Webinars are mostly associated with marketing and sales, as a tool used to promote and sell products and services. Can an educational institution make use of them to support enrolment? Yes, it can. From this post you will learn how to take advantage of webinars to encourage new students to enrol to your school or university and what kind of webinars your audience will find interesting.
How can a school / university and its prospective students benefit from webinars?
- With webinars, you can reach out to your target audience even if they are scattered across the country or the world. You are able to communicate your message to people who live too far to come to e.g. the university’s open days. Attending your webinar, they save both time and money and you stand apart from your competitors who are not innovative enough to host online events for prospective students.
- Webinars give you more possibilities to present your school or university and its offer in a much engaging way than a leaflet, a website or even a promotional video. Both teachers and students can host a webinar. Teachers can talk about requirements and benefits enrolling on their course offers, while students can give prospective colleagues a handful of useful tips based on their own experience.
- Webinars are, by definition, interactive so they enable two-way communication. You can use multimedia resources to engage your audience and answer their questions on chat or during a Q&A session. In this way, you can easily explain any enrolment-related issues and clear your attendees’ doubts.
- You can record your webinars and upload them to your website. You can share full-time recordings to let prospective students access them any time they are looking for information about your institution. You can also use fragments as teasers to promote your upcoming online events.
- Hosting webinars, you convince your audience you follow the latest trends. Many of your prospective students are the so called digital natives. For them, the Internet is a natural and the first source of knowledge. For sure, they have already attended a couple of webinars so they may be much more willing to attend one of yours than to take a look at your printed leaflets.
What kind of webinar can you create?
In webinars for prospective students you can:
- Present your school or university, as if you were inviting your audience to open days online.
- Talk about a faculty or a course. The head of the faculty or a member of staff teaching the course can be a co-presenter. You can also invite one the students to share their experience.
- Take prospective students through the entry process and explain each step – from documents they are supposed to submit, to forms they need to fill in, to all entry requirements they have to comply with.
- Let your audience learn about things they can get engaged in apart from studying – sports clubs, students’ associations, drama courses, etc.
- Present services and facilities available for students at the campus – accommodation options, health services, where to eat and drink, where to turn to for a scholarship or a loan, etc.
- Run a sample lesson to show your audience what it will look like when they finally become your students.
Conclusion
Webinars are a great tool educational institutions can use to encourage prospective students to enrol. They let you reach out to a wide audience and present your offer in an engaging way. Your audience knows webinars and they appreciate them as a perfect way of learning new things. So make webinars a part of an overall promotional strategy for your university or school, and you may see crowds of prospective students willing to apply next time you open a course.