What Makes LinkedIn Ideal for Higher Education Marketers
When marketing something as significant as higher education, the context of your messaging is just as important as the content
The decision to pursue a higher education is different from other consumer choices. The path an aspiring graduate takes from consideration to enrollment is complex, lengthy, and involves a multitude of factors influencing every step of the process. It’s not a funnel so much as a maze.
Nonetheless, many higher education marketers are forced to promote their institutions in ways that don’t match the highly idiosyncratic nature of the higher education enrollment journey. Faced with pressure to deliver leads, higher education marketers end up sacrificing quality over quantity and miss opportunities to provide the right marketing and messaging during critical phases of a prospect’s journey.
With its ability to offer insights and reliable data about an audience already focused on their careers, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to help higher education marketers partner more closely with their admissions teams and recruit high-quality prospects.
“What stands out on LinkedIn is really the ability to target based on detailed demographics that you don’t get in the other platforms,” said James Dressing, the CEO of Klik Media, a marketing agency with a specialty in higher education. “LinkedIn has a very easy platform to use to target the right people, the right background, and does so transparently still as well.
LinkedIn also stands apart from other platforms in that prospective students expect to engage on LinkedIn with institutions at all stages of their decision making. From broadly targeted advertisements aimed at establishing awareness, to pinpoint messaging to veterans in a particular town considering nursing school, LinkedIn supplies the insights and data for successful higher education campaigns.
Jackie Weissman, Associate Director of Digital Marketing for the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University, credited the data LinkedIn supplies. “The data on LinkedIn is so much more reliable,” she said. “It’s data we can count on as we market all of our degree programs. We can see it works”.
Another reason it works is that people come to LinkedIn for specific reasons. They want to evolve their careers, they want accurate information about peers and their fields, they are there to see what’s possible professionally. This creates a platform that’s ideally suited to the various messaging a higher education institution produces as targeted performance marketing as well as deep brand building.
“LinkedIn allows us to reach prospects with the right message at exactly the right moment,” said Claudio Ludovisi, Pepperdine’s Assistant Dean for Marketing, Strategy, and Corporate Relations. “LinkedIn gives us the proper context we need for our content. We know prospects trust LinkedIn.”