How to Use Webinars in Your University Marketing Strategy

With so much competition among other institutions, it’s no wonder that colleges and universities have to pull out all the stops to attract prospective applicants.

Webinars don’t require too much effort, which makes them the perfect marketing tool. Plus they can reach vast audiences, which is ideal for generating leads. Or In this case, enrollees!

Exactly how though, can universities effectively use webinars as a marketing tool?

Heads down, let’s get studying! Here’s three distinct ways:

A Vital Cog In The Recruitment Process

Whilst you’re taking prospective applicants along the journey known as the recruitment process, marketing tools like webinars are an effective way to sway their opinions in favour of your college/university!

Contributing something different than just the standard prospectuses, although they can be included as a downloadable link in our Virtual Open Houses (shameless plug…), webinars are a relatively different way to target your audience.

By incorporating a mix of different elements like:

• Guest speakers like lecturers, alumni etc.

• Images of the campus

• Video clips

• Interactive elements (Q&A sessions, Live Chat)

You can present something a little different from your competitor institutions.

Now, we know you won’t be the only university that runs online events, so it’s up to you to include content that will make you stand out from the crowd.

If you and your team put a significant amount of effort to portray your event as one not to be missed and something different from all the others, webinars can be a crucial marketing tool for your academic institution!

A Tool For International Expansion

In the UK during the 2015-16 academic year, just under 20% of students in higher education were from abroad (HESA, 2017).

That’s a large demographic, meaning there’s a huge potential audience to reach for future recruitment of international students.

Ideal for global audiences, webinars are a vital weapon to have in your institutions marketing arsenal.

Like we always say, they can be viewed anytime, anywhere (with an internet connection!), making them a flexible and functional marketing tool.

While we’ve already extolled the benefits of running online events such as Virtual Open Houses/Days, a case can also be made for running specific webinars for international students.

It’s the perfect opportunity to engross them in the world of your university and a way to get to know them, make them feel welcome and build a rapport with potential applicants.

If the college/university you’re representing truly wants to expand globally, webinars should not be overlooked as a way to do so!

A Gateway To Repurpose Content

Don’t think for a minute that once a presentation has been created by you and your team, that that’s it when it comes to the usefulness of the content.

Besides keeping the content alive by uploading it On Demand, you can harvest some of the content within your session for other marketing uses.

Webinars are brilliant, in that the materials within it, both audio and visual, can be repurposed to create new, alternative formats of marketing content.

A university (and anyone who runs a webinar for that matter) could conduct an event, then utilise the materials in it to create all manner of new pieces of content, including:

• Blogs

• Infographics

• Podcasts

• Social Posts

• Video Clips

See them as a utility piece of content. In other words, they are a useful tool that has many more useful purposes for the materials within it than simply just the initial webinar!