One of the most common frustrations I hear from education marketers is this:
You know how to make webpages convert.
You understand how to talk to prospective students.
But others within the organisation won’t let you make the changes you know are needed.
- Admissions insists on having legalistic language. Not because it is clearer, but because it sounds more official and prestigious
- Your data protection officer insists that you cannot collect prospective students’ email addresses and phone numbers
- Faculty academics resist adding student testimonials, while pushing for highly detailed curriculum information on the course page.
And I could go on.
If you work at a smaller school, such as a language school, the same tension plays out in a smaller group. It may not be between departments, but between people with different views on what the website should do.
These different views are fertile ground for conflict. And different organisations deal with that conflict in different ways.
The short term fix: everyone gets their own page
The quickest way to resolve conflict around the website is to divide and conquer.
As a marketer, you get to decide what the landing pages for your campaigns look like. Admissions takes control of the admissions pages. Faculties take responsibility for their own faculty websites, sometimes on separate subdomains.
It sounds like freedom.
Now you don’t have to fight over every comma.
But this solution is far from ideal.
Why?
Your audience doesn’t care about who owns the page. They come to your website with questions to answer and tasks to complete.
If the website is divided between departments without central oversight, the result is duplication, inconsistencies and fragmentation.
You can’t have helpful pages for specific personas, such as, say, prospective students from India, because what they need cuts right across departmental boundaries.
To make your website Genuinely Helpful, someone needs to take responsibility for the whole.
In larger organisations, this could be a team. Within that team, specific team members can take care of specific personas or sections of the student journey.
Of course, this team still needs to work closely with everyone involved. Course directors can still update course information directly. Admissions still needs to provide accurate information. Data protection still needs to be respected.
But the website should not simply mirror the internal structure of the organisation.
How will the team weigh the different priorities?
By putting the audience first.
Audience research and web analytics should guide how the page looks. And don’t overthink audience research. A few interviews with prospective students can already reveal a lot.
Why bother?
Moving from the short-term fix to the long-term solution is painful.
So why go through the trouble?
First, a disjointed website hurts your recruitment.
You see this most clearly when you attend a student fair and check your website together with the prospective students you’re speaking to.
If they can’t find answers to their questions, they may still choose another institution, no matter how much you spent travelling to the fair. No matter how promising the conversation seemed.
Second, it’s more efficient.When everyone gets their own spot on the website, many people end up reinventing the wheel. Often, these people are not full-time marketers.
Even if they do a good job, it will take much more time than if a specialist creates the framework and works with others to keep it accurate.
There are many well documented best practices for making your website more helpful. I cover many of them in my book Genuinely Helpful: A practical guide to effective university websites.
You may also have in-house SEO and UX experts who already know what should happen. In fact, you may already have a pretty good idea of the main bottlenecks on your website.
But at its core, this is not a matter of technical expertise.
It’s about buy-in.
You need to set aside time to listen to everyone’s concerns. Not just to make people “feel heard”, but to actually understand what they are trying to protect or achieve.
Everyone serves students in a different way. Yes, even the data protection officer.
In my experience, this works best as an in-person workshop, or series of workshops spaced out over time.
It can also help when a neutral person from outside leads these workshops.
That is what I do in my workshop:Â Make your website Genuinely Helpful.
Guus
This article first appeared as a Field Note
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