PR for the higher education sector
Students aren’t just looking for reputable courses anymore. They want the whole experience. To achieve growth in student numbers, a higher-education establishment needs buy-in from stakeholders and the wider student community.
Our higher education PR services use public relations, as well as other creative and digital strategies to attract students, funding from companies, and partnerships with schools.
Through education PR, our team can raise awareness of your higher education organisation. We can also position you as the academic ‘place to be’.
Why is education PR so important for academic brands?
Students are among our most sophisticated users of social media and technology, making it a vital sales channel for any University or college. Education PR enables you to own the conversation on the outlets they’re consuming media on.
It’s a great way to show off your courses. It also shows the buzz around your socials, campus and societies, which is what students are looking for.
How can Prohibition help my educational institution?
We’re a specialist higher education PR agency. Don’t just take our word for it.
We’ve worked with a whole list of recognised brands in the education sector including Northumbria University, the University of Oxford, the University of Leeds, Kirklees College, Durham University and many more.
Our higher education clients
Our higher education PR services
Increased organic visibility
Struggling to rank higher on SERPs? It’s highly likely that a younger audience will be wanting to find out more information about your academic institution through online, visual or audio search.
Digital PR plays an important role in this. Digital PR involves creating proactive, planned, and reactive campaigns in order to achieve backlinks from strong online reputable sources.
Our carefully considered PR strategy will secure backlinks that indicate to Google that your content is trustworthy in the higher education sector, improving your site’s organic rankings.
Our ‘always-on’ approach makes sure we’re utilising every media opportunity to build an authoritative and reputable presence in this busy sector.
Long-lasting relationships with education journalists
We pitch to the education and national journalists your audiences actually read, and we’ve been building those relationships since we opened in 2012.
Your academics are usually the story. For London Metropolitan University we ran an always-on press office that made its academics the go-to commentators on education and public life, week after week. That work produced 90+ pieces of coverage, in titles including The Times, Times Higher Education, The i and The Guardian, and 20+ broadcast interviews.
A research paper or a new course can carry a story too. We use media relations to put each one in front of the people you want to reach.
Social media marketing
Social media offers a personal way of reaching several audiences through content marketing, whilst also allowing you to respond in real time.
Our communications team can develop an image of your brand and provide helpful information that audiences are wanting from educational institutions. For universities and colleges, this could consist of information on partnered industry bodies, research facilities, campus amenities, funding opportunities, or general student life.
In addition to this, we can also assist your social media campaigns with videography content such as testimonials from current or graduated students to make your brand messages succinct and easily digestible.
Paid advertising
Another way to amplify your organic efforts is through paid social advertising.
Paid advertising enables us to touchpoint users through behaviours such as location, demographic, and timings.
This allows our team to target your content at an age group, for instance the 18-22 age bracket, which will be a large majority of the student population. This could even be broadened to older audiences, such as postgraduates or parents, so they can recommend your higher education facility to their children.
To drive recruitment further, we can re-target people who have already interacted with your page and prompt them to re-engage through personalised content.
Influencer marketing in the Education Sector
Looking to shift your target audience? Wanting to target academics from a competitor’s campus? Influencer marketing should be a key part of your strategy.
Influencers have an active listening audience that respects and values their opinions. In the higher education sector, this could be figureheads from your alumni, celebrity endorsements, or popular student newspapers that can share your brand message.
From sourcing to vetting, our team will match an influencer to your business goals and needs. That will drive brand advocacy from students, parents, teachers and firms across the UK and beyond.
Supporting overall digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing is evolving every day. Methods such as digital PR can improve organic performance. Social media marketing is now powering search too.
Communication comes as second nature to us. By aligning your communications across your channels, you’re able to present more direct and authentic messages to your target audience, supporting overall employer branding.
Digital may be growing, but offline marketing and PR techniques should not be ignored. Raising awareness through events, billboard advertising, and newspaper coverage will create word-of-mouth and prompt users to visit your site organically.
Integrated PR
We’re a full-service PR and marketing agency, which means we can achieve comprehensive media coverage online and offline. Not every student is online, especially students that are older and are registering to follow their passion, so by reaching them through traditional methods we’re not leaving anyone behind.
This proves beneficial for education facilities as our media relations services can generate interest from local press offices, as well as national media, meaning we’re able to drive referrals from a number of sources.
Student recruitment, from open days to Clearing
Students spend years at the university they pick, so they need to feel sure before they apply. Open days and events still matter, and we’re event specialists. In Clearing, though, the decision can take a matter of hours.
For De Montfort University we filmed four student case studies before A Level Results Day 2026, each one strong enough to run as a broadcast interview. From the same shoot we cut 16 social videos to keep the university visible through Clearing. The campaign landed 5 TV and radio broadcast hits and a total reach of 45.3 million.
Paid social can attract applicants too, as long as you can prove what’s working. We put tracking on every ad before the scholarship campaign for the Martingale Foundation went live on Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn. Applications rose 34% on the 262 it received the year before.
For Northumbria University we wrote a university-wide social media strategy and delivered it through workshops and face-to-face training with key stakeholders.
