Yesterday I read a wonderful article by Brad Neathery, founder of the Right Brain Factory, regarding the forethought and actions that should go into the decision to rebrand a company. The article has some very important carryovers that can find relevancy within higher education.
Often times in the recruitment process, we tend to find ourselves becoming overly encumbered with predictive modeling, retargeting pixels, and mass email invitations to upcoming open houses. There is a very human element that sometimes takes a backseat for one very good but unacceptable reason: It’s resource consuming.
When it comes to creating communication plans for the recruitment process an important question you must ask yourself is, “How much is too much?” Sure, the idea of creating such specific, drilled-down emails, letters, and postcards that each student feels as though you created the document specifically for him/her is enticing, but the reality is that having a solid foundation for your communication plan can allow you to divert from these pieces whenever necessary without overburdening yourself or your staff.
In the ongoing effort to appeal to an ever-changing audience of potential new students, colleges and universities have leveraged every angle they can theorize as having a possibly beneficial result: tweet-ins, Facebook groups, photo caption contests, the list goes on and on. So in a recruitment landscape that is always evolving and introducing new platforms through which to communicate, it can sometimes seem like there is no constant, no anchor that it can all be tied back to…but there is.
Creating a higher level of online discoverability for your institution, course offerings, or specific program can come in a number of different ways, many of which might be out of your professional realm. Many institutions don’t designate specific people to do their search engine optimization and, instead, rely on traditional forms of marketing that they hope will yield more visibility to their prospective students. But what if there were a way to increase your presence for free and maintain the unique culture your school or area of study has to offer? With social media you can do just that!
