We’ve all seen the news: The big-name schools are receiving more application submissions than ever before. But what these applying students and their families might not realize is that those same schools will not be admitting more students, and there will be plenty of rejection, waitlist, and deferral letters hitting homes and inboxes this month. If you are among the professionals at the some 2,500 smaller, regional schools throughout the country, you might be asking yourself, “What does that mean for me?” A lot of those non-engaged names on your list may soon be looking for an attractive financial aid package at a school close to home. Now’s the time to be sending out engagement communications and action-prompting tools for high school seniors. As examples, Spark451 utilizes tactics like Prospective Student Surveys, Express Applications, and web retargeting ads to re-engage those students and drive in late-cycle applications.

School counselors are just as stressed out as you are, or perhaps even more. They are the direct link to the families of your prospective students and can be your greatest ally right now, especially if students are not getting into the schools to which they applied. You’ve built strong relationships with these colleagues over years, so don’t let COVID get in the way of checking in on your friends.

Students are eager for the traditional college experience, on campus and in the classroom. Give them hope by releasing your fall plans as soon as you can. Reassure students, and their families, that their experience at your school will have some sense of normalcy. The best way to do this would be to utilize video assets to show them what your on-campus experience was like before COVID. Also, plan homecoming events now, as alumni will wish to get back on campus as well. Your reopening will be a major event, and we can assist you with executing this.

COVID has not completely diminished, so it is important that your admitted students and their families know they will be able to visit campus safely. Anti-melt efforts for admitted students are important during this non-traditional time. Get students excited by explaining how your campus will look in the fall, and get their families excited by showing them that their child will enjoy a safe campus experience.

Spark451 is ready and well equipped to assist you in reviewing your current strategies, developing new initiatives and seeing this through to the finish line. Feel free to reach out so we can discuss specific approaches for your institution.

With the new update, whenever users on iOS 14 launch a new app, they will now receive a prompt as part of Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature that gives them a new type of control over who can access their data. The prompt will alert the user that their data may be collected, and they’ll be asked to choose whether they want to opt in or opt out of this tracking. This prompt will appear across all apps on iOS 14 devices, and we suspect that many tech-savvy users will opt out. (Until now, the default was to automatically opt in all users. In order to opt out, they had to know where to find the option in their settings.)

As an advertiser, it’s important to remember how much information these apps typically deliver about an individual’s circumstances and preferences. From web browsing history to TikTok videos watched and Facebook ads clicked, these apps track their users across the digital landscape, building demographic and psychographic profiles that can then be used in personalized ad targeting across digital platforms.

Basically, allowing users the ability to opt out of third-party tracking may limit the targeting personas we can build when we advertise. When it comes to Apple users, we’ll no longer have as robust targeting options available to use on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or on display networks. This change won’t affect those who use Android phones, which are actually more popular worldwide than Apple devices. However, these changes may require digital marketers to get more creative in their targeting for Apple users. For example, in higher education, this may mean relying on alternative targeting strategies, such as creating lookalike audiences based on prior campaign conversion data.

In addition to potential limitations in targeting, the new iOS will change the way we track conversions and report on them. Previously, Facebook utilized a 28-day conversion window and a seven-day view-through window, which means that a conversion could be counted within 28 days of a user clicking an ad or seven days of them seeing one. Now, however, Facebook is shifting to a seven-day conversion window for clicks and a one-day view-through window.

In terms of higher education, this may affect the numbers of conversions counted on select campaigns, as there’s a longer decision-making process within the vertical. For example, it may take a student a few weeks to take a high-value action, like beginning an application or making a deposit, and due to these changing rules, your Facebook ads may no longer receive credit for an action taken outside these conversion windows.

However, we don’t expect to see much change in our typical lead generation campaigns, as users usually take lower-stakes actions, such as inquiring, more quickly. In fact, based on our cumulative historical data, 99% of landing page inquiry submissions occur within the first seven days after the user has clicked an ad on Facebook or Instagram.

As if changing the conversion windows wasn’t enough, Facebook will also now require that ad domains are verified within your business manager account. This means each advertiser will have to have a verified domain in order to capture conversion actions, and if that domain isn’t verified, or if an advertiser tries to run ads to another unverified domain, those ads will not run. To ensure your domains are verified and that your ads can run, you may now require assistance from your web/IT team.

