Before we move forward, it’s important to understand what does it mean to be an agile admission team so that we’re all on the same page. An Agile admission team is a cross-functional group of people who have a common goal to achieve with each having unique roles and responsibilities that contribute in a team environment to achieve that goal.

It goes beyond ‘speed.’ It’s about:

• Higher levels of productivity within the admission teams
• Prioritizing work more effectively
• Changing gears quickly based on feedback
• Achieving higher quality of work
• Increasing transparency in the work process

In this blog, you will get to know the top seven marketing tools every admission team should have to achieve ‘agile’.

The 7 marketing tools your admission team needs

Graphic Design Tools

To create designs for your marketing campaign, you don’t need a professional designer! Especially when you just need something quick, a fun image, or a digital flyer, to share on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, something that is within budget.

In such cases, you need someone or develop skills of someone who has years of experience in using high-end graphic tools like Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign to create world-class designs. As a non-designer, you too can knock up something pretty decent, without needing years of skills and training with simple design tools like Canva.

Canva was launched in 2013 as an online design and publishing tool with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. This is a great freemium tool with easy-to-use design features. You can effortlessly create beautiful graphics & presentations with its inbuilt templates. Its drag and drop builder makes the designing process seamless for even a novice!

Alternatively, you can also check other tools like Adobe Spark an online Adobe tool for quick graphic design or PicMonkey another robust alternative to Canva.

Virtual Meeting Tools

With growing demands for remote work, virtual meeting rooms like Zoom had always been popular—both for work and personal use­— much before the pandemic hit. But online conferencing tools like these rose to power during the pandemic due to the increasing restrictions placed on physical movement. People realized that they can often be just as productive to meet virtually. The platform that most people turned to was Zoom.

Zoom is a great tool. It has a free version that allows meetings for 40 minutes. But this time limit can hinder conversations on important topics. Additionally, there have been issues with security like Zoombombing.

An alternative you can try is Google Meet. If you use Gsuite or Gmail for any of your work-related communications, google meets is for you. Google Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet) is freemium video conferencing software aimed at business users to conduct any meeting virtually. The best part is you don’t have to go anywhere, you can access this through your Gmail account!

ExtraaEdge too has a virtual meeting tool, which you can use directly on the CRM. You don’t have to open it separately on a different tab! The best part, it has been designed especially for admission teams so that you can host video counselling sessions with prospective students.

Website Analytics Tools

If you want actionable insights on your website traffic, you need Website Analytics Tools. These tools give you reports and data on who are your site visitors, what is their age, gender, location, how they landed on your site and how your site visitors behave once on your website.

Tools like Semrush will help you analyze the top-performing content on your site; your total conversions; and so on. Semrush is a paid online visibility management and content marketing platform.

This web analytics platform covers a wide range of solutions from Keyword Search to Competitor SEO Analysis. With this information in hand, you can plan fully informed recruitment strategies and increase your admission rates faster.

Lead Magnet Tools

A lead magnet is a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details. They could be free trial subscriptions, samples, white papers, e-newsletters, and free consultations. Marketers use lead magnets to create sales leads.

Lead magnet tools like Optimmonster help you to have popups on your website to provide value to your prospects instead of selling directly.

Optinmonster is a powerful enterprise-level technology that can help you capture leads and maximize conversions on your website. It is easy to use and has a wide range of features you can explore.

Email Marketing Tools

Still, one of the best ways to engage with your prospective students, email marketing allows you to build relationships with leads, current students and even your alumni. A good email marketing tool will help you save time and money in creating a good email from scratch and sending the right message to the right person on time!

With email marketing, you have a great opportunity to speak directly to your student in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. With the right messaging, emails can become one of your most impactful marketing channels.

If you are just starting out in email marketing, Mailchimp is a great tool to get you started. You can create beautiful, branded emails that will keep your prospective students engaged! Its easy‑to‑use email builder has tons of email templates to choose from and has great features in the free subscription.

Video Tools

Video content is the in thing these days. Video content marketing has become vital to generate the right leads. Millennials and GenZs don’t just use videos for entertainment purposes anymore.

They also prefer to learn about different institutes by watching videos. These age groups opt for video explainers, video campus tours, or other marketing videos to simply reading about the institute online.

So an agile admission team needs good tools for creating and editing unique videos. Animaker is one such ingenious tool for those who have no clue about video editing. It’s a freemium platform for beginners, non-designers & professionals to create Animation and Live-Action videos.

Marketing and Automation Tools

A marketing automation software is useful for agile admission teams in streamlining and automating many of their marketing activities. A good marketing and automation software also helps keep a track of the various marketing tasks and gives accurate metrics to measure performance.

By using a marketing automation tool, your team will be more efficient, increase student recruitment and grow into a more powerful agile admission team. Here are some of the things marketing automation allows you to do more effectively:

• Email marketing
• Seamless lead capture
• Lead nurturing and scoring
• Student Retention
• Measuring ROI

Keeping in mind the special requirements in marketing and marketing automation of admission teams, ExtraaEdge has built a powerful CRM & Marketing automation software that helps your admission teams increase, manage and predict their admissions.

Conclusion

There are many more tools available in the market for an admission team to go agile. These are some of the best we have found based on our extensive research. In the end, the best tool for any institution will depend on their requirements and how well a tool best fits their needs. If you want a more robust list of tools you can choose from, check out our ebook – Marketing Tools for Agile Admission Team!