takes time to understand your desired audience and tailors its marketing strategy around creating content that targets prospective students for your career college. It’s important to not only create a specialized Internet marketing plan, but continue to monitor it in such a way that necessary changes can be quickly made in order to make your marketing plan more effective.
Another strategy to employ could be community marketing. Used properly, social media is accelerating a trend in which buyers can increasingly approximate the experience of buying in their local, physical communities. For instance, when you contemplate a major purchase, such as a new roof, a flat screen TV, or a good surgeon, you’re not likely to go looking for a salesperson to talk to, or to read through a bunch of corporate website content. Instead, you’ll probably ask neighbors or friends — your peer network — what or whom they’re using.
Another strategy is to find your school’s customer influencers. Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who’ve gained following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about. This requires a new concept of customer value that goes way beyond customer lifetime value (CLV), which is based only on purchases. There are many other measures of a customer’s potential value, beyond the money they pay you.
Achieving a personalized strategy to marketing can be challenging, which is why many career colleges and trade schools and looked to Paradigm Digital to help develop an effective plan. A successful Internet marketing plan means not only getting your message in front of prospective students, but engaging them in such a way that they seek out additional information.
Personalization involves more than just an understanding of stats and trends. It requires an understanding of what your specific goals are and how to connect trends with your goals. At Paradigm Digital we work to create an Internet marketing plan that is unique to your school and helps promote your message to the exact demographics you are trying to reach.