In combination with this change, Facebook is also implementing new conversion pixel policies. Previously, Facebook advertisers could track as many events (leads, clicks, applications, etc.) as they chose, but now, there will be a limit of eight per verified domain. Typically, in our higher education campaigns, we only use about three of these events, so this shouldn’t have a negative effect on our campaigns. However, it could pose an issue for institutions that utilize multiple digital vendors or that have different departments running and tracking campaigns at the same time. To help remedy this, Facebook will allow each verified domain to prioritize its eight conversion events. Though, if no action is applied, Facebook will default the ranking based on what they believe is the most relevant to your goals, based on your prior account activity.

In the last year, admissions officers have learned how to develop incredibly successful virtual events—from visits, to info sessions, and more. However, Spark451’s original research shows that as many as 60% of students won’t make a decision to enroll without stepping foot on campus in person. So, if your local regulations allow, it would be wise to look for ways to complement those virtual events with smaller, in-person events so you can give certain students an in-person encounter in a relatively safe environment. For example, you may consider inviting 15 or 20 students to meet with select faculty members based on their academic interests, or create unique opportunities for students to connect with current students or hear from campus leadership. Think of it as an a la carte approach to ASD, and let families decide.

Even if you can’t be with students in person as much as you’d like, they still need to know that you’re always there to address their concerns. However, the distance can make it challenging to identify those concerns. Enter: the survey. This simple tool will allow you to quickly gather insights about which topics and issues are most interesting for individual students so you and your team can deliver personalized follow-up in a meaningful way.

We’d recommend sending one survey to admitted students, and another one to their parents, because each audience will likely have slightly different concerns. Based on the feedback, you might want to help a prospective student get in touch with a current student for more info about day-to-day life on campus, and you might find it makes the most sense to connect a parent with an advisor from the financial aid office.

You might even choose to survey guidance counselors as well, as a way of putting out feelers to see if they have students who could be a good fit for your institution.

As you probably recall, the financial aid office was almost always the last group to shut down on Admitted Students Day. Their sessions were always packed, and they had lines of people waiting to connect with them after each one. If there’s one thing we can always count on, it’s that parents need help navigating the acronym-heavy world of FAFSA, CSS, EFC, ISR, and more.

In these uncertain times, it’s even more critical to help families understand the bottom line. Make sure to schedule a steady stream of virtual financial aid info sessions, Q&A sessions, and one-on-one meeting opportunities. Also, think about adding more easy-access resources to your website, such as informative videos and downloadable guides, so parents and students can access them whenever a question comes to mind.

With so many parents juggling working from home, childcare, remote school, and more, it’s worth going above and beyond to make sure you’re there for them whenever they’re ready for you. Often, this will be outside of your regular business hours.

Since night and weekend events have never been more important, it may be worthwhile to get creative with how you schedule your team’s work time. For example, perhaps you can give your admissions counselors the option to take a day off in the middle of the week in exchange for running a live chat feature for admitted students in late evening hours. (When I say late, I mean like 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.—when parents finally get some time to think and those questions start bubbling up.) Thinking outside the box can help ensure you meet parents where they are, while also preventing burnout on your team.

Even with the most creative scheduling tactics, it’s going to be hard to truly be there for prospective students 24/7, so it’s important to make sure that they can easily access critical resources online.

Create a one-stop-shop with everything they’ll need to know to enroll. Depending on your resources, you can either do this with a personalized microsite or by simply devoting a section of your school’s website. At the very least, be sure to include basic items like a checklist of next steps (enrollment deposit, FAFSA, orientation registration, housing and health forms, etc).

To deepen student engagement, take it a few steps further. Include residence hall room dimensions so students can start planning their packing lists. Add some content on dining hall favorites (“Don’t miss chicken parm Thursdays!”) so they can start picturing themselves on campus. Start developing team spirit by adding some game-day essentials, like the lyrics to your team’s fight song and victory song. You could even connect with your IT department to set up live cams across campus so students can get a true sense of campus life in the spring. The options are endless.

