While there is a slight slowdown in the immediate period surrounding Christmas and New Year, December is still prime recruitment season and it would be a mistake to wind down your campaigns too early

 

Because many department budgets are cut off at the end of the year, there is also additional pressure to spend all of your allotted funds while maintaining value for money.

When you consider that eight in ten people are influenced by web content before making a purchase over the holiday season, it's clear that keeping up your marketing in December is vital.

What lessons can we learn from adopting festive marketing approaches in other fields to recruiting economics students - be it for full study programs or online courses or professional training for those about to leap into the job market?

To help you in your quest for increased engagement, here we explore the tips, tactics and strategies to help increase your presence over the holidays.

Move Your Promotion Forward

Don’t hold off advertising your program, course, scholarship, or whatever opportunity you want to promote. If you are not visible online, how do you expect people to find you? With students starting earlier and earlier each year to find their next step, posting during the holidays is vital. Especially as the winter break often gives people enough time and mental energy to research future opportunities.

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Create engaging Christmas content

Without a doubt, by creating engaging, inspiring and valuable content aimed at a specific target audience, you stand to increase student engagement exponentially.

Through researching current seasonal trends, exploring your data, developing student personas and developing content ideas in a collaborative environment, you’ll create the kind of festive content that will drive students to your university’s website and offerings.

Creating informational blog posts, infographics, or whitepapers and humorous, inspirational or nostalgic video content (and sharing it at optimum times during the holiday season) will help spark the interest of potential students and increase your levels of Christmas engagement.

Here are some Christmas content ideas for your inspiration:

• The modern student’s 2023 survival guide.
• A glimpse behind the scenes of various departments within your university.
• A year in review: the highlights of your university throughout the year.
• A festive wish video featuring current content and faculty including a ‘join the family’ call to action.

Host an event

At this point in the game, it may be too late to host a physical event, but you could create a webinar and schedule it to take place between Christmas and New Year.

Think about what your prospective students might be interested in or want to know, conduct extensive research, and develop a theme that you feel will drive engagement. You could incentivize people to join the webinar and ask live questions through social media by offering festive prizes for attendance and referrals and create a supporting blog post to help promote the event.

Launch a Competition

A swift, simple and effective means of expanding your reach, boosting institutional awareness, and driving masses of engagement, a fully-fledged festive competition is a powerful promotional force.

By running a competition, you will grab the attention of your prospective students, build a buzz and encourage virality. But, to gain maximum traction and engagement, you should encourage all potential entrants to answer a question, join a conversation, or share a piece of themed content. In doing so, you’ll be able to expand your reach organically, encouraging people to follow the competition from start to finish and in turn, increasing the likelihood of your competition content being shared amongst wider audiences.

Students love an incentive, especially around Christmas - and by offering one in a fun, entertaining and actionable way, you stand an excellent chance of growing your audience.

We hope these student engagement tips will help you to connect with a valuable new audience over the holiday season.

This article is based on a guest post for INOMICS by Dan Hughes on "How to Increase Student Engagement to Your University Over Christmas", first published in December 2019. The INOMICS Team updated the article in December 2022 to include fresh information such that the current text differs significantly from the original. However, we still want to credit Dan for authoring parts of this article.