Increase Your Leads. Enhance Your Impact.
It seems like a simple enough equation …
- People are looking for higher education to better their lives.
- You have just the kinds of programs they need.
- And the digital landscape has made it easier than ever to connect.
Recruitment and marketing should be a breeze, right?
So why is lead generation still a struggle?
Why do your performance goals continue to elude you?
Why do you find yourself wasting hours of precious time staring at social media platforms and squiggles on analytics charts instead of getting to focus on enrolling, supporting, and developing your students?
The truth is, there is a lot (seriously, a lot) of noise out there, and trying to master all the aspects of digital marketing to reach high-quality prospective students takes time, expertise, and resources that you might not have to spare.
You Need a Higher Education Marketing Agency Who Knows How to Take Your Goals and Run with Them
You Need a Partner!
If you’ve tried to manage your own enrollment marketing campaign in the past, you’re probably well aware of how often and how quickly things in the digital advertising sphere can change. It can be impossible to know where to prioritize your budget, what kind of channel mix fits your unique goals, and how to create real connections with students who want what your school has to offer.
As a higher education marketing agency, EdwardsSchoen prioritizes two key things:
- Understanding your ideal students, the ones who will make it from enrollment to graduation
- Utilizing accurate, real-time data behind all of our decision-making and campaign-building
Your school is not like any other school. Your unique selling points (USPs) are particular to you. That’s why we start every new partnership with an extensive analysis of your markets, programs, demographics, competition, and previous campaigns.
The data game is everything in marketing these days — big data, small data, analytics, statistics, and, subsequently, being able to draw creative, actionable insights from all of these pieces. But more than that, at ES, we go one step further than the numbers to create a story that will resonate with your target audience.
ES Marketing Services
- SEO UX/UI/CRO
- Content Marketing
- Website Development
- Paid Digital Media, Search and Display
- Traditional Media
- Retargeting
- Reputation Management
- Social Listening
- Email Marketing
- Text Marketing
Higher Ed Marketing
Outside the Box
We’re a boutique agency with large-agency experience.
Founders Aaron Edwards and Jeremy Schoen have built their careers in higher education marketing and have assembled a team of professionals with a combined 100+ years of experience working with education clients.
It’s all about nimbleness and hard work.
Our whole higher education marketing agency was designed to be dynamic and flexible, quick to respond to our partners’ questions and concerns. As a team, we share a “grind” mentality that means we do whatever it takes to innovate, support, and guide our clients.
You believe you deserve to know where your money is going; so do we.
Accountability and transparency are key pillars of the ES philosophy. We prioritize regular check-ins, easy-to-digest reporting features, and shared dashboards, so you can easily see how we’re optimizing your budget and hitting your goals.
We’re making our connections work for you.
We’re a Google Premier Partner, a Meta Marketing Partner, and a Microsoft Advertising Partner, as well as a partner of CSPEN, MAACS, FAPSC, ACCET, CAPPS, ABHES, and CECU.
No higher education marketing agency can deliver a single magic bullet that will help every client achieve their perfect performance metrics, and honestly, you shouldn’t want that for yourself either. You deserve campaigns and action items that are individualized to your school.
That being said, at ES, we do believe in having a strong, foundational process that breaks down the steps we take with each and every new partner:
Step 1: Understanding your goals
Step 2: Digging into the data
Step 3: Delivering creative solutions
Step 4: Building on the results
Real Results
The Proof is in the Numbers
We’re not just all talk here; we’ve brought receipts.
As a higher education marketing agency, ES delivers real results for our clients.
%
Paid Digital Growth YOY
%
Of All Clients’ Budgeted Plan
%
Existing Customer Retention Rate
But let’s get even more specific. What exactly have we done for our clients in the past that has led to actual, tangible results?
Case Study #1
Website Management
The Challenge
Stagnant website performance, with flat website traffic and form submissions have decreased by around 8%.
The Action Plan
A full review and audit of the website, from which we created a website management plan and actionable items:
- Updated title tags and meta descriptions that ensured they were uniform and consistent across the entire site
- Each title tag and meta description contained at least one keyword pertaining to that page
- Implemented XML sitemap and Robots.txt file
- This showed Google what pages were most important and which pages not to crawl
- Increased site speed by optimizing site photos and redundant HTML code
- Keyword research and a full content review on pertinent pages to complete a content refresh to ensure success
- Introduction of additional contact forms to maximize traffic to submission opportunities
- Review of broken internal links, orphaned content, high-friction (many clicks to reach) pages
- Heat mapping analysis followed by ongoing CRO activity to drive conversion
The Results
Double-digit percentage increase in traffic year-over-year, as well as double-digit percentage increase in form submissions.
Case Study #2
Paid Digital Campaign
The Challenge
Increased spend but decreased results in client’s paid search campaign, with overall cost per inquiries increasing by almost 40%.
The Action Plan
A full audit of the paid search campaign outlined specific areas and opportunities for improvement:
- A thorough update of the negative keywords to ensure we were spending our marketing dollars in the most relevant manner
- Gradually reduced reliance on broad-match keywords while increasing coverage of exact- and phrase-match keywords
- Updated ad copy and landing page content to highlight our partner’s offerings and better align with their target audiences
- Addressed ad strength and reviewed destination URL strategies for 1:1:1 content
- Reviewed impression share metrics to create strategies for improvement
The Results
Immediate improvement, with significant reduction in client spend while increasing alignment in overall market, increasing conversion, and reducing cost per inquiry.
Case Study #3
Overall Enrollment Decline
The Challenge
Two years of declining enrollment and concerns with their overall marketing strategy.
The Action Plan
A full review of our partner, including offerings, DMAs, competitive landscape, marketing mix, messaging, data integrity — all of which resulted in a new marketing strategy to align with the partner’s goals and initiatives
- The focus of the previous campaign had been largely limited to affiliate marketing and paid search. ES reduced the overall spend allocation on affiliate from 70% to 20%. We also focused our affiliate dollars to the sources with metrics that aligned with our partner’s desired acquisition expectations
- We added a paid social campaign that had been previously tested and cut based on performance. The new campaign was built according to ES best practices and delivered results that aligned with our partner’s expectations from a CPI and conversion standpoint
- ES updated the existing paid search campaign to ensure it was optimized. We were able to increase our presence and spend while reducing the overall cost per inquiry
- ES also created landing pages for paid digital traffic instead of sending this to the website
- The website was not an area of emphasis historically and was generally not optimized to allow for organic traffic and conversion growth. ES implemented a website management campaign that has seen website traffic and inquiry flow increase by over 20%
- A refresh of creative and messaging was deployed to better speak to our target audience(s)
- Lastly, we allocated a small percentage of budget to focus on overall market awareness
The Results
Enrollment is up 22% over five start cycles, while marketing spend has remained flat year-over-year.
Drive Enrollment. Build Your Brand. Exceed Your Expectations.
Make EdwardsSchoen Your Higher Education Marketing Agency Partner
Ready to maximize your performance goals? Find students who are the right fit for your school?
We got you. Have a unique challenge? An outside-the-box school or program? Even better.
You deserve a true partner in higher education marketing,
one who treats your goals as seriously as you do, and we’re ready to do the work.
Contact us to schedule a call, so we can talk about your needs,
challenges, and opportunities, and how our agency can work for you.
