Best Education Marketing Strategies In 2024

In 2023, education has taken on new forms. The challenges of the early part of the decade have now been overcome and left a changed educational landscape. As the world now faces new challenges, including high fuel costs and inflation, options for distance learning are still being chosen by many. Educators have continued to use apps to supplement in-classroom learning as well. Education marketing will continue to evolve to meet the moment and increase the reach of apps to the students, teachers, and families looking for digital learning solutions.

In this article, we explain the top education marketing strategies that professionals in the education sector need to know about in 2024, providing several specific examples to consider when planning marketing activities next year.

Why Does the Education Sector Need Education Marketing?

The education sector has been experiencing a massive boom thanks to the numerous opportunities created by the internet and modern technologies in general. According to Orbis research, the global e-learning market worldwide is set to reach $458 billion in value by 2026, driven largely by the escalation in the number of internet users and growing access to broadband internet and mobile phones with online capabilities.

Traditional educational institutions, as well as private developers, have so far released over 567,000 educational apps, many of which are available on the App Store and Google Play. Besides education apps, the e-learning market is also saturated with online courses, videos, eBooks, and websites, making it very difficult for new players to get noticed.

Education marketing’s purpose is to implement various marketing strategies to promote valuable educational content. And it is often the only way for new educational content to reach students and gain traction. In fact, doctorate courses in education underscore the importance of marketing in the industry to drive revenues and growth. Education industry leaders must leverage education marketing to survive in the cut-throat competition in the field as well.

Education marketing shouldn’t be confused with education-based marketing, a specific marketing strategy that involves the education of prospects, rather than pitching them, to establish trust. On the other hand, education marketing encompasses all marketing activities in the education sector, including the following:

• School marketing: There was a time when schools didn’t need marketing because they relied solely on their reputation and word of mouth. That time is forever gone because millennial parents are more tech-savvy and use the internet to support their decision making. Schools that don’t actively market themselves are destined to be ignored by many millennial parents who would otherwise be greatly interested in what they have to offer.
• Marketing for higher education: Education marketing and higher education are a match made in heaven. Colleges and universities benefit from marketing for higher education because it helps them elevate their brand and drives enrollment. Students benefit from it because higher education marketing helps them make the right choice when choosing their education path.
• Digital marketing for the education sector: In today’s digital world, traditional marketing strategies are no longer suitable for targeting younger demographics. Educational institutions must embrace digital channels if they want to convey their message to a large audience in a cost-effective manner. Such channels include email, web content, social media, paid search, and others. Harnessing these and other marketing channels is not easy, but the potential to greatly increase revenue and decrease cost per lead is huge, making digital marketing an important cornerstone of every education marketing strategy.
• Social media marketing for educational institutions: Parents and students alike spend a lot of time on social media sites, and educational institutions should establish a presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage with them and learn more about their wants and expectations. Content published on social media should be bite-sized, captivating, and in line with the image the institution is trying to build.
• The promotion of educational apps: The current educational app market is so competitive that it’s no longer enough just to have a great product—one must also have a great educational marketing strategy that is executed to perfection to get ahead of the competition.

While leading providers of marketing services to educational institutions, such as ComboApp, often use education-based marketing when promoting education services and products, the fact remains that it is just one of many effective education marketing strategies that can be used.

12 Best Education Marketing Strategies in 2024

The best education marketing strategies—regardless of whether they’re used in marketing for schools or in marketing for educational apps—take advantage of the tremendous opportunities created by the internet.

That’s not to say that traditional advertising strategies, such as billboards, flyers and brochures, print ads, and face to face meetings, have no place in the digital era, but their return on investment makes them far less attractive than modern digital marketing strategies.

Let’s take a look at these twelve strategies for marketing education.

1. Use Social Media Platforms to Connect with Your Audience

There are now approximately 4.89 billion social media users worldwide, which equates to about 42 percent of the population. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit are the most popular among millennials, followed by Gen Z, Gen X, and baby boomers.

Since their early days, social media platforms have matured in every way imaginable, and they now provide a myriad of different ways how they can be used in higher education marketing. Regardless of which social media platform you decide to target, your goal should always be the same: establish meaningful connections with your target audience by providing engaging content.

It’s helpful to create a social media marketing (SMM) persona to represent your target audience. The marketing persona should include information such as age, gender, education, goals, challenges, and primary values. When deciding what content to create, always keep your social media persona in mind but don’t be afraid to experiment.

As you build your social media following, you gradually reach a position where a single piece of content can instantly reach millions even if your actual follower count is much lower. Unlike other schools marketing methods, SMM lets you see exactly who’s sharing your content, providing you with useful information that you can use to tweak your promotional efforts.

2. Include Digital Advertising in Your Marketing Budget

Digital advertising can be a very effective way of marketing education services, which is part of the reason why worldwide digital advertising spending is predicted to reach over $700 billion by 2025. Projections show that advertisers in the United States will spend 68.8 percent of their advertising budgets on digital ads by 2025.

