Do Your Own Higher Ed Competitive Analysis for Free

Understanding your competition is vital for success. Read on to learn how to do it for free.

The pool of available higher ed students is estimated to shrink over the coming years. More and more college-aged individuals are seeking and finding careers that don’t require a college education. As the number of available college prospects declines, not every school can continue to grow, and the schools that do grow will need to acquire market share from other institutions. Before launching any marketing initiative with a new higher ed partner we perform a competitive assessment, where we identify 3-5 schools with whom our partner competes, and then assess those schools through the following lenses:

• Website

• Organic Search (SEO)

• Paid Search Strategy 

• Social Media Strategy

• Communication Flow

In short, we want to know:

1. How are your higher ed competitors positioning their brand/degrees? What are they promoting in their advertisements, posts, and messages? 

2. How are your higher ed competitors marketing their brand/degrees; which marketing channels are they using, how much are they spending?

3. What strategies are your higher ed competitors using to convert students? What is their phone, email and text sequence, and what calls-to-action do they use? 

Why We Love Doing Competitor Analysis

Doing a competitive scan is a foundational part of a larger, more comprehensive strategy. Our findings have helped us avoid marketing mistakes, determine budgets, and–most importantly–uncover valuable opportunities that our clients can take advantage of.  

We utilize paid tools that help us access deeper data, but there are many free, easy-to-use methods of uncovering important information that can make or break your admissions marketing strategy. 

A quick note on competitor analysis: while competitor analysis is an important step of building a marketing and positioning strategy, spending too much time looking at competitors can be deflating (“everyone has more resources than we do”) or lead to a sense that you need to do more (“they have a huge Snapchat presence, we should be doing that too”). You are studying their strategies not to replicate it or keep up with the Joneses, but to discover opportunities that you can take advantage of in your own unique plan.

How to do your own higher ed competitor marketing analysis

1. Identify your competition

The first step is an easy one: identify 3-5 of your main competitors. Even if you know these competitors off the top of your head, it can still be helpful to look at your cross-application data, surveys, and other enrollment data to see where else your students applied and which schools you’ve lost students to. If you work in marketing, I recommend getting admissions and enrollment involved at this point and getting their opinions. 

Feeling ambitious? Throw in an aspirational competitor or two. You might not lose students to these schools, but if they are doing good marketing things then it can be educational and inspirational to discover their strategy.

2. Use these free, web-based tools 

Tools for Higher Ed Website and SEO Analysis

We always start with what impacts higher ed lead generation most - the edu website. This gives us an idea of how strategic our competitors are. For example, if a competitor site shows evidence of unclear calls-to-action, thin content, user experience issues, and no forms, then you know right away that competitor is focusing on the wrong marketing tactics. Regardless of  how much this competitor is spending or how much traffic they’re generating, we can out-perform them by converting better.

Another indicator of how sophisticated your higher ed competitors are is the amount of search engine optimization (SEO) the school has performed. Savvy higher ed marketers know that organic traffic is the lowest-cost, highest-converting source of prospective student generation available in higher ed, and should be prioritized.

A useful tool to help you evaluate a higher ed website’s SEO is the MozBar. Add this extension to your Chrome browser and you can instantly see any site’s Domain Authority (DA), which is a quantifiable measurement from 1-100 that indicates how powerful and rank-worthy a school’s site is in the eyes of Google. The MozBar also shows you the site’s meta data (title tags, header tags, meta description, etc.) page loading times, and link data, which will give you an indication of how much has been invested in SEO. 

There are also plenty of free tools that will instantly grade or score a site’s SEO status, like Website Grader, SiteChecker, and SEOptimer. These tools are free versions and are miles away from a replacement for a full crawl or site audit, but in a pinch they can help you assess how much overall effort has gone into a site’s SEO. 

Hubspot’s Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader provides a quick assessment of a site’s performance, SEO, mobile responsiveness, and security. While not overly in-depth, it’s pretty useful for quick competitive assessments.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights

You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to see if your higher ed competitors are paying attention to some of the basic SEO principles. Another good free Google resource is their Mobile-Friendly Test.

Tools for Higher Ed Social Media Analysis

When evaluating an institution’s social presence, it’s important to make the distinction between organic activity and paid activity. ‘Organic’ refers to the typical, unpaid posting that is seen in the feeds of users who follow your organization. ‘Paid’ refers to post boosts, ads, and other sponsored content that will appear in the feeds of users that you pay to target. 

