Lead Generation for Education Courses: How to Search for Potential Students?
Published on January 11, 2024by Botster
At the risk of stating the obvious, I will say that targeted education lead generation marketing is your fastest ticket to a successful course creation or online education business.
Consider this: say you were a University student studying engineering. And then while in your final year, you start receiving messages through email and on LinkedIn to grab a Master’s in Linguistics Sociology.
Even if offered at 80% off the tuition fee, it’s an offer you can’t take because it simply doesn’t align with your present academic goals. And guess what? That school can’t make a sale off you because the targeting is wrong.
This is exactly why you must take targeted education lead generation seriously. Without proper targeting, the only guarantee is a waste of time and resources.
That is why in today's guide, I’ll show you a few automation tools you can use for targeted lead generation for online education and also help attract students to your online courses.
In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn:
- How to do education B2B lead generation
- How to generate B2C leads for online courses
- How to set the process on autopilot so it always finds leads for you
A recent study discovered that about 76% of businesses use automation for standardizing or automating daily workflows. So if you’re not leveraging automation for your lead generation, you’re several steps behind the competition. And with AI on the rise, now is the best time to scale your business using bots!
With the strategies I am going to show you below, you will never have to buy education leads from anyone again!
By the end of this guide, you will have two databases of online education leads. One for B2B:
And one for B2C:
To put this guide in perspective and make the steps below easier to follow, I will act as a Washington D.C.-based institute that trains and certifies accountants. And all through this guide, I will do student leads generation for this imaginary institute.
Before showing you how to find educational leads online, I must first answer a question:
What is lead in education?
Lead in education may refer to many things due to the ambiguousness of words in the English language. But in this context, it refers to potential customers who can be nurtured and converted into sales. 💰
An education lead can be qualified or unqualified, depending on whether or not they've shown interest in your course.
If you don’t have any qualified leads at the moment, running a USA education lead generation campaign will get them for you in no time and that’s what we’ll be doing today!
Without further ado, let’s get started!
B2B lead generation for online education
Step 1 to B2B lead generation in education: Company search
As an imaginary accountancy training institute, my primary target would be accounting firms. This is because accounting firms are the dens of leads for my institute.
So for my B2B education lead generation campaign, I will start by finding accounting firms I can contact and offer our course to help enhance the qualification of their accountants.
There are several ways to do student lead generation in the B2B sense. Most people do it manually by default. But as I’ve said earlier, you're several steps behind the competition if you’re not leveraging automation for your lead generation.
So to speed up and automate the process of finding accounting education leads for my institute, I will use the Google Maps Scraper. This is the perfect tool for finding companies and businesses by location. You can extract companies in a specific industry in a specific city.
Using the Google Maps Scraper for my lead generation for education courses in accounting, I will extract accounting firms in Washington DC.
To be able to use this tool, you will need to create a free account on Botster (no credit card required):
Registration is fast and easy, and you’ll be done in less than 3 minutes. Once you’ve verified your email address (we’ll need it later), follow the steps below to conduct B2B lead generation for education:
- Launch the Google Maps Scraper by clicking on “Start bot”:
- Name your job and set a folder if you like:
- Next, enter your search queries. Make sure you specify your target location, and new keyphrases should be on a different line:
- Next, select how many places or businesses you want the bot to extract:
- Next, enter a location. I am doing education lead gen in Washington D.C.:
- Set up notifications, making sure you tick “Attach results to the notification email”:
- Click on “Start this bot” to launch this tool into action and that’s it! As easy as breathing!
And that’s the exact steps for how to generate leads for education using the Google Maps Scraper!
Video guide
Below is a video guide for the Google Maps Scraper if you’d like to see how it works:
Results
Once the Google Maps Scraper is done running, you’ll receive an email notification containing your education leads results:
Downloading and viewing the results in Excel should give you something similar to this:
Tips
Here are a few tips that can help your online education lead generation:
- First, I’d recommend that you validate the extracted phone numbers using the Phone Number Validator:
- Launch the bot and name your job.
- Under custom options, select the country code for the numbers.
- Paste the phone numbers.
- Launch the bot!
Once the Phone Number Validator checks the validity of the numbers, you can now use them for cold calling and SMS outreach.
- Use the Google Maps Scraper for international student lead generation by entering cities in any country you want.
- Use the extracted websites to export emails as described in the next step below.
- Read my comprehensive guide on investing where the Google Maps Scraper is used for finding companies to invest in.
