Webinar: Webinar: 7 Paid Ad Campaigns Universities Should Be Running (But Aren’t)
Get more clicks at a lower cost with these highly effective but often-overlooked campaign strategies.
INDUSTRIES
Digital Marketing for University Professional Development, Certificate, and Course Programs
Grow your programs and attract more career-focused learners with time-tested, future-focused marketing strategies.
Schools we’ve Helped
Digital Marketing Services for Professional Development, Certificate, and Course Programs
The career-focused educational marketplace is crowded — and that means your professional development, certificate, and/or course programs need to work harder to attract more ideal prospective students. We leverage proven strategies, data-driven intelligence, and a unique combination of expertise in both the higher education and eCommerce industries to help you stand out from the competition.
Website Design & Development
Your website should be the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. We design and build websites that attract, engage, and convert lifelong learners and can incorporate an eCommerce checkout functionality to make it easier for learners to bundle and purchase courses.
Ecommerce Integration
In order to sell online courses and certificates, higher ed institutions usually need an ecommerce technology integrated with their websites. Vital helps build those integrations.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services
Create highly optimized course pages that not only rank, but demonstrate the value of your program. Our SEO specialists help you stay on top of the ever-changing best practices of on-page, off-page, and technical search engine optimization to drive high-value traffic to your website and other online content.
Paid Digital Media (PPC) Services
Paid digital advertising can be expensive and tough to get right. We help schools and online course providers harness cross-platform data to achieve full-funnel attribution, so you can make data-driven decisions that maximize conversions.
Brand Strategy Services
Let our brand team craft strategic positioning and messaging that clearly conveys the unique value of your courses, captures learners’ attention, and helps you stand out from the competition in the crowded professional development marketplace.
Conversion Strategy
Let our team analyze your website and recommend tactics that will improve visitor-to-lead or visitor to cart and checkout conversion rates.
Email Marketing
Turn leads into enrollments and course purchases with email lead- and yield-nurture campaigns that offer value to learners at every point in their buyer’s journey, making the decision to choose your programs as easy as possible.
Social Media Marketing
Social media can be a gold mine for connecting with learners — or it can be a black hole for your marketing budget. We show schools and online course providers where, when, why, and how to use social media to appeal to learners from all walks of life and to boost enrollment without wasting time or money.
35+
higher education institution
clients
100+
programs in top 3 ranking on Google organic results
300%
increase in PPC ‘apply now’ conversions
850%
increase in leads for higher ed clients
How a University Offering Online Courses and Certificates Grew Traffic by 20,000% by Integrating WordPress & Destiny One
A website overhaul, SEO, and content marketing drove massive growth in site traffic, conversions, and enrollment for this online higher education institution.
Webinar: Webinar: The 7 Ways Universities Can Increase Website Leads
Want to discover some of the most impactful digital marketing strategies that can help drive your university to success? Watch our webinar!
Our Work
Hear it from our clients
Vital provided my team with the guidance and expertise we needed in order to maximize synergies across our omnichannel network of digital transformative initiatives.
— Andy Kauffman
Digital Marketing Strategist, University of San Diego Online
Before Vital, we struggled to have the discipline to measure results and quantify our paid strategies. Now we know exactly what’s working. Better yet, Vital pushes us to continually improve, so we’re able stay competitive in a really tough enrollment market.
— Kim Downey
Digital Marketing Strategist, UMass
Recognition for Our Work in Higher Education
Professional Development, Certificate, and Course Program Challenges We Solve
Ensure that your programs thrive in the increasingly competitive professional education market, with a proven, holistic approach to attracting prospective students, job-seekers, working professionals, and lifelong learners.
#1. Find Your Audience
Compared to traditional higher ed courses, professional development and certification programs support a far more diverse array of learners, each with a unique set of goals and challenges. Through customer interviews and independent market research, we’ll help you nail down your audience, build buyer personas, and craft marketing strategies that speak to each segment with the right content, in the right place, at the right time.
#2. Build Your Marketing Structure
Finding the right marketing structure to support certificate programs can be difficult, especially for traditional higher ed institutions looking to support long-term growth by offering non-degree professional development offerings.. We can conduct a comprehensive audit of your current structure — CRO, SEO, PPC, and more — to identify weaknesses and recommend tools and solutions to set you up for future success.
#3. Communicate Your Program’s Value
For prospective students looking to advance their careers through professional development or certificates, outcomes are everything. We work to ensure that your digital presence authentically communicates your institution or company’s value as an educational leader through brand-building and social proof that clearly demonstrates your program’s ROI.
#4. Increase Brand Awareness
When it comes to professional development, today’s learners have more choices than ever — and most start their search with institutions or providers they’ve already heard of. We leverage digital marketing strategies to ideally position your brand and increase awareness of your programs, so you can stand out in a crowded marketplace.
#5. Develop Lead- and Yield-Nurture Campaigns
Interest is good, but registrations and course purchases are even better. Our professional development and certificate course lead-nurture and yield-nurture campaigns are strategically designed to connect with learners at every stage of investigation and consideration to maximize program growth.
