As an educational institution, do you face strong competition from other schools/colleges? The face of education has seen a paradigm shift with digital transformation in the past few years. With more students and parents researching online about the school/college/institutes, it is critical for the educational institutes to create an optimum online presence. 

Right and good quality leads are vital for the growth and success of every business.Your institution may provide the best-in-class resources, professional facilities, hands-on training but prospective students can hardly find you unless you make an effort to reach them where they are. You need to showcase your facilities, expertise and growth opportunities in the most stand-out way possible. 

Understanding this, most of the schools and colleges are now turning towards digital marketing for education institutes to reach their audience at the right place and time.Today, if you are not using digital mediums for marketing your brand, you are certainly missing out on important tools that could help you with effective lead generation. Digital marketing can help to establish a brand authority and help you stand out in the competition. 

But before you plan for a lead generation campaign, these are the things you need to follow: 

• Know Your Goals: The first step towards a successful lead generation campaign for the education industry is to identify what you wish to achieve. Is it establishing your brand presence? Growing the numbers of followers on social media? Increase the number of online applications? Or being ranked as the #1 school or college on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) of Google. A well-planned online marketing strategy will help you achieve all of this, thus increasing your chances of generating leads. 

• Build Personas: After you have identified your goals, the next step is to develop personas or avatars to find your ideal audience. For this, you can do customer segmentation based on details like demographics, age, family background, income levels, geographical locations, interests and preferences etc. Profiling will help you to understand your target audience better. 

• Evaluate Competitors: In the education sector, multiple schools, colleges offer similar syllabus patterns and facilities leading to a stiff competition amongst each other. Therefore competitor research is extremely essential for generating leads. Find what are the online marketing strategies they are following and analyze their strengths and weaknesses so that you can work upon it accordingly for your brand. 

• Conduct Webinars: Webinars are the online seminar/presentations that are a great way to reach and connect with prospective students digitally. It is a platform which allows you to reach thousands of people at the same time in a cost-effective way and share helpful information about your offerings. This might catch the interests of several attendees who can soon become your leads. 

• Leverage Social Media: Social media has become an essential part for every education institution. Many of them might have their profiles on social channels but do not optimize it. Since a huge number of students are active on social media, it is imperative for you to maintain your social channels on a regular basis. 

Lead generation for your school and college takes a lot of patience and effort. It is necessary to reach the prospective students early when they are in the research process. The 4P Solutions is a renowned name when it comes to offering tactical and comprehensive digital marketing for the education domain. We are the experts you can trust for brand building, lead generation and driving the best return on investment (ROI) for your school, college or educational institution. 
Reach out to us at mktg@the4psolutions.com to know more about our specialized online marketing services for the education sector.