With the right strategy and specialized tools, your school website can ease your workload while increasing enrollment. Whether you're a marketing army of one or you have a whole staff helping you, here are 4 ways a well-designed website can serve as a powerful extension of your marketing team.
1. Lead Generation 24/7
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Strategic school websites are more than beautiful brochureware. Done right, they are built upon insightful information design and content strategy that will guide and inspire prospects to inquire and apply.
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A positive online experience creates an impression of your school that will lead to more engagment and conversions such as requesting enrollment information, scheduling a tour, or making a donation.
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Many parents (and of course prospective students) will experience your website on a mobile device. An old website that is difficult to use on a mobile device can leave the impression that your school lags behind the times compared to your competitors. A new website empowers you to take advantage of the latest features that mobile users expect such as location-aware self-guided tours, fast-loading pages, and easy-to-use menus.
2. Expand Your Reach
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Welcome diverse prospects by including the latest ADA accessibility acommodations for those with disabilities such as screen readers and appropriate text contrast for readability.
- Adhering to current ADA guidelines can help avoid litigation due to lack of compliance, paritcularly in higher education and in schools that serve a differently abled student body.
- Take advantage of the latest SEO best practices. A new website with a customized CMS should have built-in SEO tools that will improve your school's discoverability online.
Within the first year of launch, our website strategy and design for Ursuline College helped their traffic increase significantly.
3. Automations + Integrations
- Keeping your website content fresh can be a time-consuming and tedious challenge, but outdated content on can leave prospects questioning your school's programs and reliability. A modern website should provide tools for automated COPE workflow (create-once-publish-everywhere). This workflow empowers you to enter content once and publish in multiple places throughout your website while it automatically archives outdated information.
- A modern website CMS will integrate with your email marketing platform and CRM to automatically capture insights about your website users and behaviors, providing yet another tool for reaching your desired audiences.
- Now more than ever, websites can beautifully incorporate your social media feeds into your pages, providing an effortless way of recycling your up-to-the-minute news, events, and branded content and automatically serving it to your website audience.
Our website design and CMS for Cleveland Institute of Art strategically moves users through a funnel designed to convert visitors to leads. The site was a key factor in helping facilitate record breaking enrollment growth.
4. Manage Your Team
Content management systems for colleges and schools should include the ability to control CMS access based on individual logins. This allows you to maintain the integrity of your content and brand and efficiently delegate certain sections of the website to specific staff or departments.
Learn more about how we can help your school increase enrollment.