The biggest advantage digital advertising offers over traditional advertising is precise targeting based on demographics, intent, engagement patterns, and other things. For example, a higher education marketing agency that’s marketing for schools can target only graduate students who live in a certain area and have in the past shown an interest in a certain product or service. Such targeting can have an incredibly positive effect on the click-through rate of advertising campaigns as well as all other important metrics.

Some of the most commonly used digital advertising channels in 2024 include search engine advertising, social media advertising, display or banner ads, and video ads. Each of these channels has its pros and cons, which is why advertising experts generally recommend using a mix of all channels.

Regardless of how much of your marketing budget you dedicate to digital advertising, make sure to gather as much data as possible so you can monitor its effectiveness and make educated decisions to improve it.

3. Create a Mobile-Friendly Website with an Optimized Landing Page

It has been several years since the number of mobile internet users has exceeded the number of people who access the internet from desktop computers and laptops. In 2027, the number of smartphone users worldwide is projected to reach 7.7 billion, which means that nobody who wants to succeed in education marketing can afford to not have a mobile-friendly website with an optimized landing page.

For a website to be mobile-friendly, it must look and feel great on mobile devices, which means that all links and navigation elements must be easily clickable, the site itself must be responsive, and page loading times shouldn’t exceed three seconds (that’s how quickly a half of the online population expects a website to load).

In 2024, it’s also worth considering using AMP, which is a web component framework and a website publishing technology developed by Google that provides a straightforward way to create web pages that are fast, smooth-loading, and prioritize user-experience above everything else.

If nothing else, make sure your website passes Google Lighthouse’s mobile friendly test the purpose of which is to determine how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device.

To use it, enter the URL of your website and wait for the tool to finish testing. Google Lighthouse’s test will tell you whether your website is or isn’t mobile-friendly, and it will also provide you a detailed overview of all the page loading issues it has encountered so you can fix them.

The next problem we face in this discussion is how to create educational websites that prioritize user-experience. This will depend on the needs of your users and the educational product you offer. Some parts are universal though, and that means being easy to navigate and having engaging content. You want people to want to use your website, and these are two of the biggest factors that make people navigate away and never return.

This is especially true when you create a website for education institutions. Make everything easy to access and without a user needing to drill down through several levels of menus to find what they are looking for. You also want to keep a steady flow of content that will benefit your users and keep them visiting to see what is new.

4. Encourage Students to Leave Online Reviews

It’s a well-known fact at this point that 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business or paying for a service. That’s why online reviews should be an integral part of all higher education marketing strategies.

The best way how to encourage students to leave online reviews is to make the review process as easy as possible. Better yet: make it fun! Instead of forcing students to fill miles long forms, you can implement a star-based rating and make verbal feedback completely optional.

When you receive an online review, make sure to respond to it as quickly as possible. Don’t ignore negative reviews but, at the same time, avoid being dismissive. You should see every negative review you receive as an opportunity to show potential customers how you deal with worst-case situations.

If you find that you aren’t getting as many reviews as you’d like, you can always incentivize the review process by offering discounts, gift cards, bonus points, and other incentives. Often, it’s enough to politely solicit reviews in emails or some other one-to-one communication channel.

5. Create Engaging Video Content

An increasing number of marketers say that video content gives them a great return on investment, and it’s easy to see why. After all, audiences spend 19 hours a week watching online videos, according to HubSpot. That’s a lot of potential viewers that can be targeted by creating engaging video content and publishing it online.

Because educational content is among the most popular types of video content, education marketing professionals seldom have to look far for content ideas. They can simply transform existing products or services into entertaining videos and publish them on leading video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube.

Video content can have many different forms, including demo videos, brand or event videos, expert interviews, educational or how-to tutorials, explainer videos, animated content, case study and customer testimonial videos, live videos, virtual reality videos, and others.

You should let your audience tell you which video content to produce, and that’s possible only if you keep an eye on important metrics like watch time, average view duration, average completion rate, audience retention, re-watches, click-through-rate, engagement, subscriber growth, peak live viewers, and others.

6. Use An Education Marketing Agency

Whether you are marketing an institution or an education app, it is best to put your efforts in the hands of those who are experts in their field. A company that specializes in educational services marketing such as ComboApp will help to ensure that your digital marketing for education industry efforts are successful.

Educational marketing services offered by a full-service marketing agency will encompass everything from website and app design, to helping with the development of a strategy of content marketing for education apps. Using educational marketing services such as ComboApp will save your company time and manpower that can be put towards being educators and developing education content.

7. Promote Safety

While the pandemic of 2020 is behind us as far as most are concerned. On top of that, there are other safety concerns that have parents considering alternatives to in-person learning or ways to limit time on campus. When developing an education marketing strategy for this era, this presents both new challenges and opportunities. The challenges will come from an increase in the amount of competitors moving into online educational spaces, which will be balanced out by more parents and students seeking options for learning at home.

