Digital Marketing Strategies and Student Decision Making: The Role of Brand Awareness

The increasing number of higher education institutions in South Africa has led to intense competition in attracting and enrolling potential students. Digital advancement has made potential students rely on the internet to seek information to make an informed decision regarding their choice of higher education institutions. The study aimed to investigate how digital marketing strategies affect prospective students' decision-making process when choosing private higher education institutions.The cluster sampling technique was used to draw a sample of 363 Questionnaires were collected from five private higher education institutions students, namely, Richfield, AAA School of Advertising, Rosebank, MANCOSA, and Varsity College in South Africa. The study utilised IBM SPSS to analyse the data. Ethics clearance was done by the researchers. Verbal consent was provided by the respondents.The results indicated that search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing (EM), content marketing (CM), and social media marketing (SMM) were all found to have a statistically significant relationship with student decision-making.The results offer the private higher education institutions in South Africa the opportunity to adopt and invest in digital marketing strategies -such as search engine optimisation content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing, to influence potential students’ decision-making on enrolment. This study contributes to the discussion on the digital marketing impact on business performance and extended the theory of the persuasive knowledge model.