Best Digital Marketing Tools for Higher Education in 2023
Boost Applications and Lead Generation with Easy-To-Use Software
*Note - This article contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase using these links, we earn a small commission. We only recommend software that we trust and use ourselves!
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Lead Generation for Higher Education
Everyone knows the best place to market higher education is online. Social media campaigns, engaging landing pages, and interactive websites give any university or college a leg up when it comes to attracting and keeping the attention of prospective students.
However, managing these online presences can be a difficult task. With so many different profiles to run and emails to reply to, you and your team may find yourselves falling behind on posting to your socials or executing other essential components of your digital marketing strategy.
The team at Noetic Marketer is more than willing to help you manage any of your digital marketing needs (and you can check out all of our expert services here!) - however, we also know how useful it is to have your own tools on hand.
That’s why we’ve curated a list of some of our favourite digital marketing tools for online higher education campaigns.
Keep reading to see what tools and software we use to optimize our workflows and maintain efficiency throughout all our digital marketing campaigns!
Copywriting
No advertisement, blog post, or website page is complete without expert copywriting. The only way for your institution to get its message across is to craft relatable text that is accessible and engaging.
Our team at Noetic Marketer is lucky enough to have tools we can use throughout every stage of our copywriting process. These tools help to ensure the copy we write is continually optimized, in addition to being engaging and innovative.
The planning phase
The first step in any good copywriting process is to plan out your keywords. With so much content floating around the internet, it’s almost impossible to rank highly on search engines - naturally, that is. Keyword research and careful copywriting is the easiest way to ensure your institution’s website appears first in prospective students’ Google search results.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is efficient, easy to use, and simply one of the best tools for keyword planning and SEO upkeep.
With SE Ranking, you can map keywords, check out your competition, and audit your website’s SEO performance. All of these features are included in an intuitive dashboard.
Some essential tools included within SE Ranking are:
The Keyword Research Tool - This tool helps marketing departments and agencies find the best keywords for their clients. With the Keyword Research Tool, you can plan out keywords that rank quickly and figure out how much attention they’ll attract for you.
The Keyword Rank Tracker - This tool helps you to track your keywords’ performance consistently.
You can sign up for a free trial here!
Why is this important?
So many writers underestimate the importance of SEO in their writing.
“SEO” refers to “search engine optimization,” “which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages.”
Implementing good SEO practices within your writing makes it easier for your blog posts, websites, and anything else you write to be found naturally through search engines. This will, in turn, boost your pages’ traffic and click-through rate!
Surfer SEO
Another excellent tool for keeping your website visible, Surfer SEO uses its AI software to analyze the best SEO strategies to use based on your preferred keywords and then gives you step-by-step instructions on how to approach your writing.
We figured there’s no better way to show you how effective this tool is than to demonstrate it ourselves!
We took a few paragraphs from this blog post and put them into Surfer SEO’s Content Editor tool, using the keyword “digital marketing tools” as our primary target word (this score reflects what the Content Score was while this post was still being written, and therefore is not an accurate representation of our SEO metrics for this blog post!)
Immediately, the Content Editor will give you a “Content Score,” basing its total on how many words you have, how many paragraphs your copy is split into, how many headings you’ve used, and more.
The Content Editor will then suggest what words to use in your writing and how many times you should include them. Each time you insert a new recommended word, your Content Score will increase! This interface makes it easy to monitor your SEO scores while writing.
If you want to ensure your writing follows the best SEO practices out there, check out Surfer SEO here!
The Writing Phase
Writer’s block is inevitable - especially when you’re writing every single day. That’s why having tools to give you ideas and keep the creative process going is helpful!
Jasper.ai
As Jasper’s web page describes, “Jasper is the AI Content Platform that helps you and your team break through creative blocks to create amazing, original content 10X faster”. The program analyzes your copy and adds its additions, keeping SEO in mind as it writes, so you don’t have to!
Jasper writes everything from blog posts to social media biographies to ad copy. It can also help you develop catchy headlines, email subject lines, and more. Jasper makes the writing process much more efficient and is even beneficial for expert copywriters - because who sometimes doesn’t run into writing blocks?
Plus, as our blog post, “Say Goodbye to Hours of Work With These AI Marketing Tools,” mentions, “Jasper integrates with Surfer SEO, so if you really want to boost your content marketing productivity, consider trying both. That's what we do, and the two software complement each other beautifully.”
You can try out Jasper.ai using our free trial link!
The Editing Phase
Editing is arguably the most important part of the writing process. You could have the best messaging, but if your content is hard to understand or words are misspelled, it can take a toll on your institution’s credibility.
