The Minute

Marketers, you have a role in accessibility too

Written by The Enrollify Team | 10/21/19 11:00 AM

ACCESSIBLE MARKETING – IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO: Accessibility is a huge concern for businesses with any sort of digital presence. And while the majority of digital accessibility falls on the shoulders of web and dev teams, marketers are also responsible for accessibility. Is the contrast in your color scheme enough to make it readable for someone with a visual impairment? Does the latest video you posted on YouTube have closed captions? For the pictures on your blog, did you remember to use alt tags?

Why you should care: Prospective students may have a wide array of disabilities that need to be considered when developing your marketing efforts. It’s the right thing to do, it's the legal thing to do, and it will likely benefit your SEO. Consider this: Google is the largest “blind” surfer of the internet (it reads you page with web crawlers!). By optimizing your digital efforts for SEO on Google, you'll actually be starting the first steps towards improving your website’s accessibility.

WHY YOU NEED BACKLINKS AND HOW TO GET THEM: Backlinks are links from a web page that link to your school’s web page or content. If someone links to your site, then you have a backlink from them. If you link to another website, then they have a backlink from you! Backlinks are strong indicators of your site’s relevance and authority, and can help boost your SEO ranking. Backlinks are difficult to come by, but guest blogging, broken link building, leaving blog comments or forum threads can build up your library of backlinks

Why you should care: Finding convenient, quick wins and places to request a link to your high-performing blog can help boost your program’s SEO via backlinks. A quick way to start could be finding opportunities with publications your faculty members have been published in and asking to get a backlink to the faculty’s profile or content on your website.

FIX FACEBOOK IMAGES WITH THE DEBUGGER TOOL: We’ve all been there – you go to create a Facebook post or ad and the wrong image shows up (or worse, no image shows up at all!). Luckily, Facebook has an easy tool you can use to make sure you use the right image, every time. With Facebook’s Sharing Debugger tool, simply add the URL of the blog post, webpage, or other hosted file that you’d like to share. After clicking “debug”, you’ll be able to see exactly how Facebook will render the post, and the image and description it will use when you publish. It’ll also make suggestions and display warnings on what to fix before making it live.

Why you should care: For enrollment managers pumping out content and ads on Facebook, it can be easy to accidentally build a post with the wrong image or description. Use the often overlooked debugger tool to make sure you reach prospective students with the right imagery and ad copy every single time.

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Each week, The Enrollify Podcast equips you with insights into how the latest trends in marketing and technology are affecting enrollment managers. Every episode is designed to inspire new, creative ideas for how to optimize the resources you have to generate the results you need.
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