Four Digital Marketing Solutions Guaranteed to Enhance Your Enrollment Strategies

You Should:

Target a Lookalike Audience

What It Is:

Targets prospective students with similar interests, behaviors, and demographics to your current students.

Why It Works:

Engages Gen Z on the platforms they’re using the most—like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat.

Success Story:

Snapchat Lookalike Boosts College’s Prospective Student Engagement
Using Snapchat Lookalike Campaigns, one of our midwestern college partners targeted teenagers who had similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics of their current students. As a result, instead of seeing a typical 0.25% custom audience targeting engagement rate, these “lookalike” high schoolers engaged over 3.5 times more often at a rate of 0.89%!

From these connections, the college saw engagement soar with 7,110 verified website actions—zero bounce, highly intentional actions taken on their EDU site as a direct result of the lookalike campaign. These students explored past the school’s landing page into next steps such as visiting campus and applying.

You Should:

Run short video campaigns

What It Is:

Highlight your institution, programs, feature current students, etc. through short video clips.

Why It Works:

Engages Gen Z on the platforms they’re using the most—like TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat.

Success Story:

Video Campaigns Meet Students Where They Are Spending Time
The Encoura Digital Solutions team equipped one of our university partners with digital solutions that connected them with prospective first-year students where they were consuming the most content, including targeted YouTube campaigns.
This client saw 46k views by admitted students in the first two months of incorporating their targeted YouTube campaigns. This was a 23% view rate at a time when the YouTube average was 15%.

You Should:

Write for the Mindsets

What It Is:

Derived from our Eduventures® Prospective Student Research™, Prospective Student Mindsets™ identify the dreams and desires of prospective undergraduate students.

Why It Works:

Helps to better recruit and engage students through messaging that resonates with them.

Success Story:

Mindsets Help College Connect with Prospects Based on Dreams, Desires
Eduventures Prospective Student Research equips college enrollment and marketing teams with valuable research on how to strategically reach each prospective student based on one of six ways of thinking about college. This segmentation gives our college partners a glimpse into students’ dreams and desires.

When one of our partners utilized the Mindset segmentation to communicate with prospective students based on what they care most about in a future college, this messaging increased the engagement students had on their website by at least five times, brought thousands of new visitors to the website, and led to the highest levels of in-state student post-view and post-click interactions.

You Should:

Invest in Search Engine Marketing + Search Keyword Remarketing

What It Is:

These are intent-based strategies that show prospects similar content based on their searches.

Why It Works:

Helps you market your institution and specific programs to those who are most likely to act.

Success Story:

Search Strategies Engage Students Throughout the Enrollment Funnel
By adding search keyword retargeting to an SEM campaign—which means showing your ads to those who are already looking for your college, programs, etc.—our average partner can see a 25% increase in net click through rate (CTR). Because these students have raised their hand (in a digital sense) and want to learn more, our Digital Solutions partners have also seen approximately double the .edu engagement.

Think about these search strategies as initially gauging interest based on search habits (search engine marketing) and then developing as a custom audience that you want to further engage (search keyword remarketing).