Social media is always a great way to reach students where they are. In addition to running paid campaigns designed to boost engagement among your admitted student pool, you should also make an extra effort to post organic content that will encourage them to pay attention. Try asking your admissions counselors or tour guides to share some anecdotes or interesting campus shots to liven up your posts.

Pay special attention to platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. All three make it possible to share interesting animated content that students can comfortably explore in a non-invasive manner, as the posts won’t necessarily require a specific call to action. Think of these posts as a way to enhance overall brand awareness of your institution in a positive, controlled way.

Who doesn’t love a freebie? Since you’re no longer spending money on large campus events, spring recruitment travel, and other traditional yield expenses, consider repurposing some of that budget to develop some promo items that can help foster stronger connections to your school. For example, a celebratory yard sign can be a great way to help make a student and their family feel special, and it gives them a fun way to share their big college decision news with their friends and neighbors!

Across the web, more visual and intuitive ways of creating content have become increasingly popular. With the WordPress 5.0 release in early 2019 came a block editor called Gutenberg that completely changed the website editor experience. The technology was slow to be adopted, but in 2020, it went mainstream with a new release and a more robust library of components. Thanks to this drag-and-drop page builder, the building experience is more user-friendly than ever. It offers content managers the opportunity to build their websites without expert knowledge of coding. A version of Gutenberg was also ported to Drupal to compete with the native (and less flexible) Layout Builder within Drupal 8.

How does Gutenberg work? All the content is divided up into individual “blocks.” Gutenberg has many different types of blocks, such as headers, quotes, lists, galleries, and so on. Add-ons like ACF Blocks Suite offer a comprehensive collection of ready-to-use Gutenberg Blocks to help you make a beautiful website.

When you’re faced with unexpected changes or having to add completely new sections of content, a drag-and-drop builder is an easy, visual solution to get your pages up and running in no time. And while we won’t be getting rid of field-based content management any time soon, drag-and-drop builders let us create media-rich landing pages with speed and ease.

Users come to your site for a reason: the content! And when it comes to managing that content, you need a strategy. In the COVID era, we shifted our focus to bring events online and create compelling content for live interaction. Many of us even became broadcasters for the first time, mixing live video streams with slides and films into our Zoom meetings and webinars to get our messages across. And if you haven’t done that, you certainly will need to for the better part of 2021.

Another major content trend for the year ahead is the repurposing of existing video content to create new interpretations for shorter snippets and social stories.

And of course, many of you discovered that your site wasn’t as easy to use as it could be, so you had to rewrite and reconfigure your admissions section to be more usable and reader-friendly. (We often use tools like the Hemingway Editor to write more accessible, readable copy that aligns with a ninth-grade reading level.)

Finally, web personalization is becoming even more important in 2021 as students look for colleges that have their needs and interests in mind. We build personalized microsites to help admissions offices build even greater connections to students.

In many ways, web design is a balancing act. You want to have beautiful pages with compelling video, breathtaking images, and sophisticated typography, but you also need to ensure the pages load quickly.

In mid-2018, Google began to roll out a “speed ranking” for both mobile and desktop searches. In essence, if your pages were not fast, your page would not rank high on Google searches. This is an existential threat for colleges that rely on Google for up to 80% of their inbound traffic. (To check your site’s speed, go ahead and fire up the Google Lighthouse tools.)

Of course, prioritizing speed isn’t just about Google rankings. If your page doesn’t load quickly, the viewer will act fast and move on. The average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds in 2018, so we have to keep those load times short!

Erik Runyon of Notre Dame did us the favor of analyzing the fastest home pages in higher ed. How does your site stack up?

Web designers are always innovating, bringing novel content structures and components to your pages to elevate the experience for prospective students. Here are a couple we think are important for 2021:

Parallax Scroll Animations – These keep your page dynamic, layered, and engaging, and they’re so simple! Nobody wants to read a wall of text, so mixing in some images helps divide up content and provides some visual interest.

Secondary Navigation: Menu Takeover – Less is more, as they say. The less “clutter” you see in your primary navigation, the better. This menu takeover gives you the opportunity to decrease primary navigation clutter and create an engaging, interactive navigation experience.

