Engaging the Community to Expand Your Institution’s Brand

By Aaron Basko, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, University of Lynchburg

So much of our success in enrollment marketing is getting in front of as many of the right eyes as possible – simple, but not easy. One great way to multiply your efforts is to engage potential influencers from across campus and beyond. Your faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and community members can all be effective parts of your outreach strategy. Harnessing their energy and organizing their efforts can help you deliver your brand to more of the market.

Managing groups of volunteers for a marketing effort is a notoriously challenging task. In the past, often only institutions with more resources and staff were able to tap into the power of their larger communities. But today, colleges can leverage technology to help make an influencer network more feasible and more sustainable. To be successful, the system you build needs a few key qualities. It should be transparent and easily understood by your community. It should allow for a level of self-service, and it should be built on a team approach, rather than depending on the efforts of one person.

Here are a few tips to get your influencer network off the ground:

Get the Right People

Start by pulling the right people together to imagine your process. You’ll want representation from admissions, the alumni office, parent programs, and, if possible, a faculty member who would want to participate. From the marketing office, be sure to include someone from your web team or someone who manages your social media content (they may be the same person!). These are all key players in building a process that is easy for members of your community to navigate.

Then, ask a few questions. Which groups do you want to engage? Do you want to start with everyone, or do you want to start with one group, like alumni, and roll out to one audience at a time? Define your audience, and then brainstorm what that audience can do for you.

As you identify people who can help you, don’t forget one of your best assets – your students! Especially if you marketing staff is small, students can become an important way to extend your team and produce more content. If you have student tour guides, orientation leaders, graduate assistants, or interns, they can become powerful influencers by contributing an authentic voice of the student experience.

Don’t forget one of your best assets – your students!

At the University of Lynchburg, where I work, we utilize our university ambassadors to reach out to sophomores and juniors in our prospect pool to with advice about choosing a college, selecting a major, and making college visits. We also ask them to shoot some of their own casual videos around campus of what seem to them like mundane, everyday actions – like eating in the dining hall, studying out on our beautiful Dell green space, or participating in intramurals. These videos become posts that help bring the campus to life for students.

Ashlie Walter, Lynchburg’s Social Media and SEO strategist shares, “When it comes to a platform like TikTok, spontaneous and authentic content does the best. Our best performing videos this semester have been Q&As around campus where students will ask other students random questions, but also niche commentary on things only found at Lynchburg.”

These videos become posts that help bring the campus to life for students.

Create a Menu of Options

There are myriad options of how your network, or influencers, can help you spread your brand and attract students. Your team can develop a menu for them to choose from. An easy contribution they can make is to utilize their own social media networks as a platform to share information for you. Ask them to help publicize campus events and deadlines or to highlight newsworthy items that might convince other families to visit. Provide them with regular updates of talking points you want them to share.

Certain influencer network members can engage personally with students through phone, email, or hand-written notes, based on their geography, major of interest, or other factors. They can volunteer to attend a college fair for the institution or to bring materials to a local high school. They can also provide you with contacts of organizations in their communities. Of course, the most traditional way for certain influencers to help is to recommend students from their own families and personal groups of friends, so make this an easy and rewarding process for them.

We’ve had parents attend college fairs specifically to speak with prospective parents or sponsor a table at a local sporting event to give out swag and information. Some of our alumni have made introductions to guidance counselors for admissions staff or helped us spread the word about upcoming open houses. We’re even piloting a new program where alumni would drop off coffee at school counseling offices to show appreciation to the counselors.

Build the Back End

Once you have defined a menu of options for influencer involvement, you will need to design a streamlined, repeatable process that will provide your influencers with a smooth experience. Just as you might map a student’s journey through your application process or comm flow, you can map what your influencer’s journey should be through their work of helping you disseminate the brand.

• Create an easy way for them to sign up.

• Write autoresponder messages that immediately acknowledge their willingness to help.

• Confirm what they have signed up for and give them a clearer sense of the expectations.

• Let them know when they will receive more information about next steps. Identify their contact person or people.

• Keep a record of influencers for each audience group, and note which ones are your best brand advocates over time.  

It’s important to immediately confirm that they have made a good choice by volunteering in this capacity, and to instill confidence that this will be an organized and positive experience.

Your team should think through each step of fulfillment. Who will the initial influencer contact information go to? Who will respond and within what time period? If your network members will need content to share, create a plan for how the content will be generated and conveyed. If they will need materials, have a plan for how you will pack and ship them. Think through how you will collect information back from influencers about their experiences and their results. Include a plan for how you will thank them for their service, either verbally or by sending them and appreciation gift. Make sure all of these details are mapped out before launching any type of influencer marketing effort.

Create a Face

Once the back-end processes are built, you are ready to create the interface that your influence network members will use to volunteer. Design a webpage with a menu of the options so participants can choose how to help you share your college or university’s brand to a broader audience. Provide descriptions of each option to make the expectations clear before they sign up. Share results or testimonials on the page so that potential influencers can see that their work will make a difference. Make the initial data collection minimal, as you can always collect more information later as you match the influencer with the task.

Our Marketing and Communications office is teaching people across campus how to talk about the Lynchburg brand and how to "always be marketing." That project includes a Google site called the Marketing Lab, which is a hub of information for how employees can interact with MarCom and admissions. A key feature of the Lab is a single page where employees can go and sign up for different options to help with recruitment. We’ve also designed a version specifically for our alumni to use to engage in volunteer recruitment opportunities

Launch

Now that you have a well-designed interface and a complete, it is time to launch your site and to recruit your own influencer network. Consider a strategy for reaching each audience. Alumni may appreciate a direct invitation from the alumni office or the president. Work with your parents’ council or through faculty and staff governing boards to get the word out. Post the opportunity on social media to recruit current students, staff a signup table at campus events, or create an introductory video – whatever you need to do to get the network started.

Get Results

“When it comes to getting our name out there,” Walter says, “some of the best advocates for our brand can be our employees and our customers (current and former).” Ashlie has also created what she calls an “employee advocacy program” for social media.  “I can track how often certain followers like, comment, retweet, or tag the University's accounts. Starting this month, I selected three employees who have interacted with our content the most and sent them a swag item as a ‘prize.’ I hope to continue this month after month.”

Remember, the ultimate goal of influencer marketing is to maximize the reach of your brand and positively impact your enrollment results. As you build a network that is engaging to be a part of, you can reap the rewards of having a team of volunteer brand ambassadors actively working for on behalf of your institution.

Need assistance building your brand at your institution? Let us know how we can help!