Grammarly
Grammarly is the everything-in-one tool to ensure your copy always comes out perfectly.
All you need to do is upload your document into the Grammarly reader and let it do its magic! Grammarly will underline words or phrases - or sometimes, even paragraphs - within your writing that have errors or could be improved upon.
Grammarly is one of the best tools for:
Checking for proper punctuation, sentence structure, and spelling
Checking for plagiarism
Assessing readability
Assessing how interesting your readers will find your content
Campaign Rollout
After all your hard work, you deserve to have applications that will make your campaign rollout easier! Here’s a sneak peek of our favourite.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign makes it easy to plan out and customize email marketing campaigns, so you can effectively roll out your newsletter and promotions and so you can maintain good relationships with your client base.
This is all made possible with their built-in CRM system, which, as mentioned in our blog post on AI marketing tools, “can start providing you with insights on the likelihood of a specific lead becoming a customer or when the best time to send an email to a specific audience is.”
Try out ActiveCampaign today!
Design
After perfecting your copywriting, the next step is to grab your audience’s attention. The best way to do that is to pay close attention to your website or ad design! At Noetic, we have a team of expert graphic designers. But, when such resources aren’t readily available, it helps to know you have applications that can help you create top-tier designs.
Instapage
You spend a lot of time and money creating innovative ad campaigns for your institution, and you’re getting a lot of clicks. But where do these clicks lead to?
Landing pages!
A landing page “is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign.” It’s usually based around a specific call to action, whether “Download our Info Pack” or “Apply Today.” These pages must stand out; they are the last step in convincing prospective students to choose your institution.
Instapage allows users to build professional landing pages without needing a web developer. The interface is fully customizable, so you can design your landing page to fit your institution’s brand and style. The program also allows you to share your work with other team members to build projects together efficiently.
If you’d like to test Instapage, you can check it out here!
Project Management
With so many copywriting, design, and campaign rollout tasks, it can be hard to keep everything on track! At Noetic Marketer, we find it easier to use applications that allow us to keep track of each other’s progress while monitoring our own goals. Having your tasks visible to other team members also helps to keep you accountable!
Asana
There’s no better way to keep your team on the same page than Asana. According to Asana’s webpage, “teams report they’re up to 45% more efficient with Asana. That’s because Asana cuts down work about work and gives teams clarity to focus on what counts.” - and we agree wholeheartedly!
Asana is a project management tool that allows teams to track projects, deadlines, and progress. Once it’s up and running, your team members can update their project status in real-time, leaving comments and updates that will help keep track of where everything is! Asana is easy to learn and use, so you won’t have to spend much time teaching your team the tool itself.
Some of our favourite Asana features include:
Forms - make assigning tasks to team members easier with Asana’s forms feature. The forms let you complete a detailed work request, then assign and share the details with your desired team members.
Calendar - see your team’s schedule in real-time so you can assign tasks according to their workloads.
Automation - As Asana’s website says, “Don’t waste time on tedious manual tasks. Let Automation do it for you. Simplify workflows, reduce errors, and save time for solving more important problems”. This is the ultimate feature Asana has to offer, as it keeps everything your team does organized and timely.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we use these tools to help expedite our work processes. While the entire team at Noetic Marketer is filled with field experts, our usage of copywriting, campaign rollout, design, and project management tools helps us create flawless deliverables for our clients in half the time. These tools are easily transferable to your higher education marketing campaigns.
Let us know in the comments below whether you have marketing tool suggestions we should know about! Or, if you use one of our links and try out one of these tools, let us know what you think!
PS You can download our infographic below to help you remember these tools!
About the Author
Juliana Stacey
Juliana Stacey has always had a passion for stories. Luckily, the time she spent reading in the dark (with a flashlight, of course) far past her bedtime when she was little has paid off; she’s taken that love of literature and language and turned it into her life’s work, studying English and Professional Writing & Communications at the University of Toronto. As a Copywriting & Content Marketing Strategist at Noetic Marketer, Juliana has had the opportunity to apply her studies in writing and editing to content creation and copywriting for a variety of industries, and she loves being able to help different companies convey their messaging and stories in ways that are accessible for all readers. When she’s not writing or editing, Juliana loves to play the violin, catch up on the latest bestsellers and Netflix shows, and absolutely spoil her two dogs.
Who We Are
Noetic Marketer is a full-service digital marketing agency with roots in Ottawa and the GTA. We specialize in creating and optimizing digital marketing campaigns for the higher education, e-commerce, professional services, and contractors industries.
As digital marketers, we strive to find solutions to every company’s lead generation challenges, creating personalized marketing strategies that suit the specific needs of our clients.