How We Educate

We challenge conventional thinking — even when it's hard.

Mama taught us sharing was caring — and we care a lot. We listen, we learn, and then we share the insights that are most meaningful to today’s enrollment marketers.

Skim Our Blog    Dive Into Data

Inbound Enrollment Marketing 101

Inbound-pillars

What is Inbound Enrollment Marketing?

Inbound Enrollment Marketing is a methodology for student recruitment that focuses on creating educational content that pulls prospects toward your website where they can learn more about your institution on their own accord based on their interests and needs.

How is Inbound Enrollment Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing?

Inbound Enrollment Marketing is fundamentally different than direct, outbound marketing strategies. Inbound acts as a magnet that organically pulls in qualified website visitors, while outbound marketing tactics act more like a megaphone. Inbound also requires enrollment marketers to think about student recruitment in the context of a flywheel, as opposed to the traditional funnel.

Flywheel2
content-vs-context

What differentiates Inbound Enrollment Marketing from Content Marketing?

Inbound Enrollment Marketing adds context to your content. Content Marketing adopts an “if you build it they will come” approach to content creation, but Inbound Enrollment Marketing suggests that your content strategy must be conversion-centric in order to efficiently nurture prospects through The Applicant Journey.

What are the Six Themes
of Inbound Enrollment Marketing?

Persona Development

Student personas are fictional representations of your ideal student. They are just like real people, with real personalities, identities, life situations, goals, challenges, and media preferences. 

Content Creation

Creating content like digital resource libraries, eBooks, guides, videos, checklists, financial aid calculators and more, will leverage your institution as a thought leader and validate your online presence as a true resource.

Personalization & Context

Inbound Enrollment Marketing provides a context for the content you are creating. It takes educational content and applies conversion-centric strategies and techniques in order to generate prospective applicants.

Lifecycle Marketing

It’s essential that you create conversion-centric content that is relevant to each stage of the Enrollment Journey. Your goal as an enrollment marketer is to nurture prospects through the enrollment funnel as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Channel Optimization

As you learned in the above section on the changing marketing mix, today’s student recruitment strategy requires a diverse marketing channel portfolio. Inbound Enrollment Marketing is all about diversification! Inbound is about creating content that is relevant and appropriate for each channel: From social media, to email, to video, to direct mail, and more.

Marketing Technology

Marketing technology is the glue that holds Inbound Enrollment Marketing together — it’s what makes this strategy doable for busy enrollment teams. Inbound Enrollment Marketing requires having an inbound marketing platform — like HubSpot. The marketing automation tools that HubSpot offers enables you to leverage prospect behavior data related to content consumption — a method that improves engagement and generates positive applicant conversion results.

Drag

Fill out the Form to Access the Comprehensive Resource!

Discover the strategies and tactics schools are using to recruit new students!

Inbound-enrollment-marketing-cov-v2-03

Enrollment Marketing Coaching & Cohorts

Are you looking for more in-depth coaching and advice on how to plan and execute the best enrollment marketing strategies? Check out our small group cohorts that enable hands-on coaching and best-in-class techniques to improve performance and achieve positive ROI.

The Enrollment Marketer Blog

A platform dedicated to sharing observations, trends, and tactical takeaways for education marketers.


Skim Our Blog

How Schools Use Hubspot

HubSpot is the leading marketing automation platform for educational institutions — and DD Agency is proud to be the only Platinum Partner Agency that exclusively serves the education space. Our clients use HubSpot in a variety of different contexts — watch below to learn more.

Prefer some individualized attention? No worries!

Sign up for a free exploratory coaching call with one of our enrollment marketing strategists.

Educational Workshops

Our team regularly speaks at key industry events and higher education conferences of all shapes and sizes. We also work with educational institutions to craft half-day, full-day, and multi-day custom workshops for professional development days! Access our recent workshops and presentations below.

HubSpot Consulting & Trainings for Schools

So your school is on HubSpot? Fantastic — so are all of our clients! We’re experts and helping independent schools, colleges, and universities optimize HubSpot for enrollment management. Whether you need a custom training, just a few hours of technical support, or a full services retainer, we’re your people!

Let's Chat!

Interested in a custom workshop for your college, department, or association?