Content creation
Tuition costs don’t come cheap, so prospective students will want to make sure it warrants the investment.
Content marketing sells your experience and career opportunities, through captivating imagery and video content. Our creative team can provide a multitude of video services; corporate, thought leadership content, TV adverts, or social media content.
Online video content consumption is only growing, with dedicated video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram enabling new ways to reach audiences.
Reputation Management
Reputation is everything in the education sector. Prospective students want to know they’re going to a reputable higher education facility that’s going to look amazing on their CV. And with the jobs market more competitive than ever, holding your business to the highest amount of integrity is where institutions can shine.
For stakeholders, it’s this reputation that will make them choose you over competitors. At the end of the day, a partnership needs to show the stakeholder’s business in the best possible light too.
Whatever the size of your institution, we know how to make it stand out from its competitors through reputation management.
Crisis communications for universities and colleges
Universities are big, public places, so sooner or later something goes wrong. It might be a strike, a protest on campus, a cyber attack, course closures or a story about student safety. The first few hours usually decide how it gets reported.
Crisis management is one of our specialisms. Stories break at any time of day or night, so our crisis service runs out of hours, with a 24/7 virtual press office. Before anything happens, we’ll help you put a crisis plan in place and test it with mock incidents. We’ll media train the people who’ll face the cameras, too.
When the calls start, we handle the media enquiries and agree the lines with your leadership team. We’ll also make sure students, parents and staff hear it from you before they see it on social media.
Education PR Training
Being able to communicate effectively and get your key brand messages across to the media is absolutely essential in order to build or maintain a reputable brand.
We run comprehensive courses on all aspects of media training, helping you make the most out of the media and make your team communications experts. Or even better, let us handle your comms.
Marketing and PR support
Our entire education PR team is spearheaded by expert strategists and specialists who are well-versed in brand positioning, design, tone of voice development, and creative communications strategies.
We’re here to offer support and guidance, no matter where you may be in the world. Prohibition’s press office is an extension of your marketing team, we’re your PR Director, providing ‘always-on’ PR support and solutions.
Why universities choose to work with us
The short answer is results you can check.
Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford is a good example. For its 25th anniversary it wanted a thought leadership series to stand out on social media, where business school content tends to look the same. We set the creative direction and made animations and graphics for 20 articles, all built to the school’s own style so its team could publish them. Engagement on its feed rose by 68% and website traffic by 10%, and the school asked us back for more projects. As Bex Henley, the school’s marketing manager, put it in a verified Clutch review: “It’s a great change from the usual corporate stuff we produce.”
Specialist education PR agency
From training to reputation management, to public relations campaigns, to social media audits and strategies, we’ve helped a range of higher education clients that are recognised across the globe through education PR. You can trust you’re in safe hands with us.
What other sectors do we operate in?
Prohibition has been operating for 10+ years, working with clients from a range of diverse B2C and B2B industries, so we can help in any field.
If you’re looking for marketing and PR support beyond higher education, our expert knowledge covers a number of fields such as luxury PR, retail PR, travel PR, food and drink PR; to name a few.
Full service agency
We may look like a normal PR agency, but that’s far from the truth. We’re different from other PR agencies, we’re a paid and organic social media marketing agency, influencer marketing agency, video marketing agency, public relations, and advertising agency all wrapped in one.
This means we’re able to apply our arsenal of innovative strategies across all our services to gain maximum success and return on investment.
Multi-award-winning Higher Education PR Agency
There are a lot of award-winning PR firms out there, but we’re not just award-winning, we’re multi-award-winning and that is over more than 10 years. You know you are dealing with quality.
Our work has bagged us over 45 awards over the past 10 years; including being named as one of the best PR agencies in the North by Prolific North, as well as winning 30 CIPR Awards and multiple PRCA DARE awards.
Successful campaigns are of massive importance to us, we strive to create the best results for any client; every day.
Our Latest Work
Questions universities ask us before they hire
How should a university choose a PR agency?
Start with the agency’s education work. Lists of the top PR agencies in the UK, or in the world, mostly rank the big PR firms by size, which tells you very little about how they’d handle Clearing or a difficult story about your vice-chancellor. Ask each agency for recent higher education results. Then ask how they’d deal with a crisis on campus. If the answers are vague, keep looking.
How do you manage PR content for universities?
Plan it around the academic year, because that’s when your audiences are paying attention: open days, Results Day and Clearing, welcome week, graduation and big research news. Then get your channels in order. For Northumbria University we reviewed more than 200 social media channels, many of them belonging to departments and individual academics, before writing one university-wide strategy. Your academics and students are usually your best content, so build the plan around their stories.
Do you work with colleges as well as universities?
Yes, we work with colleges too. Our clients have included Kirklees College and universities such as Northumbria, Durham, Leeds and Oxford, along with organisations that serve the sector, like the academic publisher Emerald Publishing and the Martingale Foundation, which funds postgraduate scholarships. A college recruiting 16-year-olds usually talks to parents far more than a business school does, so the audiences and channels change. The job stays the same: get the right people talking about you.