Negative Space Is Actually Positive – OK, this isn’t really new, but it’s worth repeating. Adding negative space to your designs highlights your newly finessed content so that it is easier to read and understand.

If you build an amazing website, but its content doesn’t show up on search engines for important keywords, does it really exist? How can I show up for searches that don’t include my college’s name? These are the questions you will need to answer in 2021, as competition heats up to capture the attention of people who are searching online for undergraduate and graduate education opportunities.

SEO is yet another example of the web design balancing act. We want to give our writers the freedom to use their talents to best express our spirit and quality, but we also have to ensure that what they write can also be appreciated by Google’s web crawlers and machine learning algorithms. It starts with “technical SEO,” which means getting everything right in our code—from semantic elements to proper meta data structure—and extends into the content manager’s domain.

Keyword research helps us understand the words we need to target, and comprehensive knowledge of web standards helps us use those keywords with the proper emphasis for the search engines. (For example, be sure to use your most important keyword in the <title> tags and <h1> tags.) SEO is an expert’s game that can be learned, and we are here to help for those in need.

With recruitment and registering online becoming the norm, the ways in which we keep track of those interested users must change. You want to know when someone visits your website and how they interact with it. Maybe they’re interested in learning about your institution or the nursing degree you’re well known for, or perhaps they came to learn about an event you’re hosting that was shared on social media. In these cases, you want to be able to follow up with those visits and clicks to make sure users are getting the information they need and seeing what makes your institution stand out from the rest. That’s where pixels come in.

A pixel is a tiny, invisible digital marker that is placed on your website in order to keep track of a user’s movements throughout. Not only can it tell you how they got to your site in the first place, but it can tell you:

• The time of day they visited your website
• Their locations
• New or recurring visits
• What browser they used
• The type of device they used (desktop or mobile)
• And more…

With this type of information, you can learn more about what your users are interested in and make smarter marketing decisions. Ultimately, you’ll take these learnings to optimize your digital ad spending so you can avoid focusing on ineffective marketing campaigns.

We anchor this blog post with the topics of accessibility because, without it, nothing else matters. It is not a trend, per se, but a responsibility and, doggone it, it’s the right thing to do! Equity and access are part of our national discussion on higher education and those ideas reflect the foundational values of our colleges and universities. Everyone belongs on our campuses, and everyone deserves to be able to access our content. Of course, these values are codified into law in Section 508 of Rehabilitation Act, which states that any entity that receives funding from the federal or state government must meet WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards.

According to w3.org, “web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.” Many colleges have been slow on the uptake of accessibility, but are catching up in 2021 and beyond. Part of the reason accessibility has been tough for designers is that it requires some tradeoffs that may be difficult to follow. For example, some schools have had to use a different shade of their school colors to increase contrast (for color-blind readers), or cut back their use of JavaScript widgets that just can’t be navigated through voice.

At Spark451, we have redoubled our efforts in accessibility, standardizing our approach around the Axe Accessibility testing tools, and adding screen readers and keyboard navigation to our testing process.

Looking back to November 2020, when paid media networks paused political ads, our clients kept running ads because it was both a pivotal point in senior search season and a prime time for graduate search to take off.

In one noteworthy example, a partner school who is our biggest daily spender in paid media, and mainly does targeted ads, saw a 13% increase in impressions and 12% increase in clicks during election week, compared to the week prior. However, the school’s cost per lead also increased significantly week over week, and there were fewer conversions.

Meanwhile, one of our biggest college brands—a nationally recognized university in Virginia—ran an apply campaign that week targeting a large list of prospects (read: a limited and defined audience, but still a very large group). They saw lower clicks, lower conversions, and a higher cost per click, compared to the previous week.

“This exciting addition of Feedback’s unique brand of social listening and real human analysis is a perfect match for Spark451’s hyper-personalized approach to persona modeling, lead generation, and brand awareness campaigns,” says Pete Colbert, Senior Business Development Strategist at Spark451. “While we’ve always taken a data-driven approach to marketing for higher education, the additional insights we’ll receive from Feedback will expand our perspective and further enrich our strategic planning, allowing us to develop even more effective campaigns for our college and university partners.”

