Bringing Focus to Value When Cost is in Question
The cost of college is a constant topic around dinner tables, workplaces, and schools. Changes in the economy, disruptive forces like AI, and shifting policies around workforce readiness are all driving families to put the value of a college degree under more scrutiny than ever. This is a moment for your marketing team to shine – a time when telling your story and highlighting successes could be the most important key to healthy enrollment.
Top Up Your Testimonials
You need proof that your students graduate and move on to successful careers. To beef up your stock of testimonial stories, attack it from two sides – both current students and alumni.
Collect stories of distinctive projects and programs that your current students are leveraging to create pathways to career success. Give evidence of the ways in which they are engaged in research, internships, and experiential learning opportunities that directly map to their career goals. Solicit employer testimonials and utilize industry surveys to demonstrate that these are, indeed, the skills that employers want.
If you have particularly strong relationships with certain employers, ask them to contrast the experiences they have had with your graduate to those of other educational backgrounds. Focus on these key relationships as a distinctive advantage.
Tap into Your Alumni
For the second category, reach out to your alumni for interviews and highlights of their successes. Invite graduates with notable successes to serve as guest speakers for leadership programs, engage them as presenters for webinars on hot topics in their field, or ask them to co-present with faculty to talk about the link between what students are learning in class and what they will need after graduation.
You can also directly involve successful alumni in on-campus programming, matching them up with groups of parents to share their experiences and successes. “Celebrity” alumni are more valuable than ever as families seek visible markers or quality. Ask these alumni for quotes that you can display prominently on your website. Create displays highlighting them for your admissions office. You can also ask them to share about the school on their own social media pages.
Tighten Up Your Career Pathways
Career services can be your best ally in demonstrating the value of your degree. Partner with your career office to get the data that you need to make your marketing efforts more compelling – job placement rates, average starting salaries, sign-on bonuses, potential industry growth rates, and other factoids. Utilize the “first destination” survey results, which most career offices collect, to design infographics to grab attention and show how your graduates are stacking up compared to averages, both for students with and without degrees.
Show how career services is cultivating good relationships with employers. Parents, in particular, want to see that there is a chance that jobs will come looking for their students. Take the time to capture photos and videos of job fairs, employer interviews, and other events. Show students having headshots taken for LinkedIn profiles, shaking hands and exchanging business cards with employers from recognizable companies, and attending resume or interview workshops. Total numbers of employer visits to campus is another statistic to gather and highlight.
Tout Your Faculty
In addition to your students, graduates, and employer partners, you can also highlight your faculty. They play a critical role in shaping your students’ college experience as well as their initial career steps. In fact, research from the Gallup-Purdue Index indicated that two of the top predictors of student success and engagement beyond college are having a faculty member who helped students get excited about an academic topic and having a faculty member who cared about them as a person. Share this research along with the relationships that students and faculty have on your campus.
Other ways to show the quality of your faculty include:
Show off the bios of your faculty, especially those who are actively working in their fields or have significant market experience.
Highlight those who are frequently quoted in the media as experts, perhaps with a YouTube channel of clips where they are quoted.
Capture photos and video of subject-matter conferences hosted on campus that feature faculty members as speakers.
For an interesting twist, ask current students to interview their faculty either on current topics of interest or on their pathways to success.
Pump up your campus visits and reduce your visitor no-show rate by sending a preprepared email from a faculty member or department chair to families before they arrive on campus.
Talk About Your Differentiators
While tight finances will likely prevent some students from attending college at all, many others will go to your competition if they provide slightly better financial aid. To prevent this, you need to know your head-to-head value with your most important competitors and be able to highlight your differences.
For example, if you are a smaller private college and your top overlaps are larger public institutions, they may win on published sticker price, but you can likely win on smaller classes sizes or getting students the classes they want without as much waiting. Clearly identify the benefits students see in your competitors and be ready to counter them. Focus on what your competitors don’t do well and give compelling proof of your strength in these areas. Create videos of students who transferred away from other institutions (even if you don’t want to name them), indicating their reasons for transferring to you.
By combining these kinds of evidence, you are showing, not just telling, families that you are the right investment. There should be no doubt that your graduates are getting their money’s worth, even if they have to sacrifice a bit more for it.
While the financial aspect of higher education is certainly a key consideration for families, it presents a vital opportunity for schools to clearly articulate the exceptional value of their educational experience. Maximizing the impact of all your institutional assets – including thriving students, successful graduates, dedicated faculty, and strong employer relationships – will powerfully affirm that your institution is an invaluable and rewarding investment.
Could you use a fresh perspective on your enrollment marketing efforts—or some extra man hours to supplement your team? Let’s talk about how 5° Branding can help.
