Right from BYJU’s to Unacademy, India’s online and digital education sector has seen fierce competition. There is no doubt that the opportunity in Indian edtech is massive and the top edtech startups are eyeing the same pie.
In 2023 alone, India’s edtech startups have garnered more than $1.5 billion. This is as much as the startups have raised in the last five years together. India’s edtech startups raised $1.6 billion between 2014 and 2019.
Now, 2023 is almost over and we will be heading into 2024 very soon. At this time, when everything has already gone digital, the best way for any education brand to impress students is to use digital marketing.
The target audience for any education brand is the students, and most of them are teenagers. Thus, to get their attention, education brands have to engage them online.
The prospective student population is already looking online for a lot of educational and training courses. There is no denying the fact that students spend more of their time on the internet, smartphones, and social media.
This is why advertisements and online promotions are so important to get the attention of the students. Also, most of the parents nowadays judge the schools and educational centers based on the website, its online presence, ratings, and reviews.
The internet is ideally the most favored place of this generation, especially for education in 2023-2024. Also, expatriates and outstation students have no other option than depending on the internet for college admissions and education.
That being said, what could be the ideal digital marketing tactics for an education brand, especially in 2023 and 2024? The following section of the blog will give you the details.
| SL NO. | Digital Marketing Elements | Brief Details & Stats of digital marketing in education |
| 1. | Visual Content | 45% of the marketers are of the opinion that visual content works best as a digital marketing element in the education sector. |
| 2. | Podcasting | 17% of marketers agree that podcasting is going to be an important element in digital marketing in 2023. |
| 3. | Social media marketing | 71% of the online customers are interested in buying something if it is referred on social media. |
| 4. | Mobile marketing | On average, Indian adults spend almost 2 hours 30 minutes on mobile every day. |
| 5. | Search engine optimization | More than 85% of the consumers refer to Google Search results before choosing an education institution or brand. |
| 6. | Email marketing | More than 50% of the brands and businesses use different automation tools for brand awareness through email marketing. |
| 7. | Video marketing | Landing pages with videos increase conversions more than 85%. |
What are the best digital marketing tactics of an education brand in 2024?
Just like any other business, education institutions need to market their brands as well. At present, there are a lot of education brands and you have to compete with them to garner more students. Thus, you have to create balanced and effective campaigns that will set you apart from the crowd and for all the right reasons.
The most important aspect of using different digital marketing tactics for educational brands is, to figure out which marketing channel works best for you. There are a lot of digital marketing strategies available for the educational sector. However, not all of them will be suitable for you. DO NOT try to engage in all forms of digital marketing to achieve equal presence across all platforms.
It doesn’t work that way and also it will become more expensive unnecessarily. All the digital marketing activities you engage in should be based on the most effective channels to reach the right target audience, at the right time in the right way.
For instance, you might have a large number of followers on Twitter, but if you gain more engagement on Instagram or through email marketing, then you should focus on Instagram and email marketing.
That being said let us look at the best digital marketing tactics for education brands.
1. Video marketing
A picture is worth a thousand words! Imagine how effective a video can be. Nowadays, people are more likely to watch a short video of 2-3 minutes. If you can create an insightful and engaging video, it is highly likely that your target audience will watch it till the end of it.
Most of the education brands like BYJU’s and Unacademy use video to engage students in academics. Video marketing is the most effective digital marketing strategy for education brands. It is based on the simple fact that humans are visual creatures.
Thus, they absorb visual content more effectively. Also, the young generation watches and learns from a lot of videos on their smartphones. They do it on a daily basis. The best part is, creating a video is not that difficult either. There are a lot of educational elements on which you can create videos and share them.
92% of marketers say that video marketing is an important part of a marketing strategy.
2. User-generated content
In general, the consumers don’t trust what a business has to say, especially when it comes directly. One way an educational brand can use this is through customer reviews and testimonials. If you can get the present and ex-students to recommend your education brand, a lot more potential students are likely to consider you.
Along with the testimonials, you can also share the user-generated content on social media channels, like Instagram and Facebook stories, posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms as well. This is how an education brand can make the best use of user-generated content.
3. Optimal Use of Social Media
Almost every individual is on social media these days. Thus, education brands need to use Social Media to nab the attention of their audience. An education brand can use social media to offer helpful information regarding their programs, share information about their campus, create polls, Q&As with faculties, organize live sessions, host webinars and do a lot more. You can also create live streams of on-campus events to garner more interest in your school.
4. Influencer Marketing
While using social media marketing strategies, get in touch with social media influencers to promote your services. Social media influencers are the people that have a large number of social media followers. Make sure you get in touch with those influencers that can have an impact on your target audience. They are very much active on different social media platforms. Thus, they can share your content with their followers to increase your brand exposure and awareness.
