Online Marketing Opportunities for Education Institutes

Investment in education to beat the recession and boost earning! Job seekers and the unemployed are seeking ways to become more employable and going back to education seems a sensible route.

Alistair Darling recently announced funding cuts totalling £900m to British universities in the 2010 budget! The budget also plans to make 20,000 new places available in science, technology, engineering and maths. Universities are going to need to tighten up their operations and ensure they are running efficient businesses. These announcements are going to put strains on resources, jobs, marketing etc.

This may push more relevance to the international or ‘distance learning’ student to fill the loss of funding.  International student’s tuition fees can range from £5,000 to £20,000 per year which is a higher return than national students.

Reaching out to international students via the internet is not only the most cost effective solution but also easy to track and review performance.

It also makes sense in the fact that universities target audience will be actively searching for information on courses and institutes. Social networking sites are also a popular medium for the perspective target audience.

Research shows that students search for distance courses place high importance on unique selling points such as prestige, history, accreditation, ranking and awards. These are high value purchases after all so international students will be seeking confirmation of quality.

Competition for student recruitment is only going to increase, this will see university website become their shop fronts and require highly targeted marketing campaign to insure the highest ROI possible.