Internal marketing teams often face challenges getting to the top of search rankings, driving traffic, and creating conversion-optimized content. While this can be due to time and expertise constraints, the solution isn’t necessarily outsourcing – it’s about finding the right balance between internal capabilities and external support.
Evaluating Your Digital Marketing Needs
Before considering outsourcing, institutions should assess their current situation:
- What are your existing internal capabilities and expertise?
- What are your short-term and long-term marketing goals?
- What is your available budget for marketing initiatives?
- How much control do you want over day-to-day marketing operations?
- What institutional knowledge is crucial for your marketing success?
The answers to these questions will help determine whether to build internal capacity, outsource certain functions, or create a hybrid model that leverages both approaches.
The Challenges Higher Ed Marketing Teams Face in Digital Marketing
A strong online presence is essential if your institution wants to stand out from other schools. While internal teams often have deep institutional knowledge and strong relationships within the organization, they may face several challenges in executing comprehensive digital marketing strategies.
Balancing Strategic Goals With Tactical Execution
Most marketers know online visibility is important, but they aren’t sure how to achieve it. You likely know that you need more website traffic, but why are you stuck behind your competitors in the search rankings? Your social media strategy is doing great at generating clicks, but why aren’t your landing pages capturing leads?
Keeping Pace With Evolving SEO and Digital Marketing Trends
Even if your strategies are generating results, search engines are always updating algorithms and changing the playing field. It’s crucial to keep tabs on developments in digital marketing and adapt your tactics.
Internal teams may lack the time and resources to monitor digital marketing trends and understand how they affect visibility. For example, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how users discover information. It’s important to optimize your site to respond to these shifts and ensure your institution stays competitive.
Limited In-House Bandwidth for Specialized Tasks
Many SEO tasks are resource-intensive. Weighed down by other priorities, internal teams may find it difficult to execute advanced digital marketing strategies. Tasks that may fall by the wayside include:
- Researching keywords to find valuable search terms.
- Optimizing metadata and schema markup to entice click-throughs.
- Mapping internal links to guide prospective students through your marketing funnel.
- Analyzing data to guide decision-making and optimize performance.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Digital Marketing for Higher Ed Institutions
While outsourcing can provide valuable support for higher ed institutions, it’s important to understand both the advantages and potential drawbacks to make an informed decision.
Access to Specialized Expertise
Digital marketing encompasses fields such as SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media, and pay-per-click advertising. Each niche requires distinct skills, and it’s hard to have in-house staff in every area of expertise.
Outsourcing deepens your team’s capabilities and lets you tap into your marketing partner’s rich experience and knowledge. External strategists can get to work right away, efficiently assessing your goals and finding the most effective ways to achieve them.
Scalable Solutions for Fluctuating Needs
Higher ed marketing teams often have varying workloads tied to application and enrollment cycles. Program launches, special events, and shifting business priorities also create demands on your time. When you outsource, you have the luxury of scaling resources up or down without changing your staffing levels.
Cost Efficiency
Digital marketing partners provide you with expertise and infrastructure. You don’t have to invest in salaries, office space, or equipment. Many marketing agencies also invest in enterprise-level tools that can make SEO, content management, data analysis, and technical optimization faster and more efficient. You’ll benefit from keyword research at scale, detailed competitor analyses, and user behavior insights to fine-tune your strategies.
Faster Implementation of Campaigns
After implementing thousands of campaigns, seasoned digital marketers have optimized their workflows so they can easily manage large-scale, high-volume tasks. Your campaigns should launch seamlessly due to:
- Standardized processes that ensure consistent, reliable implementation.
- Division of work among specialists who execute tasks quickly and efficiently.
- Communication protocols and checkpoints that reduce misunderstandings and errors.
- Project management that ensures strategies are on track with client expectations.
Flexibility To Focus on Core Objectives
With your SEO and digital marketing campaigns in the hands of a trusted partner, your staff can shift attention to activities that directly support your institution’s mission. They’ll have more resources to brainstorm and implement initiatives to engage current and prospective students, showcase faculty research, raise your community profile, and encourage enrollment. These tasks are well-suited for internal teams with institutional knowledge and familiarity with your community.
As your outsourced marketing efforts gain traction, you can make the most of leads captured through improved visibility and traffic. Your team can focus on nurturing increased inquiries, event registrations, and mailing list subscriptions, driving enrollment numbers even higher.
Industry-Specific Expertise
Professional marketers with a track record in higher education understand the nuances of the sector, such as how students search online and factors that affect decision-making. Thanks to direct, hands-on experience, they’ll have insight into the tactics that work, the ones that don’t, and why. They’ll also have a sense of how other institutions are targeting students, with numerous competitive analyses under their belts.
Using this intelligence, experienced partners can optimize your digital marketing strategies. They can bring your approaches in line with industry standards and take advantage of competitive opportunities. The result? You’ll spend less time on ineffective tactics and get a leg up on other schools.
Measurable Results and Data-Driven Decision-Making
Digital marketing agencies also have access to a wealth of data. They use analytics platforms to measure performance through keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, bounce rate, user engagement, conversion rate, and other metrics. Your partner should provide you with regular reports summarizing campaign performance. These user behavior insights can inform your marketing tactics and help you better target students.
Key Challenges and Risks To Consider
Before moving forward with outsourcing, institutions should carefully evaluate potential challenges:
- Potential disconnect between external agency and institutional culture.
- Need for strong internal project management and oversight.
