Prioritizing Current Students Is Marketing, Too
If a marketer or CEO has heard it once, they’ve heard it a thousand times: it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire one. And not just by a little bit, either. In higher education, retention can have a significant impact on revenue. In fact, the Education Policy Institute reports that colleges and universities lose more than $16 billion in revenue every year to attrition. And if our business is providing transformational educational experiences, the responsibility to meet our “customers’” needs is even greater.
Cultivating a satisfied student body has long-term positives for the institution, as well. In addition to cost savings, marketing to current students correlates to increased affinity for the entire institution (rather than just a department or professor) and, later, converts them into engaged alumni.
While communications and marketing teams aren’t often responsible for the services and programs students utilize on campus, they can use the communications tools at their disposal to contribute to a happier student body. Consider these three ways your institution can better market to current students.
Listen to Them: Student Surveys
Chances are, your institution has some student surveys that are fielded on a regular basis. Bring your marketing mind to the survey instrument to suggest adjustments to yield the best insights possible. Or consider including student satisfaction questions in your office’s brand perception studies.
Surveys can be an effective way to hear from current students about their experiences on campus, what they appreciate about the college’s offerings, and how they feel the college could improve.
Be sure to gather helpful demographic data with your surveys in order to analyze sentiments among certain segments of the student population. Just as you recognize the differences in prospective students and market to them accordingly through segmentation, it’s important to understand your current students’ experiences as unique individuals within the student body. Perhaps there’s a pain point for athletes that you can help solve, or a misunderstanding about your honors program that you can clarify moving forward.
Inform Them: Useful Content
Often, student complaints are driven by lack of information or misperceptions. Utilize the survey data to create content strategies to bridge those gaps. Perhaps students want to be more engaged with the campus’ mental health offerings, but they’re confused about when counseling is available and what the intake process is like. It could be that students expressed disappointment when they saw pictures of a campus event that they missed because they never heard about it.
Knowing about these needs can help the marketing team craft content that will keep your students engaged and feeling supported. Or perhaps the team could develop resources to empower other offices to better communicate with students.
Once you determine the message that needs to be communicated, it’s time to figure out the right channels. Where do students spend physical time? Where do they spend virtual time? Where are they a captive audience? Well-placed digital signage screens and insides of elevators can catch students’ attention as they travel to class or wait between classes.
Engage Them: Create Brand Ambassadors
By engaging current students as brand ambassadors, colleges and universities can activate a significant population who are able to reach their peers. Some colleges have official Brand Ambassador programs in which students maintain a social media presence, contribute content to school accounts, and partner with the marketing office.
Even without requiring a long-term commitment, marketing departments can engage students as brand ambassadors by:
Hosting social media contests encouraging students to share #myCOLLEGENAMEstory with specific invitations to share things like their favorite spot on campus or preferred meal at a dining hall.
Inviting students to do social media “takeovers” of school accounts to show a first-person perspective for a day.
Increasing opportunities for current students to interact with prospective students and participate in the recruitment process
The more involved students are in shaping the university’s brand, the more likely they are to closely identify with the institution and maintain a positive relationship with it even after they graduate.
Current Students Are More Than Important Customers
We get it. Your top priorities as a marketing team are likely prospective students and donors as the revenue drivers of the institution. But current students are a captive audience with a vested interest in what the institution has to say. Their experiences and satisfaction can affect their future relationship with the university and shape your brand as a whole. By communicating effectively with current students, your college or university can contribute to the financial health of the institution through retention and also the long game of cultivating engaged and, hopefully, generous alumni.
Plus, isn’t the transformative experience of higher education what got us into this field in the first place? As marketers, those rare opportunities to impact students directly can be some of the most rewarding. Let’s take them when we can for the benefit not just of our schools, but for the students they serve.
5° Branding loves helping colleges shape their brands in ways that serve students best. Whether you need help with the research, messaging, or design, let's talk!
