Online marketing and brand awareness for HEI: A review and bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Background: Many studies have been conducted on higher education institutions (HEI) regarding advertising, promoting, branding, social media marketing, and student enrollment. We investigated the gap in these studies by using bibliometric analysis and comprehensive science mapping in the field of HEI online marketing and brand awareness. Methods: The study used a web-based application, biblioshiny, which comes in the bibliometrix package. The study used the Scopus database to create the data set, given its conventional construction and quality of the sources. The analysis done is descriptive analysis. By using the bibliometrix software, the study showed the authors name, articles, sources, citations, relevant journals and co-citation from the year 2017 to 2022.The time period selected by the study was five years which means that articles published from 2017 to 2022 have been taken for the study. Results: We found that HEI online marketing and brand awareness have not been explored much. The study highlighted that HEI online marketing is a topic that has been developing but has not reached the stage of maturity. Publications on this topic have decreased since 2020. Also, the role of brand awareness in student enrollment decision for HEI requires more investigation. The ways in which brand awareness affects the choice of HEI should be studied. Most of the publications were from sources like higher education, higher education advertising and technology. Conclusions: This subject has been researched, but not much. This paper has given a path for interdisciplinary approaches that can be further explored in the field of higher education and marketing. Further, it gives opportunity to examine publications patterns through different authorships, co-authors, collaborations, relevant sources and citations. The insights of this paper will help education policymakers to devise more creative strategies to increase enrollment. This would give an in-depth understanding of this field to the readers.