If you want to evaluate the organic performance of a higher ed competitor, you have two options: pay for a tool that will do it for you, or do it the old fashioned way. If you want to do the latter, find a college work study student with a penchant for social media and turn them loose with a goal of finding out each school’s posting frequency, engagement, average engagement rate, most popular posts, etc. 

For paid social media, there aren’t any tools that can tell you exactly what a competitor spends in any social platform. However, Facebook offers an opportunity to make educated assumptions as to who your competitors are targeting, how much they’re spending, and how they’re positioning their brand/degree on the platform. 

Here’s how to access that data:

1. Go to the competitor Facebook page

2. Click on Page Transparency in the right hand navigation

3. Click on View in Ad Library in the Ads From This Page box

Facebook will show you all the ads your competitor is currently running. By viewing a school’s ads, you should be able to answer the following questions: 

• How many ads are they running? 

• Is there evidence of A/B testing? Look for two or more similar ads, with just a change in photo, headline, or call to action (CTA). 

• Are ads aimed at a specific audience or multiple, unique audiences such as parents, students, grad, online, etc.?

• Landing pages: are ads going to a general home page, or are they intentionally going to appropriate page based on the content, messaging and audience? 

• Messaging: Are they promoting specific benefits (cost, convenience, academic rigor, location, etc.)? How are they positioning themselves?

Answering these questions will tell you how sophisticated a school’s Facebook strategy is, and can give you a sense on how much the institution is investing in Facebook. This method is free, accessible to anyone, and works for any brand - higher ed or not.

For more detailed instructions on how to determine what your competitor’s Facebook ad strategy is, this article goes deeper into the topic. 

Tools for Evaluating Positioning and Messaging

As the higher ed landscape continues to shift, how a school positions itself will become more and more important in the coming years. A great way to determine a school’s positioning is by reviewing the messaging they use in advertisements. Moat is a free tool that will help you analyze your competitor’s advertising in the click of a button.   

Simply type your higher ed competitor in the search field and it will show you all the display ads that brand has run on networks like Google. Doing so for Harvard University, you are able to see all of the school’s display ads, and a quick mouse hover will show you ad details and when the ads started and stopped running. 

This is helpful for determining what campaigns a higher ed competitor is running, what they are promoting, how they position themselves, and how coordinated their display strategy is. 

Another useful monitoring opportunity is to set up Google Alerts for each main competitor. Google will notify you when those brands are in the news, which can help you uncover any public relations strategy that your competitors are using. At a minimum, it will allow you to stay up to date on any developments on competitor campuses. 

Combining your Moat findings with what you discovered on Facebook, what you saw on the edu website will help you paint the full picture of how your higher ed competitors are positioning themselves in your micromarket. 

3. Mystery shop your higher ed competitors

There are companies that will do secret shopping for you, but keeping with the spirit of this post, we will assume you are looking to do your own assessing at no cost, so here is how you can run a mystery shopping campaign on your own. 

Fill out forms

You need to at least fill out your competitor’s website request for information form, but don’t be afraid to start an application as well. Create a faux prospective student persona so that you don’t use your own email or personal information. 

Track the communication

Use a spreadsheet to record what you submitted and when. Then record how the school follows up with you: what methods do they use (email, call, text, print, etc.)? When do the touch points occur? When does the communication stop? What do they say or promote in their messages? 

We always save communication pieces, as admissions teams usually find it helpful to see emails, text message transcripts, print pieces, and more. 

Once your secret shopping experiment is complete, be sure to tell the school you are no longer interested, as a courtesy to them. 

Finally, do not forget to mystery shop your own school  

A few years back, Jens Larson (@jensplarson) mystery shopped every school in Pennsylvania in a 10-week experiment and reported his findings. One of his more interesting conclusions was that over a third of all schools didn’t respond at all to his request for information within the 10 weeks.  

4. Organize your findings

Now that you’ve completed some basic elements of a competitive assessment, organize your findings and prepare an assessment to get the most out of your research. . 

Identify Opportunities and Summarize Findings

Once the analysis is finished, highlight your opportunities and findings. How will this intel feed back into your marketing, communication, and enrollment strategies? 

Communicate your Findings

Your research provides valuable intelligence that can build interdepartmental relationships, begin valuable conversations, and earn internal credibility. In addition to sharing your findings laterally with your marketing and enrollment teams, share your analysis with senior leadership.  

Repeat the Analysis Regularly

We recommend repeating your research on a regular basis to identify trends and developments. The frequency will depend on how sophisticated your competitors are from a marketing standpoint, but an annual report is a good place to start.