One of our most read and shared blog posts this past year was our “2013 Predictions” blog post in which we emphasized three major trends that we felt would significantly impact higher education marketing for the upcoming year. Rounding out the first quarter of 2013 we are not only supporting and standing behind those predictions, but are staffing to support Next Generation Marketing in Higher Education.

Last week, we hosted a webinar with one of our clients from the University of Michigan-Dearborn focused on how Hubspot is a powerful tool for higher education marketing purposes. As the only Hubspot-certified partner who specializes in the higher education space, we felt that it was crucial to explain how the inbound marketing platform that is often associated with the private sector could be extremely beneficial to colleges and universities in their recruitment and enrollment efforts.

Remember this classic scene from a brilliant movie? Take the 1:19 to absorb the message.

Let's face it - most colleges and universities serve similar fare. In addition to programmatic similarity (Online MBA, Liberal Arts, Nursing), even the benefits and values that many institutions boast about (such as "small class sizes") are not exactly unique to a small handful of schools. Unless you're one of those elite institutions (you know who you are), you might not get noticed when someone does a Google search for "private college California Liberal Arts." In fact, St. Katherine College was the first institution that I could find in the organic search results when searching for that keyword combination. The result appeared on page 5, far past when many give up searching, especially when bombarded with all of the paid advertisements on the first page.