3 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand with Prospective Students
With so many colleges and universities vying for prospective students’ attention, it’s important that you do everything you can to stand out from the pack. Of course this means offering high-quality programs and academic opportunities to help them achieve their goals and grow holistically. But it also means conveying the uniqueness of your school—of your brand—in an engaging, authentic, and memorable way.
With that in mind, here are three key ways of making sure that you’re consistently painting a strong image of your brand in the minds of prospective students.
Make the Student the “Hero” of Your Brand Story
Popular author and marketing expert Donald Miller has written much about the power of storytelling in your marketing. His book, Building a StoryBrand, unpacks his case, and there are some key elements for your school to keep in mind.
The primary idea is that your messaging should ultimately convey a narrative—a compelling story—that places your student (and not you!) at the center. This is because students are ultimately looking at your school and wondering how it’s going to help them pursue their career passions, find a community of like-minded peers, and enjoy these next four formative years of life. In other words, they care about your school insofar as you are helping them achieve their goals.
Following Miller’s approach, if students are the “heroes,” then your school is the “guide,” the wise sage that helps them overcome a challenge or reach a goal. This is why content marketing is a great strategy, because it allows you to serve your audiences—helping them learn or achieve something. But the key is to make sure your messaging is continuously helping students picture themselves at your school and achieving their goals.
One simple example can be found on Hillsdale College's homepage, where the second person voice is used to prompt prospective students to imagine "the people you want to be around" and the "four years of conversations you'll never forget." It's simple, but instead of relying on third person and talking only about the college itself (like many schools do), they immediately place prospective students at the center of the story they're telling.
Another great way to make students the heart of your story is to literally turn them into your brand advocates. You “walk the walk,” so to speak, of placing students at the center of your brand story.
Emphasize Stories Over Statements
This doesn’t mean you have to provide wordy articles or long videos. But keep in mind that students can better visualize themselves succeeding at your school if they can see others doing so. For example, instead of talking about your committed faculty, tell a story that reveals how a committed faculty member helped a student find a job.
Stories are also much easier to remember than informational reports. When students are hearing from every other school how they will be offered real-world experience in a program, it’s easy for the benefit to become a standard, uncompelling feature. But when a student reads about a team of biology students joining a professor on a trip through the Andes to track alpaca, then they can see and understand exactly what type of real-world experience your school can offer.
Wheaton University does a great job of presenting student stories to give visitors a sense of what they can expect. They provide an easy-to-navigate and well-designed platform to include stories from not only two or three students, but many. This makes it more likely that prospective students will find a story that resonates with them. Seattle Pacific University is another great example, providing a short video of various students in an authentic, homemade format where they share why they decided to attend the school.
Consistency Is Key
There is a temptation to try to be everything to everyone, but that makes your school forgettable and indistinguishable. In other words, you need to make sure that your brand marketing story is clearly communicating the heart of your school and what kind of students thrive there. This doesn’t mean repeating your mission statement over and over again. It means being clear about what you represent so that students get a sense of what you have to offer (and can decide whether they’re a good fit or not).
For instance, if your school is committed to forming service-oriented leaders, then include narratives, photos, and messaging that emphasize this mission. Include examples of students volunteering or leading in this capacity, faculty speaking about the virtues of servant leadership, and messaging that speaks to this value throughout your website, brochures, and emails. (Of course this doesn’t mean you should use the same exact language each time.)
For example, Biola is very clear and forthright about their mission as a Christ-centered university. Right on their Student Life webpage they communicate that they "integrate a Christian perspective into everything [they] do." And this isn't just a throw-away line, but something that they embrace full heartedly. The sentiment is expressed all over the site. This promotion of a clearly defined faith commitment consistently ensures that prospective students can know what they can expect by attending.
The goal of your branding efforts is not to have prospective students come away with your mission statement memorized, but that they can articulate in a general way the spirit and heart of your school’s brand. And this means students will be able to recognize—and remember—that your school is an authentic, unique, and distinguishable one.
You have a story for prospective students. 5° is here to help you tell it.