5. Create a mobile marketing strategy
Mobile, especially smartphones are available for pretty much every student these days. Thus, you have to think about keeping your marketing efforts mobile-friendly. The first thing to do is to make sure you have a mobile-friendly website because most of your target audience will browse the web with their smartphones.
In terms of internet use and access, mobile users have surpassed the desktop or laptop users a long time ago. Thus, if your site doesn’t support mobile platforms, then you will miss out on a lot of potential students.
6. Use segmented email marketing
When you are using email marketing to garner the attention of your target audience, you will need to convince them to visit your online platform. Thus, you cannot send them some random generic email that you might send everyone. This will not help you.
Instead, focus on customizing the email list according to the trends and preferences. Track your audience when they visit your website. Use that information to personalize emails so that every individual can receive relevant emails.
7. Link Building
Link Building is a useful strategy for education brands. It is an SEO strategy. At present, the quality of web pages is not limited to the content alone. The average time spent on a web page also depends on the backlinks of your website.
If your website doesn’t have any relevant backlinks, then the user will just skim through the website information. They will not want to stay on your website and jump into other sites. However, when you offer a lot of backlinks and offer access to more information, you can increase user engagement.
Thus, it is important to increase backlinks to your website and retain web page visitors.
8. Google Ads
You will be running ads. Thus, consider the platforms which most of your target audience will use. Sort them according to the age group, location, demographics, language, and customize your Search and Display ads accordingly.
It is important to consider the managed Ad placement. This is a process of placing Google Ads on relevant web pages that are related to your program. For instance, if you want to promote the latest online courses, then it is better to place your ads on websites that are related to education or academics.
Therefore, it will increase the number of potential visitors to that course. Also, you can display the ads on the web pages that are dedicated to higher education and career advancement. In this way, the managed ad placement will help in regulating the marketing budget. Also, you can reach your target audience easily.
9. On-page SEO
SEO is one of the most important elements of any successful digital marketing. Thus, you cannot miss out on that. SEO will enhance your brand visibility on the search engines. Consider different tricks like using affluent title tags, correct meta descriptions, optimal keyword density, internal links, refined headers, and more.
10. Garner Media Attention
This is one of the most effective ways to promote your educational brand. To stay on the news, you have to understand the latest developments in the higher education sector. Follow the latest news and act upon it to stay on-trend. For instance, if you follow the latest trends and encourage your faculty to create their opinions in a pitch, it will help in leveraging the faculty expertise and get more attention from the media.
Examples of brands that used digital marketing to grow
1. BYJU’s
When it comes to online education brands, BYJU’s is one of the fastest-growing brands. Initially, BYJU’s started with TV ads and commercials. Their first TV ad aired in 2017 during a match between India and Pakistan. It was a huge hit!
At present, they use both TVC’s and online ads for promoting their education brand. This year, in 2023, to garner more attention, BYJU’s unveiled a brand new series of TVCs, featuring Bollywood actor Sharukh Khan.
In the light of COVID-19, BYJU’s offered the complete app content for free. Also, they included live classes from highly recognized teachers. Here is the series of TVC’s created by BYJU’s to engage their audience in 2023.
i) The best way to learn at home
ii) Understanding the concepts easily from BYJU’s
iii) Learning from movie-like videos from BYJU’s
iv) Visualise and learn with BYJU’s
Thus, it is pretty much evident that BYJU’s invested heavily in TVCs. It is one of the most important ways to garner attention from your target audience. They used the TVCs to post videos on different online platforms and social media platforms. This brings us to video marketing – another impactful element to engage with your target audience.
As an online education brand, BYJU’s used video marketing in the best way possible. One of the interesting things in the video marketing of BYJU’s is, at the end of every video, Sharukh Khan says, “Download the app now”.
This has been consistent with every video from BYJU’s. It helps in generating the leads and the leads are not cold leads because customers are already aware of the company and product. The leads come across the country and they have established sales teams throughout the country.
Another interesting initiative from BYJU’s is they brought up their new online “BYJU’s Classes” to the parents throughout the country. Launched just recently, the TVC focuses on the importance of personalized after-school learning for helping the students in learning from the comfort of their homes.
Other digital marketing strategies from BYJU’s
Apart from video marketing, they also used other ways of digital marketing to grow amidst the COVID-19. Here are the following digital marketing strategies used by BYJU’s.
BYJU’s used Google Ads on branded keywords.
Also, they used Google Display and Shopping Ads.
They used Facebook Ads for booking more online counseling sessions directly from Facebook.
