Tactics for building communities online keep multiplying. Among the many opportunities higher ed marketers now have to develop connections with current and future students through social media, Twitter chats are emerging as one of the most useful. These conversations where users meet at a specific time to discuss a topic using a distinct hashtag are relatively easy to set up and cost-effective. Yet they can yield a loyal following, increase users’ connection to your school and help you get to know your prospects’ needs better.

Follow these guidelines to set up a successful Twitter chat:
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As everyone looks to maximize marketing efforts and get more clarity about ROI per channel, it’s becoming painfully clear that a lead is only as good as the subsequent follow-up.

In order to assess how this plays out for business school recruitment, I signed up for the QS World MBA Tour stop in NYC on January 22. I put in an honest profile, which would have shown me as a pretty well-qualified candidate (albeit on the older side!), expressing my interests as an entrepreneur and marketing professional. … Read more

The chase is ever more challenging. Capturing readers’ attention with your content is simply a tough game – content output has increased by 78 percent over the last two years but engagement has dropped by 60 percent, according to TrackMaven’s survey of 8,800 brands. What’s more, the same study reveals that over 40 percent of professionally-marketed blog posts receive fewer than 10 reader interactions. Organisations measure online engagement using a broad range of criteria depending on the type of content and the business goals for the content. … Read more

This blog post is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on The Economist's Marketing Unbound site.
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Is your business equipped for change? While change is nothing new (John F. Kennedy described it in Darwinian tones as “the law of life”), the pace of change is accelerating faster than ever. This was a key theme at The World Economic Forum at Davos, where Google chief Eric Schmidt predicted an emerging world where the Internet of Things will pervade all areas of our lives. … Read more

Let’s say you’ve sent a pitch-perfect email or written a super clickable LinkedIn ad to promote an academic programme. The next step is converting interested students into leads who you can connect with and move through your enrollment funnel. So, the last thing you want to do is send those prospects to your homepage – where there’s a good chance they’ll get distracted or lost while trying to navigate to the content they really want.

Landing pages can be a great tool for improving the performance of your marketing campaigns. If you’re using them already – or are planning to – here are a few helpful hacks for optimising your landing page content to increase conversions. … Read more