Throughout the year, Lastarria Media will be offering a “Tip of the Week” each week. Check out our LinkedIn page for each of these tips, or read the tips below for some inventive ways to marketing your IEP or other educational institution.
52 Tips for Marketing Your Institution
Tip #1: Review reports on your Audience, Language, Pages, and Landing Pages
Use the first week of January to review your analytics reports of 2017 vs. 2018. Make sure to review reports on your Audience, Language, Pages, and Landing Pages. Use these reports to:
– Identify target audiences (and make sure that your Sales and Marketing Plan for 2019 incorporates these countries);
– Make sure that your multilingual pages are for the appropriate languages;
– Determine if your main web pages are accurately optimized;
– Make necessary web changes to improve the performance of key web pages.
Learn more with our article, How to Use Metrics for a Successful Website.
Tip #2: Make sure all marketing efforts in your 2019 plan are clearly planned and assigned (with deadlines)
Start your year off right! Make sure that your year is carefully planned. All internal employees should know their roles in marketing efforts; your third-party marketing company must know how to work with your internal team in order to meet all marketing goals.
Tip #3: Conduct a site audit
Conduct a comprehensive site audit to make sure that your site is up to date in regard to content. Don’t know how to conduct this detailed and comprehensive project? A third-party marketing team can orchestrate this.
Tip #4: Review social media “about” sections
Check your social media accounts to make sure their descriptions use your identified keywords. Don’t HAVE keywords? Then you need Lastarria Media. We provide targeted keyword strands based on your industry, competitors, and your institution’s marketing goals and target audience.
Tip #5: Identify multilingual hashtags for target audiences
Be sure that your institution is using branded and industry-specific, carefully selected hashtags on all social media. Hashtags should be industry staples and trending.
Tip #6: Run a broken link check
Are you 100% sure that your site and blog have no hyperlinks that lead to a 404 error message? To be certain, you need to run a broken link report and fix any broken links. Don’t know how to run a broken link check? We run them for you!
Tip #7: Review keywords (and check their performance)
A two-part question here: are you certain that you’ve identified the most effective keywords and keyword strands? And how are these keywords/keyword strands performing?
Keyword and keyword strand selection is a complex process.
Note: simply searching for your keywords on Google isn’t enough to determine your rankings. Google will take into consideration your location, your search history, and more. To truly identify your rankings (both locally and globally) requires a more complex process. Contact us to learn more.
Tip #8: Publish a blog that meets your marketing needs
There’s no way around it: your site needs a blog. When done correctly and professionally, blogs significantly improve SEO and serve as a valuable marketing tool. Learn more about why your institution or business needs a blog.
Tip #9: Check your branding
You’ll probably need a professional to do this. Alongside a designer, complete an audit of all online and print materials. Do they follow your style guide and branding? (This might also be a good time to develop a style guide if you do not have one.) It also might be a good time to refresh and modernize your look and brand.
Tip #10: Run a backlink report
Backlinks are an important part of SEO. Do you know who is linking to you? And do you know if their sites rank higher than yours? A comprehensive backlink report will yield this information. Don’t know how to run one? We can run one for you at Lastarria Media.
Tip #11: Identify opportunities for backlinks
Is your site utilizing backlinks from its partners? Do you know which sites are linking to you, and have you identified which ones should be linking to you? Don’t miss out on link opportunities: identify these, and then take the steps needed to link to partners and other potential partners.
Tip #12: Check all blog post title tags and meta descriptions
A title tag is a piece of HTML coding that reflects the title of a webpage. It is the text that will show up on search engine results.
A meta description is the snippet of text that describes this page. It also shows up, under the title tag, in search engine results.
Title tags and meta descriptions are the text that determine whether or not a user will click on your page’s search result and enter your website. They are incredibly important: they’re the one chance to “sell” your site and convince a reader to select it. Make sure that all pages have accurate title tags and meta descriptions and that the text of each fits the character count for each (roughly 60 for title tags and 160-180 for meta descriptions).
Tip #13: Review your headers
Your H1, H2, and H3 headers are vital for SEO. Are yours optimized? An SEO site audit will yield this information.
Tip #14: Promote your institution’s volunteer opportunities, scholarships, and charitable donations
Is your school giving back? Make sure that this information is on the forefront of your website!
Tip #15: Test your site’s user experience
How easy is your site to use? Is navigation well mapped? Is it easy to get to the most pertinent information? In how many clicks? Conduct a professional user experience audit to ensure that your site layout and content are appropriate.
Tip #16: Develop a system for compiling all testimonials
Testimonials are a vital aspect of marketing. Make sure you have developed a system (such as a tried-and-true exit survey) to collect testimonials, in real time, before your students leave. And of course make sure that you have a way of using these throughout your site and marketing materials!