Do You Know What Your Prospective Students Are Thinking?

Answering that question can ignite your communication strategy. By addressing their basic needs, fears, and motivations, you can make a compelling case for your school.

Certain aspects of your audience stay the same—like interest in majors, costs, and the application process. Yet there are other, more nuanced characteristics of prospective students that may change over time. That’s why it’s important to keep up to date with some of these finer points. And the best way to do that? Ask them. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Send Email Surveys

Surveying prospective students is one of the most efficient ways to find out what they’re thinking. You will likely have a majority of email addresses for prospective students, giving you the ability to reach a broad group. Depending on what you’re specifically interested in, it’s important to be strategic with your questions. You may want to ask them:

• How often they use social media to engage with potential schools

• What’s most interesting on a campus tour

• What aspects of a school’s website they care most and least about

Make sure to limit your questions (around 10 is usually a good goal) and leave space for students to provide their own responses. Also, you’ll need to consider how many responses you receive to determine how representative the feedback is. The greater the percentage of responses you receive from an adequately-sized base, the more likely your results will be statistically significant.

Of course, the biggest challenge is getting people to respond to your survey. Since prospective students are often hounded with tons of email from multiple schools, you may need to offer incentives to the first “x” number of people who respond or highlight some kind of prize raffle for all respondents. Even more importantly, let them know how much their input matters. In your introduction, emphasize that their responses will help to make the college discovery experience even better for all prospective students. The more you can provide an incentive to complete the survey, the better.

Conduct Over-the-Phone Interviews

Interviewing prospective students requires more time, but it’s a great way to get more detailed responses from this audience. This particular strategy is ideal for learning about your prospective students’ buyer journey. How did they learn about your school? What barriers are they encountering as they research options? What are their unique reasons for pursuing an education? These are the types of things you can learn more about by directly speaking with them.

Since this strategy requires a decent time commitment from those you’re interviewing, you’ll want to offer a gift card of some kind to compensate them for their help. The good news about this strategy is that you don’t need to speak to hundreds of prospective students. As long as your sample is representative of your prospective student population, speaking to 8–12 individuals within a given demographic bucket (females, out-of-staters, first-gen students, etc.) is all you need to get a good sense of their buyer journey. Though results of a sample this small wouldn’t yield absolute conclusions, it would help to identify big ideas.

Unlike a survey, you can really delve into responses in an interview and learn where you can do a better job with your marketing and communications. However, this does require an understanding of how to properly conduct these interviews to get responses that are helpful. One resource that does a great job of explaining how to do this is Adele Revella's Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business.

Ask Them at In-Person Events

You can also conduct individual interviews or focus groups with prospective students at in-person college fairs and events or when they come to visit campus. This makes it much easier to actually track down students who are willing to chat.

For example, after a campus tour, you could ask if prospective students would be willing to sit down and answer some questions. You could also do the same thing at a college fair or some other event where prospective students are gathered. Plus, you can also ask their parents questions to get a better sense of what they’re thinking. (As we know, they often play a major role in prospective students’ college decisions).

The team at Carson-Newman University, a 5° Branding partner institution, regularly asks students who attend campus visit events for their opinions on marketing and enrollment materials. They often use that feedback to narrow down different creative approaches for content that is mailed or emailed to prospects.

Be very clear that any info they provide will have no bearing on their admissions decision (as you should do with all four of these strategies). They may be less likely to speak honestly if they perceive that it could hurt their chances of getting into your school.

Take Advantage of Online Tools

Another helpful way to find out what your prospective students are thinking is to use online tools (such as Hotjar or User Testing). This can be an easy way to get student feedback on your website or landing pages. There are more and less involved ways of doing this.

For example, you can add a pop-up that inquires whether visitors found a given page helpful or whether they easily found what they were looking for. This can be a great way to understand if your website or other digital properties are meeting prospective students’ expectations. While something like this won’t usually allow for very detailed responses, it can give you a general sense of what online users are thinking. Then you can conduct further research by employing some of the strategies already listed.

You can also conduct more sophisticated research using online tools. For instance, you can opt for services that allow users to provide detailed feedback about your website or landing pages (in-person or online). By using an online service to recruit users who fit certain parameters (ages 18–22, etc.), you can then give them a set of tasks to complete on your website or landing page.

You might ask participants to find the cost of tuition or explore campus housing options. As these users are completing the tasks, they narrate their thinking (out loud if in person or through audio recording if online). This is a great way to know what prospective students might be thinking when they visit your website or landing pages.

Regardless of the approach you take, it is important to identify ways to gather feedback from prospective students. Hearing what they’re really thinking may complete the missing link in your recruiting efforts.