What You Missed from the 2018 NAGAP Conference

NAGAP, The Association for Graduate Enrollment Management, held it’s annual conference in New Orleans earlier this month – bringing together professionals across the country working in the graduate enrollment management environment. Each year, NAGAP provides an opportunity for members to not only network with colleagues, but share insights about how different educational institutions navigate a changing and more challenging graduate recruitment environment.

If you weren’t able to make the conference, we’ve shared some key digital insights from this year’s conference.

Digital Insights for Graduate Admissions (NAGAP 2018)

“It’s about the persona, the prospective student, not your university.”  – Tony Fraga (Marketing Consultant and CEO at DirectDevelop

“Organic traffic is how you know you’re winning on SEO.” – Tony Fraga (Marketing Consultant and CEO at DirectDevelop

“There is a direct correlation between page visits and conversions and the total number of blog posts” – Tony Fraga(Marketing Consultant and CEO at DirectDevelop

“43% of grad schools use LinkedIn for student recruitment.” – Marc Hanson (Director of Graduate Admissions at  Roger Williams University)

“57.6% of grad schools are doing paid social media promos [and] 5% of them say they’re working.” – Marc Hanson(Director of Graduate Admissions at  Roger Williams University)

“If you’re able to develop content on your website that answers people’s questions, Google will reward you. Ensure your grad program names are matching the way people are searching.  – Marc Hanson (Director of Graduate Admissions at  Roger Williams University)

“There should be no dead ends in your inbound marketing. Does your thank you page give students other content to see next?” – Zach Busekrus (Inbound Marketing Consultant)

“We should no longer place all of our content behind a gate for inbound. Expose a good portion (i.e. 75%) on your site to help with SEO rank.” – Zach Busekrus (Inbound Marketing Consultant)

“48% of US doctoral institutions report that international applications have dropped significantly, 25% of US master’s colleges report same. International yield is down for 46% of all institutions.” – Kate Beczak (Assistant Director, Graduate Admissions at RIT)