Putting Your Brand to Work: Student Recruitment
Education
In the “Putting Your Brand to Work” blog series, I’ll explore four of the most important uses of brand in higher education.
Given the enrollment challenges many colleges and universities face today, you might expect that admissions offices would be among the first campus units to adopt and utilize a university brand. However, at BVK we’ve found that this is frequently not the case. While admissions might quickly incorporate a new tagline and color palette, more often than not, they struggle to deploy brands fully in their messaging and prospective student experiences.
There are good reasons for these difficulties. Staff members in admissions offices are often young and turnover is high. The pace of work is usually frenetic, and there is little time to pause and plot strategy. And like most units in higher education these days, they are often understaffed with limited budgets.
Still, these challenges aside, there is a deeper and more important reason for the difficulty in deploying brand-related messaging in student recruitment. At the heart of the problem is a misalignment that often exists between a university’s brand, which is usually an expression of its mission and core values, and the expectations of prospective students and parents, which are focused almost exclusively on cost and short-term return on investment (ROI). Translating between the two can be challenging, and often it’s easier for overworked admissions staff members to remain focused on the dollars and cents. This is among the reasons that so many colleges and universities look so much alike when they recruit students. They are all speaking to the same concerns about cost, affordability, and value.
Overcoming this challenge requires carving out the time necessary to be more strategic in your admissions-related messaging. Specifically, you need to consider how best to utilize the language and sense of purpose inherent in the institutional brand to explain the financial value and ROI that most students will expect to know about your university. For example:
- If any college degree will help graduates to find a better job with a higher salary, what is it about the experience of learning at your college or university that will guarantee or improve these outcomes for students?
- If cost is an obstacle for students, are there unique experiences or support you provide that make the expense worthwhile?
Taking time to answer these questions can help your admissions staff to develop messaging templates—from short texts and social media posts to lengthier emails and scripts for campus tours—that speak to prospective students and parents in their terms, but still convey your brand identity at the same time.
Once you have a communication plan in place that fully expresses your brand identity, you can then turn your attention to creating prospective student experiences that reinforce this messaging. The campus visit is among the most important and highest yielding moments in a college student’s recruitment journey. Yet too many institutions offer campus tours and presentations that are so formulaic and generic that they are indistinguishable from their competitors’. Using your university’s brand promise as a lens, it’s useful to reexamine each of your prospective student events—from walk-in tours and day-long visits through admitted student events to summer orientations—and ask whether students will get to live your brand when they visit. In other words, will they experience your brand tangibly enough that they can clearly imagine what their lives would be like as students once they enroll: from demonstration lectures and research projects to interactions with advisors and prospective employers. Arranging these kinds of experiences takes thoughtful planning and the collaborative efforts of faculty and staff members from across campus. But the more these recruitment events deliver an experience that reinforces your recruitment messaging, the more authentic and differentiating your brand promise will be to your prospective students.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to work with university leaders to maximize the impact of your brand, let me know. Email me at [email protected] and we can talk about best practices for helping your college or university to genuinely live your brand. Or you can visit BVK’s Brand Academy for Colleges and Universities to explore how to develop and leverage your brand.
We also offer a free presentation called Beyond “Telling Our Stories Better”: How to Work with University Presidents, VPs, and Deans. You’ll receive practical, step-by-step guidance for how to engage your campus leadership in ways that build trust, broaden their understanding of marketing and communications, and yield genuine partnerships that facilitate your work. To learn more, download our Presentation Overview.