Step 2 of B2B education lead gen: Email export
The previous step is not all that goes into lead generation for education. Although you have the accounting companies’ phone numbers and websites by now, you still need their email addresses for outreach and marketing campaigns.
To make a usable list of education sales leads, we will find the accounting companies’ email addresses using the Company Email Finder. This bot can extract email addresses associated with any domain name you provide. This means that for www.capitolcpa.com, this tool will extract every email address that ends with @capitolcpa.com.
Most companies nowadays use email addresses that contain their URLs, so there’s massive potential in finding a company’s email address from their website URL.
Here’s how to find email addresses for your internet marketing education leads:
- In the results returned by the previous tool, copy out only the company websites:
- Turn the long website URLs into short domain names like this:
www.capitolcpa.com/ ➡️ capitolcpa.com
💡 Lifehack: You can either do this manually or automatically with the help of the Google First Result Finder as described in my post about B2B SaaS lead generation.
Whichever route you take, you should arrive at something similar to this:
- Now open the Company Email Finder’s start page and name your job as I showed you earlier. Mine is “Accounting education sales leads emails”.
- Now paste the website domains (no www.) from the previous tool into the field titled “Enter domains”.
⚠️ Each domain must go on a new line:
- Set your notification options, launch the bot, and that’s all!
Easy peasy!
Now wait a moment while the Company Email Finder gathers the emails to complete your B2B lead generation in education.
Video guide
In the meantime, check out my pre-recorded guide for the Company Email Finder:
Results
On the “My jobs” page, you will see the Company Email Finder running. Once it shows completed, you can download the results using any of the icons in a red box in the image below:
You can also click on “View data” to see the results online or click on “Run again” to rerun the bot.
Viewing the results in Excel should give you this:
And there goes how to generate education leads for B2B educational institutes.
Below are some tips to help you make the most of this data:
Tips
- First, validate the extracted emails using the Email Validator:
- On the Email Validator’s start page, paste the extracted email addresses.
- Set up email notifications.
- Launch the bot!
- Among the extracted email addresses, you’ll typically see some generic addresses such as contact@companyname.com, info@companyname.com, help@companyname.com, etc. Make sure you remove those ones before adding the emails to your final education lead generation marketing list.
- Finally, you must analyze the emails to find a decision-maker in the company. They often contain words like ceo@... or name@... . Once you analyze the email addresses, you can select the right people to send your cold email to. You can read my guide on how to find emails of companies for a better understanding of how to do this.
B2C lead generation: Students search
Now onto the second part of this step-by-step guide on how to generate leads for educational institute courses, we will be scouting for individual accountants who either own an office or work within an organization. You can see this as a student enrollment lead generation because they will register as individuals.
For this step, we will be using the LinkedIn Email Miner. This bot can scan and fetch people’s names and publicly visible emails from their LinkedIn profiles based on a keyword (which is usually a profession).
The LinkedIn Email Miner extracts location, profile URL, name, and email address, and that makes it the perfect educational lead generator for this step.
Launching the LinkedIn Email Miner is easy, and it takes just a few moments:
- On the LinkedIn Email Miner’s start page, enter your search keyword(s):
- Next, enter your target location(s):
- And finally, enter the desired email masks:
That’s all!
Now wait while the LinkedIn Email Miner does your student enrollment leads generation.
Video guide
Watch the video guide below to see the LinkedIn Email Miner in action!
Results
The LinkedIn Email Miner will gather your results within a minute. Viewing it in Excel should give you this:
Tips
- First, validate the extracted emails using the Email Validator as described above.
- I would recommend that you send personalized offers per email. It may take time, but it is proven to have a higher success rate.
- Since LinkedIn is a professional social media platform, it’s also a great place to send your offers. You can do this through InMail or connection requests.
Free trial for the student lead generation tools
Whenever I consult with business owners, I always say that finding clients shouldn’t be cumbersome or time-consuming. You must have a process that yields high results in as little time as possible.
Even if you had no idea of how to generate leads for educational institute courses before now, all you have to do is follow the simple steps above, and you’ll be able to automate your lead-generation process!
And when it comes to automating your processes, Botster is your best ally! It is home to a host of automation tools that can save you hours of work while you concentrate on more hands-on tasks.
The best part is that you have the opportunity to use every tool available on the platform free of charge for 7 days when you open a free account. And even when those 7 days end, the tools cost so little, it’s like buying a book. But guess what? They hold way bigger benefits.
Open your free account today, and get started with targeted education lead generation marketing!
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