“While surveys and focus groups showcase how your many audiences (from the prospective student to the friend of the college) speak when prompted, our digital ethnographic approach using actual behaviorists to analyze how discreet audiences discuss, ask, respond, interact, and simply behave in all corners of the internet helps build a more complete picture,” adds Feedback Principal Dean Browell, PhD. “We’re excited to bring more of our solutions to higher education by formally expanding our great relationship with Spark451.”

Dare I say that higher education is infamously glacial? Well, it’s true. Our institutions each have a wide breadth of processes, procedures, programs, and regulations that tend to make us about as agile as a large oil tanker at sea.

However, when push came to shove this year, your institution’s faculty and staff made herculean efforts and demonstrated the ability to be nimble in an environment that required such speed and institutional agility. You have so much to be proud of.

First, you and your colleagues salvaged the Spring 2020 semester by rapidly and safely closing campuses across the country and disseminating critical information to students, families, and the community. During that period, I spoke with presidents at a few schools who were proud of the fact that they could make swift decisions that directly benefited their students’ health.

Second, your team still enrolled a new student class for the fall. You shifted very important on-campus events, like admitted student days, to virtual environments. You also worked to ensure applicants and their families had their questions answered and could find a place they would call home for the next four years.

Third, your colleagues figured out ways to work together and safely kick off the fall semester by introducing concepts such as hybrid environments, quarantine spaces, mask policies, and more.

These are lessons that you will carry with you for your professional life. Plus, now we’ve learned that higher ed can be just as nimble of an environment as as a tech startup…OK, maybe that’s a stretch, but you definitely moved from an oil tanker to a schooner. Congratulations!

For this silver lining, I reflect on a discussion I had earlier this year with a vice president at a major public institution/system in the northeast. She relayed to me the story that just a few years ago, as they were upgrading the connectivity throughout campus, the administration wanted to install webcams in classrooms for future use. At that time, the faculty union filed a grievance stating that doing so would undermine their ability to protect the privacy of their intellectual property, the academic coursework. They won that grievance.

Yet, just a few years later, your institutions were literally placed in a do-or-die academic situation and everyone involved rose nicely to the challenge. Before this year, some faculty had never actually used a Zoom, Teams, or Meets environment, but they dug in and found a way. And in an incredibly short time, they gave new credibility to the online delivery of academic coursework.

I like to keep things real and recognize that, in some cases, it was less than ideal—maybe even impossible. Some classes require labs or other in-person experiences, like clinicals and student-teaching, that are invaluable to achieving a successful program. Yet, still, for the vast majority of undergraduate programs, 2020 is a true milestone year for the online delivery of academic content.

(As a side note, for those of you who are in geographic areas where snowfall can happen, I think we just witnessed the end of snow days as we know them for all students from middle school through college. Academic evolution is happening right in front of our eyes.)

If there is one message that came out of 2020 and the COVID pandemic, it is that the public truly values the student experience your campus provides and that many students want to be on your campuses–even if that means attending classes virtually. And the majority of your campuses delivered on that experience with safety and support in force.

In the late spring, we surveyed the parents of freshman students and asked them how they felt about their students returning to school in the fall. Here’s what they had to say:

You may think this applies exclusively to undergraduate students and programs, but an even more recent survey of domestic graduate intenders also demonstrated a continued preference for in-person learning:

As professionals in college admissions, we have had the great opportunity to develop our own skills, connect with friends, and network with new colleagues through a wealth of professional conferences. They range from regional groups to national conferences and cover every aspect of our professional lives. Honestly, as a person who attended my first conference in 1991, it became easy to take these conferences for granted, and I sometimes considered attending them a borderline chore as opposed to a phenomenal opportunity.

Yet 2020 (and possibly 2021) took those precious opportunities away from us. Sure, we have all made an effort to make the best of the situation by participating or presenting in virtual conferences. However, much like students who prefer being on campus, we realize that the in-person experience of being with an incredibly talented group of people for a few days to learn from each other is truly irreplaceable.

My hope for 2021 is that we get to a place where we feel it’s safe to meet, interact, and enjoy each other’s company in person.