One of the biggest challenges higher education faces in relation to institutional .edu sites is multiple key audiences. Depending on who you are as a customer (or consumer) of the site, your needs are focused and specific but you are engaged by a website that is not. In many ways higher education websites try too hard to serve too many masters. If you are a 16 year old prospective student, a faculty member, a donor, a trustee, the parent of a current student, a fan of the football team, a prospective graduate student, or a 37 year old adult trying to return to school to finish the bachelors degree you started 20 years ago – you are all directed to the same place. Needless to say, this is a problem.

For decades higher education has taken the approach that consumers of their site would simply search until they found what they are looking for, but more and more we are realizing that is not true, especially as it relates to the highly-competitive adult and graduate student market.

Websites are tremendous marketing tools, and they are also the first line of recruitment. For the adult and graduate student market that is “shopping” online, being unable to find what they are looking for on your website quickly can become a deal breaker. If a prospective adult student can not find what they need on the website, get hung up in the traditional undergraduate admissions requirements, or (worse yet) mistake the residential undergraduate tuition for their own – they move on to one of the six other options they found when they did a Google search.

Clear information presented in a simple easy using a format that intrigues them enough to fill out a request form is the goal; but as we see all too often on institutional sites, it is often not a goal that is accomplished. If you would like to learn more about how an audience specific microsite can benefit your customers (prospective students) and ultimately your enrollment, please register now for our free upcoming webinar: The Challenge – The Solution.