- Time investment required for effective agency collaboration.
- Risk of dependency on external expertise.
Finding the Right Balance: Internal vs. External Marketing
The most successful higher education marketing programs often employ a hybrid approach that combines internal strengths with external expertise. Here’s how to strike the right balance:
Internal Team Focus:
- Strategic direction and institutional priorities.
- Brand voice and messaging.
- Stakeholder relationships and communication.
- Campus culture and community engagement.
- Quick-response marketing needs.
- Day-to-day social media management.
External Partner Focus:
- Keyword strategy aligned to team goals.
- Technical and on-page SEO recommendations and implementation.
- Off-page SEO strategy execution.
- Large-scale content creation.
- Data analysis and reporting.
- Specialized campaign execution.
- Industry trend monitoring and adaptation.
Key Digital Marketing Areas To Outsource
Below are areas of digital marketing that are ideal for outsourcing, depending on your team’s skill set and workflow. These tasks require specialized knowledge and have clearly defined scopes, which make them easy to delegate without duplicating internal efforts.
SEO: Increasing Organic Visibility and Traffic
A website that’s optimized for search engines can push your brand higher in search rankings and drive website traffic. Because SEO prioritizes user experience, you’ll have a robust site that guides audiences on their journeys and inspires action. More importantly, your optimized site can also support visitors from multi-channel marketing campaigns.
A reputable SEO partner provides crucial services like auditing your website for weaknesses, reviewing keyword targeting, performing on-page and off-page optimization, and building backlinks. They will work through these tasks systematically, prioritizing improvements that have the most immediate impact so you see faster results.
Content Creation
Your web pages perform better when bolstered by high-quality, SEO-friendly content. This requires audience and keyword research, topic ideation, competitive analyses, writing, and content optimization.
When you outsource this work, your team spends less time planning and creating program pages, landing pages, and blog posts. You’ll receive publish-ready pieces based on data-driven insights and your prospective students’ needs and interests. You can provide brand guidance and messaging to ensure the final content lines up with your voice and values, but the heavy lifting of content development and creation can be easily handled externally.
Technical Optimization
Your site’s technical health has a big impact on search rankings and audience engagement. If prospective students are waiting for your program page to load, squinting to read content on their mobile device, or running into broken links, you may lose them to another website. Similarly, sites with poor architecture, duplicate pages, and confusing navigation tend to drop in search engine rankings.
An external partner will devote resources to monitoring your site, performing speed tests, identifying errors, and ensuring that audiences are engaging with a fast, user-friendly site.
How To Select the Right Digital Marketing Partner
The ideal partner brings valuable knowledge to the table and works as an extension of your internal team. They listen to your concerns, work collaboratively with your staff, and have their sights set firmly on your targets.
Evaluating Expertise and Alignment With Institutional Goals
Your first step is to determine what you want to accomplish and where your internal team can use help. Marketing agencies differ in their areas of focus, so be as clear about your goals as possible. Are you looking for content creation, technical optimization, or better conversion rates?
Once you know what you need in a marketing partner, you can identify candidates with relevant experience and skills. If you’re unsure of the exact type of service you need, explain your goals and ask how the agency can help. A good partner transforms your needs into an actionable plan — and their response will give you a sense of how communicative and responsive they are.
Prioritizing Collaboration With Your In-House Team
Digital marketing agencies need context from your team to inform their work and make sure it’s aligned with your goals. Look for an agency that wants to work closely with your team so your institution’s values, vision, and unique brand are reflected in their campaigns. An ideal partner:
- Expresses interest in your organization, its challenges, and how it compares to other schools.
- Welcomes your input to ensure strategies meet your goals.
- Answers your questions and shares knowledge freely so you can do your job better.
- Communicates openly with regular check-ins and status reports.
Reviewing Case Studies and Client Success Stories
When considering potential partners, look for real-world examples of their ability to deliver results for higher ed institutions. Case studies provide valuable insight into how agencies work with clients and their approach to solving problems or achieving goals.
Read their success stories carefully for examples of tactics, tools, and strategies the agency uses. The case studies should also present quantifiable metrics so you can see the impact of their work on lead generation, website traffic, ROI, and conversions.
Strategic Outcomes of Outsourcing Digital Marketing
By leveraging external expertise to fill in skill gaps and take on time-consuming tasks, you’ll streamline your workflow and amplify your results.
Achieving Alignment With Broader Institutional Goals
Your marketing activities should be purposeful and support your institution’s goals, whether that’s increasing brand awareness, enrollment, or revenue.
Building Lasting Partnerships for Sustained Success
As your partnership falls into a rhythm, you’ll develop mutual trust and understanding. Your partner gains more insight into your brand, audience, and needs, using this knowledge to better shape your strategies.
Freeing Up Internal Teams To Innovate While External Teams Manage Execution
One of the biggest reasons to outsource digital marketing is to reclaim time for more creative endeavors. Use the services of a digital marketing partner to handle the mechanics of digital marketing — researching keywords, optimizing websites, and creating SEO-friendly content. You can then dedicate your in-house resources to connecting meaningfully with your target audience and finding unique ways for your institution to stand out.
Unlock New Possibilities With Outsourced Digital Marketing
At Victorious, we understand the challenges that higher ed institutions face when trying to break through to prospective students, faculty, and donors. Our team of specialists takes a data-driven approach to digital marketing that responds to the realities of the sector, your target audience, and your goals. Schedule a free consultation and learn how our higher education SEO services can complement your in-house team.
