Recruit Students Using Your Website
Students planning for higher education often find themselves at a confusing crossroads. With so many potential paths ahead – each with their own benefits and drawbacks – making the right choice for their future can feel overwhelming. Should they attend a four-year institution or a two-year one? Should they choose to study their true passion or a “safer” alternative? Or maybe they’re contemplating delaying college plans altogether in favor of entering a robust job market and earning a paycheck immediately.
With so much weighing on their minds, students need to feel motivated to commit to a single option – and that happens when they feel a strong emotional connection. As a university recruiter, you’re challenged to build that connection with every student who encounters your school through its marketing resources. You have a wealth of programs, knowledge and resources that prepare students for future success, and no other school provides the unique combination that yours offers. The key is convincing students of its value and showing them that your environment is the right one for them – a place where they can picture themselves growing and maturing for the next several years.
Your website is your best opportunity to communicate this message, and to generate the emotional excitement that results in completed applications and accepted admissions offers.
As the main marketing touchpoint between your institution and the public, it’s often the first resource prospective students encounter when researching their options. It may be your only chance to make the best first impression, so it’s wise to audit your current site for impact. Is your homepage as stunning and engaging as it could be? Does it include a mix of compelling media like looping background video, clickable explanatory videos and crisp photo galleries? Do your text paragraphs stand out and use enough white space to be scan-friendly and succinctly powerful pitches?
If you can’t confidently answer yes to any of those questions – or if your traffic analytics and application numbers have been stalling – that’s a good indicator that you’re due for website refresh (if not a total overhaul.) But before you start biting your nails at the thought of all the time and resources required, rest assured it’s much simpler to accomplish than you might imagine. Even if your marketing team is just a few individuals strong – or more remarkably, if you’re the only one handling operations – you can still revitalize your main university site with minimal time, effort and money.
Squarespace Enterprise gives you the power to re-launch your site without development or coding knowledge, and its top-notch templates let you add content hassle-free. Designs are fresh, eye-catching and multimedia-friendly, so you can put your school’s best foot forward to the world. Importing existing content is possible from select platforms, helping to make your site switch smooth and seamless. The site editor empowers you to be nimble with changes – you can efficiently tweak content and add or remove pages so your site always appears up-to-date for return visitors. And as an administrator, you have complete control over branding – set the tone with proper fonts, color palettes and site styles to make sure everything stays true to your university’s image.
Then help your collaborators do the same by setting up Enterprise templates to guide them in site building, which provide a pre-approved layout framework. Think of how impactful and educational it would be to have student partners create on-brand landing pages for their extracurricular groups on campus! You can manage their contributions (along with those of any other helpers) from the Enterprise dashboard – your one-stop approval control center for any site pages related to your university.
Improving your university site is nothing you can’t accomplish on your own – and the potential ROI it can bring makes it well worth the endeavor. If just one student stumbles across your renovated site and decides to apply and enroll, the project will likely have paid for itself – and then some.