2. Unacademy
Launched in 2015, Unacademy brings expert educators to connect with millions of students for offering quality education online. Started as a YouTube Channel, Unacademy is a very popular online education brand in India.
Coming to the marketing strategies and media mix of Unacademy, the majority of their advertising is spent on Television. Also, the digital and OTT platforms are popular in the metro cities, they use them too as their digital marketing ads.
However, 60% of Unacademy ads are spent on TV because Tier, 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 cities prefer TV, 15% of the ad spends is towards digital and the remaining is for the Print Media, Cinema, Radio, and OOH platforms.
According to Karan Shroff, the VP Marketing of Unacademy, “I think one of the challenges across the Ed-tech industry would be changing the mindset of moving people to learn online. A larger section of students across the country are hesitant or have an element of fear to clear their doubts. Online education platforms help the student to overcome that fear.“
Digital Marketing strategies used by Unacademy
To continue growing in 2023 amidst the COVID-19 and helping students to educate, Karan Shroff, the VP of Marketing of Unacademy believes that podcasting is the most viable form of digital marketing to engage the audience with maintaining social distancing.
Unacademy partnered with Gaana for their online campaign, “Let’s Crack it with Cyrus Broachha”. This is a series of podcasts for motivating students with Cyrus Broacha and his special guests.
According to Karan Shroff, “Podcasting has found new relevance in the current world and is turning out to be the most viable form of new content that can be created while maintaining social distancing.”
Within the Let’s Crack It initiative, Unacademy also created a Legends on Unacademy campaign. This was an initiative to bring the legends like Bret Lee, Brian Lara, Jonty Rhodes, and Shashi Tharoor, Virat Kohli, Anushka Sharma to motivate students, and share life lessons with students on different topics. These topics included fitness (both mental and physical), working under pressure, leading the attack, and moving towards their dreams.
Also, Unacademy offered 20,000 free online classes for students looking for preparation for different exams. The free classes were offered on different examinations like Bank Exams, UPSC, Railway Exams, and more. This was an initiative to motivate the spirit of learners and encourage them to stay determined even during the COVID-19 crisis.
Optimizing digital marketing strategies by Unacademy
Along with bringing a lot of initiatives, Unacademy also focused on mobile marketing. They started as a YouTube channel and created an app when the followers started to increase. They also used their website along with the app. This made it easy for the company to push the subscription-based model to the users of the app.
Also, they created an Unacademy Educator’s app. This app made things easier for educators to record lectures on their phones. Unlike BYJU’s that focused heavily on creating attention capturing content, Unacademy focused on making things easier on the educator’s end.
A lot of contributors and educators are young pass-outs or teachers that have recently completed the exams successfully. This has helped in keeping the cost of content creation low.
Coming to the online ads from Unacademy, they created a short yet very engaging video relating studies with the IPL 2023. The video ad has created a stir and it gained 6.8 million views on Twitter.
Apart from this, Unacademy also continued with the OOH campaigns amidst the COVID-19 crisis. The Bangalore based education portal used highly noticeable print displays in different regions in India.
3.Toppr
Launched in 2013, Toppr is a popular name amongst educational brands in India. Within just one year of its launch, Toppr attained more than 40,000 students with 100% month-over-month growth. Toppr applied different digital marketing tactics.
Considering the Indian edtech startups, Toppr is only behind BYJU’s in monthly traffic. It is valued at $150-200 million after its $35 million funding in December 2018.
Use of digital marketing strategies by Toppr
They used email marketing and SMS marketing to share contextually relevant learning content with their existing users and potential users as well.
They used customer behavior tracking that adds to understand the learning requirements of the users. This also helped them in creating tailored learning content for the users.
With the real-time data, Toppr created content and sent it to the highly targeted audience that would help them in their progress. This helped in their customer retention.
Toppr focused on maintaining massive data points in one place that helped them in managing communication through multiple channels that include email, SMS, in-app notifications and push notifications.
Along with the targeted push and in-app campaigns, they also started the refer and earn campaign that increased the traffic to 35% on web pages. They focused on the design elements of the website to segment the users based on their actions from real-time data.
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, Toppr announced free access to the live classes and video classes till the school’s resume. This resulted in a 50% growth in subscribers of the Live Classes along with a 30% growth in traffic.
Toppr initiated an “Ask Doubts” module for the students to help them with their doubts in academics.
Topper also rolled out a new campaign called “Better Learning, Better Results”. The campaign emphasized Toppr’s learning methodology in three key areas, the live classes, the adaptive practice, and the ‘ask doubts’ segment. This is aimed at helping students to learn in a better way.
