Top Tips for Utilizing Your College Website to Boost Student Recruitment

In this day and age, your college’s website is arguably the most powerful tool you have when it comes to student recruitment. It’s one of the first places prospective students look to find out more about a university, plus the content and design are completely within your control. Here are some top tips to ensure that you’re making the most of yours: Get insights from data We have access to so much data these days, and there’s a wealth of valuable information to be gleaned from it if you know where to look. Enrollment Management for Higher Education can be extremely helpful with this, leveraging the power of data analytics to highlight your college’s current weak points and how to overcome them. Invest in a top-quality website This is vital. If your website is tricky to navigate, looks old fashioned, or contains out of date information, then prospective students are not going to stick around. It’s well worth investing some time and money into making your website visually appealing, intuitive, and of course, interesting so that your college stands out from the crowd. Try to keep it looking professional but also inject some of your university’s unique personality in there too! Ensure your website is mobile-optimized It’s extremely important to ensure that your website is not only able to be viewed on a smartphone but has actually been optimized for this. The number of people who use their cellphones rather than a computer to browse the internet is steadily growing, so if your website is awkward to view or navigate on a small screen, then you run the risk of losing a large percentage of your audience straight away. Make your website student-focused This sounds obvious, but you might be surprised at how many college websites don’t seem to have been designed with prospective students in mind! Think about the type of content that will be useful to your target audience. What information are they coming to your website to find out? What questions do they have that they’re trying to answer? What additional value can you give them? By making sure that your website is genuinely interesting and informative, you’ll encourage students to spend more time on it and visit more often. Use it alongside social media channels These days having a world-class website but no other online presence is simply not enough. The vast majority of young people – your target audience – use social media, so being active on these channels as well is key. They offer a greater chance for interaction and engagement with prospective students, in addition to the opportunity to show your college’s personality in a more informal way. Make the most of student-generated content Nothing beats content generated by current students when it comes to showing prospective students what life on campus is like. If you can recruit students to write blogs, post on social media, and even make videos about college life, these can be wonderful ways to help people connect with your university on a natural level. Plus, it comes across as much more genuine than sleek marketing campaigns!

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