Digital marketing campaigns will make or break your campaign. All around you are ads. The ads appear on blogs, before, after, and even during videos. Ads like this are everywhere. How can you subtly get your idea across without enraging anyone?
The answer lies in digital credentials.
Digital Certificates and Badges are rapidly growing as the new norm around the world. With a wide variety of advantages over paper credentials, from being instantly verifiable to allowing for the creation of micro-courses and smaller programs, they are the next wave of innovative technology that is on the rise.
They also give educational institutions and organizations a marketing edge over their paper counterparts.
Education is and will always be a competitive industry. While the platform and methods change over time, the process of teaching someone a new skill is always needed. Attracting new students must always be a priority of educational institutions. Digital credentials are a new, creative way of marketing a course or a program to eager minds willing to learn.
Here are four ways why digital credentials are ideal for your digital marketing strategy
1. They cater to a new generation of learners
Students after the pandemic want different things from educators. After getting accustomed to online learning for 2 years, they experienced flexibility in their coursework. They could learn during a busy schedule and do extra projects with the time it takes to finish their course. With social media usage at an all-time high, learners want to share their accomplishments online. Paper credentials take a year, sometimes even more to reach the hands of a recipient.
Digital certificates and badges allow these expectations from learners to be met. Certificates are provided the instant their course is completed. This allows learners to share them on their social media platforms. When being shared, their friends and followers will see your institution’s name on the certificate. Just like that, via word of mouth, someone else knows about your institution, and that you provide digital certificates. This enables you to capitalize on the impression that your institution is easily adaptable and understands the needs of learners.
2. They make the lives of employers and recruiters easier
Digital credentials allow job recruiters and providers an innovative way to figure out if a potential candidate meets their skill requirements and technical know-how for a position at their company. This can range from vocational and technical skills to soft skills and communication skills. With Hyperstack’s Credential Cloud platform, employers can instantly validate a candidate’s digital credential at the click of a button. Not only does the candidate make a good impression on the recruiter as a person well-versed with modern digital technologies, but it also gives a good impression of your organization for the same exact reason. Essentially, you’ve saved them a lot of time from calling the institute and verifying whether or not the candidate has completed the course they’ve mentioned there.
By gathering a good reputation among employers as a place that produces skilled individuals with validatable claims who can get the job done efficiently and effectively, you create a self-sustaining cycle, and as time goes on, your organization will be notable by the top companies which then attract learners and students who want to work at those companies.
3. Digital Credentials exist in the digital world
A key advantage of digital credentials is it allows your current students and past graduates the hard work of marketing for you on an ongoing basis. By issuing digital badges that students can immediately begin posting to their social platforms and networks now (and that will be continually viewable as part of their skills acquisition record), education providers get the power and extended the reach of peer-to-peer marketing at a fraction of the cost of digital or social media marketing.
One way education providers can achieve an immediate ‘bump’ effect in this network marketing effort is by issuing digital credentials to past cohorts in bulk. By offering this advantage to students (for example, students who completed courses last calendar year), they can get the advantage of immediate past students posting their achievements online and sharing them with their networks, which can help launch a digital credentials initiative and boost recruitment at the same time.
4. They help you stand out as a modern brand for education
Building and maintaining an education brand is an important, ongoing project. With both students and employers valuing those brands that are known and respected in their niche as leaders in both learning and employment outcomes, the investment providers make in bringing that brand story to life through marketing can make or break efforts to differentiate the school or education product and achieve sustainable market buy-in over the longer-term.
Digital credentials give marketing teams an edge by helping them link their brand to desirable traits like an appetite for innovation and commitment to student employability. By becoming synonymous with a modern approach to education and certification across student and employer markets, education providers are able to set themselves apart as leading brands within their niche, especially when compared with competing providers who have not moved to embrace innovation.
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