A Digital Marketing Audit’s Advantages for Business Schools

June 2 , 2023

Business schools now more than ever need to have a strong, all-encompassing digital marketing presence in these difficult times where it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit qualified prospective students. According to Statista,, from July 2021 indicated that there were approximately 5,288 universities in India. With 3,216 universities, the United States was second only to Indonesia, which had 2,595 universities.
It can be crucial to make sure your institution is actively generating engagement across numerous digital media, targeting the relevant target markets, and accurately tracking and assessing your progress. Doing so can help you maintain stable enrollment rates and cost-effective recruitment strategies.
Investing in a digital marketing auditing app can assist business schools in improving and optimising their approaches in a number of different areas, as well as adjusting their strategies to the current environment, even if it can be a time- and resource-intensive procedure.
We just touch on a handful of the most significant issues that a digital marketing audit can assist in resolving in this blog. This activity may be helpful if you believe your school falls short in any of these categories.

Refining Student Personas and Critical Messaging Using an Audit

A digital audit might be an excellent opportunity to establish target personas for your business school if you have never done so. Personas give you the ability to describe a typical member of your target audience, including their demographics, objectives, and pain areas.
Personas may assist you in creating important messages that stress why your institution and its programmes are the best option for your target audience. By incorporating personas into your content across all of your digital channels, you can better address their needs.
If you currently have personas, an auditing app is a fantastic chance to see if they need to be improved to better meet your goals. It’s possible that many business schools have personas that need to be modified in order to represent the most recent reality of their target audience. For instance, you might draw prospects from other areas or more overseas students than you used to. Your prospects may have previously been younger, but they are now more likely to be older, more seasoned professionals.
Even if the changes haven’t been as significant, your school might have gathered more data throughout the years, such as market research or polls of existing students, that can be used to give your characters greater dimension. You might also ask your admissions team for feedback on their interactions with students and the typical queries and worries they come across.
You can compile and examine this data during your audit, detecting any discrepancies or problems, and then update your personas and the important messages that go with them as necessary.

Assessing the Online Traffic of Your Business School

Once your personas have been accurately identified, your school should determine whether or not it is successfully attracting that audience online. Examining your website traffic by geography in Google Analytics is a smart place to start. Depending on the size of the audience you’re aiming for, you can divide this up by nation, city, or even area.
Also, you want to assess each of these locations’ conversion rates because they might offer some insightful information. For instance, in the aforementioned example, nations outside of the USA report significant traffic but low conversion rates. If the school improved its website to better cater to international audiences, this might be improved.
Your school could also be in for some welcome surprises. It’s likely that after conducting such a thorough analysis of traffic and conversions, you will find that some sites have incredibly high conversion rates in comparison to the volume of traffic they are bringing in. You might have found a highly valuable new audience if these are markets you had previously ignored.
You should look at where your traffic is coming from online in addition to where it is coming from globally. You’ll be able to determine which channels are most effective at bringing interested prospects to your website by looking at your website traffic by source.
You may decide to alter your strategy or allocate more resources to underperforming channels, such as particular social networks, based on your results and your goals. As an alternative, you can decide that it’s more sensible to focus your additional efforts on your current high-performing channels in order to increase your return on investment.
Even while it’s a good idea to regularly check all of this data, doing so within the framework of an audit will enable you to identify connections that you previously missed and unearth deeper meanings in the data.

You Can More Precisely Monitor Conversions with the Assistance of a Business School Digital Marketing Audit

To assess the health of your online presence, you can track almost any action on your website. Your school can set up goals in Google Analytics to track everything from inconsequential signs of interest and engagement (micro conversions) to significant turning points in the enrollment process (macro conversions).
A few of the conversions that your school could find useful to monitor are as follows:
• Fulfilment of Forms
• Registration for Events
• Subscriptions to Newsletters
• Conversions from Marketing Initiatives
• Brochures And Other Materials Can Be Downloaded.
• Views of pages and videos
• A CTA click online submission of applications

Digital Marketing Audit for Business Schools

You may clarify what these objectives should be with the aid of a digital marketing auditing app for business schools. Analytics specialists may thoroughly examine your website to find and classify various conversion chances and develop a complete plan that your team can use moving forward.
A chance to find mistakes and technological problems that can result in erroneous tracking can also be found during an audit. For instance, the effectiveness of cross-domain tracking is a typical issue at various business schools. Your website can be located on a subdomain of the larger institution if your school is a part of a university.
If not configured appropriately, visitors that go from the subdomain to the main site and vice versa may be mistakenly classified as direct or referral traffic, which would cause your reporting to be inaccurate about the sources of your leads.
The improper use of tracking codes and the incorrect classification of Google Analytics goals, such as goals that are being tracked as event goals (such as a website click or form submission) but would be more accurately tracked as a destination goal, are other common problems that audits can uncover (reaching a specific URL such as a thank you page).

The Results of an Audit May Benefit Your School’s SEO

The ranking of your school may be impacted by a number of characteristics taken into account by search algorithms, including page architecture, inbound and outbound links, page speed, and mobile friendliness.
Business schools may benefit from conducting in-depth analyses of every factor that might be affecting how visible they appear in critical searches. Your school can create a list of priority keywords that it should be focusing on as a starting point. These can include keywords that are exclusive to your programmes, regional keywords, or any other targeted keywords that may be highly relevant to the audience you are aiming for.
Your team can analyse how well it is performing in particular searches with a set list of target keywords and plan how to improve.
A complete list of on-page and off-page SEO recommendations that you can adopt to improve your chances of attaining higher visibility is provided by an audit by SEO specialists, which may assist you in this process. Some typical suggestions might be:
• Page titles and Meta descriptions for improvement
• Making header tags (H1s, H2s, etc.) more effective and making sure they are used properly
• Turning 404 error pages around
• Deleting or changing faulty links on your website
• Compressing, delaying, and removing items on some pages to speed up loading
• New content creation for SEO goals
Despite their seeming complexity, the bulk of these problems can frequently be resolved quickly and could have a significant impact on your visibility.

Assessing the Rivals of Your Business School

Comparing your efforts to those of your primary competitors might be one of the most insightful aspects of a digital audit. You may evaluate how much visibility and interaction other institutions are producing, what strategies they are using, and how robust their presence is in relation to your own by examining each channel individually.
The outcomes can be extremely illuminating and pave the way for both modest and significant changes that your school might make. For instance, you might discover that your competitors outrank your school in a lot of important searches or have greater visibility in particular target markets.
With this knowledge, you may decide to devote additional resources to enhancing organic SEO, or you may decide to support your efforts with paid search advertising to increase your chances of quickly connecting with potential customers.
Also, you might be able to gain insight from the innovative digital channel strategies of your rivals. For instance, they might exhibit thought leadership when writing blogs and news stories, have a more user-friendly website, or just have a more active, engaged network on LinkedIn. In these circumstances, your school may be able to borrow ideas from their efforts and modify them for use in your own initiatives.

Conclusion

A marketing automation expert-led audit can identify issues with reporting, workflows, and other more complex marketing automation features that could be impeding your ability to move prospects through the enrollment process. For instance, many business schools employ extremely intricate email workflows for specific campaigns, which frequently contain little errors that could prevent them from operating as intended. However if you are looking for auditing app for professional report templates then get in touch with UrAudits.