Tactics and Strategies for Marketing Alternative Higher Education Programs The higher education landscape is evolving, driven by innovation, economics, and changing attitudes among today’s students and a labor market that increasingly prioritizes job-ready skills.  The high cost of earning a traditional bachelor’s degree, the gap between college graduates’ skills and employers’ expectations, and today’s tight labor market are combining to drive unprecedented interest in alternative education programs (AEPs). A growing number of cost-conscious, career-minded students are skipping college a ..read more

How Can UX Boost Higher Ed Enrollment? User experience (UX) design is the multifaceted process of defining how users interact with your website. It requires you to get to know your user to determine what journey you can create to meet their unique needs.  Investing in UX early on as part of your higher ed marketing strategy will allow you to deliver a curated experience that garners value. The sooner you begin, the sooner you can adapt and optimize the design to drive more meaningful and useful experiences. What Is UX? User experience refers to the sum of prospective students’ experiences ..read more

How to Use Your Higher Education Data to Boost Enrollments Higher education analytics are an essential aspect of enrollment marketing. University marketers can leverage data discoveries to make more informed decisions on a day-to-day basis. On a foundational level, university marketing departments collect vast amounts of data, including website visitors’ behavior (time on site, number of page views, etc.), but data points may not give enough context to inform decisions. The next stage of analytics is information, which provides a more digestible means of understanding a marketing campaign’s pe ..read more

What Is Digital Public Relations (Digital PR)? Like just about everything else these days, the future of public relations is digital.  Not only has digital technology changed how organizations communicate internally, it has changed how they communicate with each other and the public. Gone are the days when public relations simply involved churning out press releases and responding to media inquiries.  Digital public relations (or digital PR) as practiced today combines these traditional PR tactics with content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO). A ..read more

Six Proven Ways to Reach Nontraditional Students The nontraditional student population now makes up the majority of higher education students (74%), according to a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and this population continues to grow — in both number and importance. Within the undergraduate student population alone, about 37% are aged 25 and older, 24% have dependents, and 64% work while enrolled in college, according to the Lumina Foundation. The target audience is shifting for higher education marketers, providing a fresh opportunity for you to realign ..read more

How to Build a Digital PR Campaign for Faculty When you’re in the higher education space, you’ll inevitably hit a roadblock at some point. Maybe your competitor schools achieve higher application rates, star in more news stories, or receive more donor funding. Or maybe they simply have higher levels of faculty engagement, thus making their overall public relations more effective than yours.  It may sound simple, but faculty participation is a PR hack too many colleges and universities forget to employ. That’s why the Archer Education PR team put together a free webinar to show you there’s ..read more

How to Use Search Terms to Boost Alternative Education Programs The only constant society has experienced in the last couple of years is change. Education? Changing. Workplaces? Changing. Our culture as a whole? Changing. With all these shifts, there’s good news and bad news for the higher education market. The Bad News: Enrollments are dropping. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, total higher-ed enrollments fell to 16.2 million this spring, a 4.1% decline from last year. Unfortunately, the decline is likely to continue as the looming “demographic cliff” approache ..read more

How Institutions Can Make Certificates and Short Programs Feasible Amid Rising Costs While traditional degrees are still king, today’s students are making major changes in how they approach their education. As employers increasingly drop college degree requirements for new hires in favor of skills, more students are leaning toward certificate programs, bootcamps, and other non-degree pathways as the next step in their education (and often in their careers). With this spike in interest, the alternative education market is growing rapidly. For example, the coding bootcamp market is projected to ..read more

Listen Now: Attention Retention, Episode 6 Together with our friends at Enrollify, Archer Education is bringing you a podcast about attracting and retaining the modern, adult learner. Listen in every other Tuesday this summer for Attention Retention: a six-part series with Angie Mohr, Clayton Dean, and Zach Busekrus. Episode 6: How To Capture And Keep The Attention Of Today’s Prospective Students In this episode, Angie, Clayton, and Zach dive into the importance of playing the enrollment long game. Testing & optimizing, plus strategies to help determine which channels to inv ..read more

Listen Now: Attention Retention, Episode 5 Together with our friends at Enrollify, Archer Education is bringing you a podcast about attracting and retaining the modern, adult learner. Listen in every other Tuesday this summer for Attention Retention: a six-part series with Angie Mohr, Clayton Dean, and Zach Busekrus. Episode 5: How Marketing & Enrollment Automation Empower Connection in the Student Journey In this episode, Angie, Clayton, and Zach delve into the world of automation. Learn more about tactics, strategies, and common mistakes enrollment marketers make when creating ..read more