Standing out and attracting prospective students requires a strategic, data-driven approach - selecting a University/College is a huge decision for your prospective students, and you can be sure the majority of their research & decision making will come from accessing online resources. HubSpot, with its robust suite of CRM and marketing tools, empowers institutions to create targeted, personalised campaigns that engage and convert. By leveraging HubSpot’s capabilities, you can streamline your marketing efforts—from building detailed student personas to capturing leads and optimising advertising strategies—allowing your institution to more effectively reach and nurture the right audience. Below we'll explore an example of how we can link various HubSpot tools together to create a powerful marketing strategy.
Before you can effectively market to prospective students, you need to know exactly who they are. Building detailed personas in HubSpot is the first critical step in any marketing strategy.
Personas are fictional representations of your ideal students. They go beyond simple demographics, delving into pain points, goals, behaviours, and decision-making factors. For example, you might create a persona such as "Career Switcher Chris," a working professional looking to earn a graduate degree to change careers.
Within HubSpot, you can create and organise detailed personas to tailor your marketing content to different segments of your audience. This helps you better understand what motivates each group and tailor your messaging to meet their unique needs.
Key elements of your persona may include:
By clearly outlining your personas in HubSpot, you’ll have a solid foundation for creating content that speaks directly to your prospective students.
Once your personas are defined, you can begin creating content to engage them. Blogging is a highly effective way to attract prospective students, provide them with valuable information, and showcase your institution’s offerings.
HubSpot's blog tool allows you to create, edit, and optimise your blog content while tracking its performance. Tailor your blog topics to the needs and concerns of each persona. For example:
For Career Switcher Chris, you might write blogs like “Top 5 Degrees to Jumpstart a Career Change” or “How to Balance Graduate School with a Full-Time Job.”
Within HubSpot, you can easily segment your blogs by persona, ensuring that the right audience sees the right content. You can also use HubSpot’s SEO tools to optimise each blog, making sure it ranks highly for search terms prospective students are using.
To further engage your prospects and move them down the enrolment funnel, you can include a Call-to-Action (CTA) in your blog posts. HubSpot’s CTA tool makes it easy to create attention-grabbing CTAs that encourage users to take the next step.
For example, after reading a blog about career-switching degrees, a reader might be ready to download a free guide, such as “The Ultimate Guide to Career Change through Graduate Education.” Your CTA would link to this free content, offering it as a valuable resource that provides additional insights.
HubSpot’s CTA tool tracks clicks, allowing you to see which CTAs are the most effective and which content is driving conversions. This allows you to continually refine and optimise your CTAs for maximum engagement.
When users click on your CTA to download free content, it’s a great opportunity to collect valuable information. HubSpot’s form tool allows you to create customised forms to capture important data, such as:
Using progressive profiling, you can ask different questions on subsequent forms to build a more complete picture of your leads without overwhelming them with too many questions at once.
For example, a prospective student may download a guide on career-switching degrees and complete a simple form. When they return to download another resource, HubSpot can automatically ask additional questions like “What program are you most interested in?” or “When do you plan to enrol?”—deepening your understanding of their needs.
Once they submit the form, HubSpot can automatically trigger a follow-up email or enrol the lead into a nurturing workflow. This builds trust and engagement with the prospect as they explore your institution.
One of HubSpot’s most powerful features is its ability to integrate seamlessly with your advertising platforms, such as Google Ads or Facebook. You can use the data you’ve collected from HubSpot forms, CTAs, and website interactions to create hyper-targeted ad campaigns.
Audiences in HubSpot allow you to track user behaviour and create custom ad audiences based on how users engage with your content.
For example:
You can create a remarketing campaign targeting users who downloaded your “Ultimate Guide to Career Change” but haven’t yet scheduled an open day.
You can also build lookalike audiences based on your highest-converting personas, allowing you to target similar individuals who might be interested in your programs.
Events in HubSpot allow you to sync lifecycle stage data with your ad accounts, ensuring your ad spend targets the right audience. By tracking actions like form submissions or content downloads, HubSpot updates a contact's lifecycle stage in real time. You can then exclude contacts who are already at advanced stages, such as Evangelists or Customers, from your ad campaigns.
This way, instead of wasting budget on those already converted, you focus your ads on Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) or prospects who still need nurturing. This ensures your ads are shown to the most relevant audience, maximising ROI and driving higher-quality conversions.
Additionally, HubSpot's integration with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads allows you to track ad performance, ensuring that your budget is being used effectively. With precise data on how users interact with your site and which personas are converting, you can continuously optimise your ads for better results.
By leveraging HubSpot’s comprehensive tools, you can create a higher education marketing strategy that effectively targets prospective students, nurtures them through the enrolment journey, and maximises conversions. From defining personas and creating targeted content to using data for highly focused ad campaigns, HubSpot provides the perfect platform to grow your institution’s reach and impact.
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