Leaning into promoting the safety and convenience of learning from home is going to be a winning strategy for educational marketing. Let your audience know the benefits of using your service as part of their education plan, and how it contributes to the safety of students or families. Distance learning websites and apps are well positioned to take advantage and rise to the moment, but even traditional educational institutions can lean in by promoting their home based options when marketing education offerings in 2024.

The more you focus on developing great distance learning tools for students, the greater the opportunity to develop marketing strategies for schools that make the best of this situation. If you do not already have any, develop educational apps in order to take advantage of the added convenience of being able to access your content and courses from anywhere with a mobile device.

8. Create Educational Apps

While it has been mentioned in a few of the previous points, the benefits of having an app are even greater in 2024. With the explosion of people now seeking ways to learn or access educational materials online, having an app is another fantastic way to both attract and keep users. Rather than having to navigate to your website, having a simple button on their home screen that they can click and go right into their lessons is a convenience that cannot be understated.

For traditional educational institutions, apps can serve as a great way for students to access course material, schedules, activities, and more. It also can give students a way to solve simple problems or ask questions without having to come to campus in order to do so.

9. Promote Education Apps

Educational marketing for an app requires all of the same tools that are needed to market a website, alongside tools for marketing the app itself. Education marketing strategies for apps need to include paid ads, reviews, SEO, a social media strategy, content development, and more.

Some examples of educational advertising to promote your app should include:

• Having a website for your app that is designed for SEO marketing, attractive, mobile friendly, and filled with interesting and relevant content.
• Paid ads on app stores
• Social media marketing and advertisements
• Influencer marketing
• Encouraging and incentivizing reviews
• Video based educational ads

Working with an education marketing agency such as ComboApp will ensure that your app has education marketing strategies that set it up for success from day one.

10. Increase App Engagement

Having students using your app for learning is great, but an excellent education digital marketing strategy will keep looking for more opportunities to make sales. The more you keep them coming back for more, and giving them a reason to stay engaged, the more services you can get them to buy.

A great example of this is the Duolingo Owl. More than just a mascot, the owl also serves to encourage users to not miss days, sending them push notifications and emails to remind them to not break their streaks.

Personalized content, engagement reminders, and offers for more services within the app such as new courses and course upgrades are all great online education marketing strategies for engaging existing users.

11. Get Personal With Educational Content Marketing

Marketing for schools, educational apps, or any other form of education content benefits greatly from personalized efforts. People tend to have personal reasons for the things they choose to learn, and they all learn in their own individual ways. This means that one size fits all education marketing strategies will be less effective than ones that speak to the individual needs, tastes, and personalities of students or their families.

Personalization can take many forms. Language learning apps and schools might find that starting with an advertisement on travel sites is a first step towards personalization. From there, they can narrow that down by advertising the specific language for the country whose page the advertisement is placed on. This speaks to the audience by telling them: “Hey, why not learn a little of the language before your trip.” From here, you can gather information on the user and re-target them with personalized emails and more.

Marketing strategies for schools can use similar techniques, reaching students by talking to them about their interests and showing them courses they might be most interested in. When it comes to digital marketing for educational institutes, personalization can be essential to attracting the highest quality students by speaking directly to them, and matching them with alumni that they can identify with.

As you can see nearly all marketing strategies for educational institutions and apps will benefit greatly from these and other personalization techniques.

12. Be An Educational Thought Leader

An effective education marketing strategy is to establish your brand as being a thought leader in your field. Producing high quality content that shows you (or your organization) are educational experts, will cause audiences to see you as an authority. The greater the authority you have with your audience, the more they will trust you and your brand.

Being a thought leader will make educational marketing campaigns even more successful. One reason is that it will get you, or representatives of your school, guest posting opportunities on sites and apps with a larger reach. These opportunities are perfect for educational marketing strategies because they will help your brand to expand its reach and grow your business further.

Conclusion

With the 12 education marketing strategies explained in this article, you shouldn’t have any problem successfully marketing your education service or product to students of all ages. Well rounded approaches to marketing education programs will take advantage of most or all of these strategies as part of their educational marketing plan.

The challenges of the current evolving world and changes that have come in the wake of the pandemic also present an opportunity to those who are prepared. School marketing strategies can benefit from a focus on safe learning in their marketing content. Educational websites and apps can also benefit by presenting themselves as safe alternatives to in person education.

If you still feel intimidated by marketing for education or just want to avoid making a potentially costly mistake, you can always rely on the educational marketing services provided by ComboApp to make your offering stand out with innovative digital marketing solutions that adhere to higher education marketing best practices as outlined below.

Simply call us at 773.305.0886 or click on the Contact Us button in the header of this site. We look forward to helping you become the next unicorn!