#6. Improve Website Engagement
Now more than ever, learners are going online to research programs, which means you need to deliver an exceptional online experience. We’ll optimize your online presence with enriched features and course pages that both excite and educate, helping learners see the incredible value your programs have to offer.
#7. Stay One Step Ahead
In today’s rapidly changing digital world, it’s all too easy for your organization’s formerly tried-and-true course enrollment marketing strategies and tactics to lose their effectiveness. Our professional development and certificate course program specialists do more than just stay on top of trends — they constantly innovate new approaches that your competition hasn’t thought of yet.
#8. Retain and Strengthen Graduate Relationships
The strength of your graduate network is a powerful decision-making factor for many prospective learners. Our digital marketing strategies for professional development and certificate programs help you stay connected to this important audience for brand-building and enriching the value of your courses.
Essential Reading
Ebooks: Digital Enrollment Marketing for Higher Education
What’s in the eBook? This 30-page guide is your digital marketing playbook for attracting more qualified applicants, building your academic brand, and bridging the gap between acceptance and enrollment to fill more seats and grow your school’s programs.
We Know Marketing for Professional Development & Certificate Programs
Professional development and certificate programs cater to a diverse audience of ambitious professionals seeking to enhance their expertise and competitive edge in their respective fields. Unlike traditional students in residential higher ed programs, these learners demand solutions that fit seamlessly into their busy schedules and provide immediate, applicable results in their current roles, or a clear path to a new career. Course providers in this field must develop digital marketing strategies that highlight the practical benefits, flexible learning environments, and direct career impact of their courses.
As an agency that specializes in marketing professional development and certificate course programs, we can help you understand and address learners’ primary concerns and motivations, including:
Demographic Variability
Motivated job-seekers, aspiring professionals, career explorers, lifelong learners, and more — professional development programs and certificate courses cater to a diverse audience with a diverse set of needs.
Career Impact
Whether they’re looking to move up the ladder or to change roles or industries, learners in this audience tend to be highly career-oriented. They’re likely to prioritize programs that can demonstrate ROI in the form of success stories and testimonials from graduates who have seen tangible career benefits.
Learning Style Preferences
Many learners will find themselves balancing part- or full-time jobs while pursuing certification, meaning they’ll need the flexibility to balance learning with work and personal responsibilities through online learning and self-paced modules.
Flexibility
For many learners, the appeal of professional development is the flexibility to take either a complete program from start to finish, or individual courses on an ad hoc basis. This gives them the freedom to acquire new skills on their own terms, rather than according to someone else’s schedule.
Expectations for Support and Resources
While it’s less common for certificate programs to offer a robust support system than it is for traditional degree-granting programs, course providers have an opportunity to set themselves apart from competitors by offering direct access to instructors and technical support.
Financial Considerations
Learners are often particularly cost-sensitive, as many are financing their education independently while managing other financial responsibilities. Transparent information about costs, financing options, and potential ROI is crucial.
Why Choose Vital?
When the future of your professional development and certificate programs is at stake, you need time-tested strategies that drive results.
For over 20 years, we’ve been obsessed with finding new ways to enable our clients to achieve the goals that matter most to their success. When you partner with Vital, you get:
A Future-Proof Foundation
We evaluate your website, your brand, and your existing strategies — then fix what’s broken, build what’s missing, and set you up for long-term success.
A Plan for Growth
You tell us your enrollment and program growth goals and we collaborate to build yearly, monthly, and weekly plans to get you there.
Comprehensive Strategies that Beat the Competition
We work holistically across disciplines and platforms to build strategies that transcend tactical silos.
Data-driven Continuous Improvement
We harness data and AI-enabled testing to stack successes and multiply positive results.
A Process You Can Rely On
We apply fanatical discipline to executing your strategic plan, with regular meetings, reporting, and touchpoints that leave nothing to chance.
A Partner You Can Trust
We’ve developed long-term partnerships with some of the fastest-growing professional development and certificate providers. We like to think that’s due to three factors: our amazing people, our client-focused approach, and our proven results.
Our Process
We combine deep higher education expertise with a foundation in digital marketing for some of today’s most innovative brands to create an unconventional approach to increasing your professional development or certificate program’s enrollment rates.
Step one: Intake and assessment
Our education specialists take stock of your digital marketing performance with a baseline assessment of your current online presence and marketing activities.
Step two: Discovery and research
We conduct a thorough discovery into your brand, your digital marketing goals, your audience, and your major competitors.
Step three: Plan the work
Based on your goals and your budget, we create a plan for building your digital marketing foundation and a monthly calendar for tactical deployment, with key performance indicators (KPIs) to define and measure success.
Step four: Work the plan
Our team of strategists, designers, developers, and writers partners with your internal marketing team to create digital assets, build your content library, and execute your plan.
Step five: Measure, improve, repeat
We measure and report on your customized KPIs weekly and use the data to adjust tactics and improve performance. Our expertise allows us to balance the patience necessary for long-term improvements with the agility to respond immediately to fast-moving metrics.
Let’s Talk
Ready to reimagine your program’s digital marketing strategy and dramatically increase registrations? So are we! Let’s get the ball rolling. Our team will be in touch within 48 hours.
