Top Internet Technologies to Transform Your Recruitment Strategy Free

According to data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, one in six adults goes online to read blogs. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of new blogs created every day, and the total number of blogs has grown so explosively that Mer-riam-Webster Dictionary named it their word of the year in 2004.

What is your institution’s blogging strategy? If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one immediately. Try keeping an institutional blog to update your prospects about current events at your school. Or allow your faculty or your students to keep blogs and publish them on your Web site. Blogs give your prospects incentive to return to your site, and the constantly refreshed content will also give you a boost in the search engine rankings. You might also try advertising on other people’s blogs, which might offer less expensive placements than traditional media buys.

Depending on whom you ask, “RSS” stands for either “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” but in both cases RSS feeds are one of the hottest new Internet technologies for getting your message out. An RSS feed allows a Web site to publish its content in a format that other sites, blogs, or intranets can easily pick up and redistribute.

The best content to distribute through RSS feeds includes press releases, event listings, news stories, project updates, or corporate information—essentially, the type of information that adds value to external Web sites. By allowing these sites to pick up your institution’s updates and announcements, you’ll extend your public relations reach and drive qualified traffic to your site.

Webinars are Web-based seminars or workshops offering another excellent way for your school to get its message out and differentiate it from your competitors. This presentation technology allows you to paint a more complete picture of your institution’s offerings than a traditional banner ad or Web page ever could, thereby dimensionalizing your value proposition for the audience.

Give your prospects a meaningful understanding of what it’s like to attend your school, or what type of education they’ll gain by enrolling in certain degree programs through Webinars—among the most effective tools on the Internet. Presentations can also explore topics such as financial aid, career paths, or the value of earning a degree online or through accelerated learning. To get the maximum value out of your Webinar, promote it on your Web site, in your newsletter and on partner Web sites, and archive it after the event.

Podcasts are audio files that Web site visitors can download to a portable mp3 player and listen to whenever they want. With the widespread adoption of iPods and other mp3 players, podcasting is set to explode as much as, or more than, blogs in 2004. In fact, researchers at the Diffusion Group have estimated that the podcast audience will grow to 56 million listeners by 2010.

Many prospective students would prefer to listen to certain content rather than read it on their computers, and by offering valuable audio content you’ll demonstrate that your institution is ahead of the curve when it comes to technological innovation. You could offer podcasts about how to succeed in distance learning, or how to compare and select distance learning programs. Another way to take advantage of podcasts is to advertise on popular pod-casts reaching your core audience; many in-demand podcasts offer ad opportunities such as product placement, show sponsorship, and even 15-second ads similar to a commercial you’d air on a radio program.

A recent study by Noel-Levitz, James Tower, and the National Research Center for College and University Admissions found that 81% of college-bound students use instant messaging (IM) when they go online, and when asked what activities they would like to participate in on a college Web site, 70% said they’d like to use IM to communicate with a counselor (“The e-savvy class of 2006,” 2005).

Not only is IM a popular communication vehicle, but it can be highly effective in streamlining the enrollment process because it eliminates the lag time between a prospect completing a contact form and receiving a telephone call from an enrollment advisor. Imagine how much better prospects will feel about your institution if they can get answers to their questions immediately, rather than waiting a day or two. And, of course, another added benefit of IM is that it will reduce your phone bill.

Okay, so search engine marketing isn’t exactly new, and maybe it’s getting competitive and costly, but there are still viable ways to generate qualified leads for your school.

First, optimize your site for natural, or unpaid, rankings through the use of meta tags, backlinks, search-friendly content, and other tactics that will help boost your site rankings in all of the major search engines and directories. This will help make sure your site comes up for relevant search terms and thereby net you free site traffic. After that, consider bidding on search terms related to your core offerings. But be careful not to overbid on broad, highly competitive search terms that will not convert at an effective rate. Keep a close eye on your click-to-lead ratios to ensure you’re getting your money’s worth.

Two new trends in search marketing that are worth keeping your eyes on are local search and vertical search, both of which are quickly emerging as less costly, more targeted methods of reaching your core audience.

Local search is especially valuable for any institution wanting to target prospects within a particular geographic area. Most of the major search engines now offer their visitors some way to search locally, while a number of new search engines have recently appeared on the scene in an effort to lure local advertisers to their sites.

Meanwhile, vertical search has come about as a result of the major search engines simply including too many results, often making it difficult for the users to find exactly what they’re looking for. But with a vertical search engine, users can narrow their results down to include only Web sites from the particular industry that interests them. So an education search engine, for example, would return a smaller and more targeted list of returns on searches conducted by prospective students than a similar search conducted at Google or Yahoo. Vertical search is still in the very nascent stages, but it’s worth following to see if any education-related search engines grab the spotlight.

The last few years, a large portion of institutions’ advertising budgets has gone to Online Education Directories (OEDs)— Web portals that allow visitors to browse through their directories of colleges and universities. But the proliferation of these directories has diminished their value to the prospective student and made it harder to decide which ones are worth placing your school in and which are not.

More recently, a few Online Education Directories have begun syndicating their content and offers on the Web sites of third-party publishers, allowing them to run your offer on highly trafficked and highly visible Web sites on a cost-per-lead basis. This strategy expands your reach to a targeted media network while controlling your costs and generating qualified leads. Ask your Online Education Directory what their syndication capabilities are and how it can help get your school more exposure and better leads.

Typical banner ads simply do not cut it any longer. Consumers have conditioned themselves to barely notice banners, a trend that is evidenced by the miniscule click-through rates most banners experience nowadays.

The online advertisements that capture attention and engage the consumer more than any other ads are those that make use of rich media. The term “rich media” is generally used to describe any type of interactive media that exhibits dynamic motion and takes advantage of enhanced sensory features such as video, audio, or animation. In the past, most advertisers have shied away from ads that incorporate these elements because they tend to take longer to download than most ads, thereby frustrating the consumer. But with broadband connections now prevalent in most homes and nearly all businesses, rich media ads are quickly gaining popularity.

Internet marketing is nothing like direct mail, traditional media, or other forms of advertising. What worked last year won’t necessarily work this year, and just because a campaign is successful right now, is no guarantee of future success. Astute marketers know they must constantly study the latest trends in the online marketplace and leverage them in their recruitment strategies if they want to secure more leads and convert them more effectively into enrollments.

If you’re not planning on using any of the technologies discussed above, just keep in mind that your competition probably is.