Students are the lifeblood of any university, and with increased competition for a limited resource you need smart strategies to attract the brightest people to your campus. Gone are the days where a good website would be enough to recruit new students, now you need a well-rounded multi-media strategy with striking video to sell the sizzle. A good strategy is one that leaves a strong first impression. It not only informs potential students of the academic excellence that is your university, it doubles as a showcase of the benefits to enrolling with you. Students want to know about the culture at your university, your policies of inclusion and acceptance, how you are connected to the community. Most importantly, students will want to know how you will make them feel welcomed.
This ultimate guide will be a comprehensive look at recruitment plans. We want to help you discover what students are looking for and how you can deliver that to them through an interconnected strategy in many different forms of media.
What Is A Higher Education Student Recruitment Strategy?
A student recruitment strategy plan is one that higher education institutions develop to reach out to and connect with new students to encourage them to enrol. A good strategy conducts research and applies the learnings from the data to adapt accordingly and speak with their target audience effectively.
The goals of a recruitment strategy would be to paint the university in a positive and encouraging light and to remain in the front of the minds of any students looking to continue their studies. A strategy needs to leave a strong, lasting impression in the minds of those looking to enrol.
Multiple streams of communication are needed for a complete strategy, delivering a cohesive message to target audiences. Use of social media, websites, subscription newsletters and real world marketing are all part of the package. Powerful video elements can hook people in with colour and movement and a concise message.
There needs to be an underlying theme of values and mission statement and a positive spin on what students can expect from you when they enrol. You want your strategy to show them a future where they have careers and are successful thanks to the education they will receive from you.
Ultimately a student will decide what is best for them, not you. Your strategy has to showcase all the benefits a student will have enrolling with you, and then let them make up their own mind. The best marketing strategies are the ones where your target audience feels they made the choice themselves. Through seductive video content where students can live and breathe the university life, with colour and movement, you can help them make the right choice – you.
Why Is A Student Recruitment Strategy Important?
A student recruitment strategy is important for your university because it is a much more complex operation to bring new students to your campus. The range of students covers ultra-connected and online youth, mature aged students and those returning for post-grad studies. It is easy for students to browse potential universities online. If you don’t grab the attention of your audience quickly, with a strong message that aligns with their values, their wants and needs, they can easily click to the next option and you’ve lost their attention, and their application.
You can’t just make videos and put them online and hope to get results. You need a cohesive and well-planned strategy. Not only will this help to target the students you want to enrol, it is also a much more efficient way to invest your money wisely.
The more work you put into your strategy the more you will stand out in the digital world, the more memorable you will become to potential students.
How To Develop Student Recruitment Strategies for Higher Education
Developing a successful and winning strategy for your university is a big project. It needs to embrace your university’s brand, values and mission. The strategy needs to address the gaps you’re trying to fill. It needs a budget and measurements in place to judge its success. There are some clear steps involved with developing a winning strategy.
- Assess the current recruitment strategy – What is your university doing now to recruit students, and why do you feel it’s not working? Look at your overall business strategy and decide if your recruitment and business strategies align. Look at the budget being spent on this strategy and see if you’re getting a good return on your investment. Do multiple schools within your university have their own recruitment strategies? Create a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) report and begin to build a strategy that works.
- Evaluate the current recruitment process – From the SWOT you can make an unbiased and comprehensive evaluation of how your university currently recruits students. What is the path they take from first touch point to enrolment? How many touchpoints are there, and when’s the first chance they get to speak to a real person? How many steps to get them down your funnel and on board? From this examination and evaluation, you can begin to choose what you want your strategy to look like, how many touch points you want for each student.
- Define goals and tasks – After your comprehensive review you can now start to define the goals you want to achieve with your strategy and what tasks will be required to achieve this. Working backwards from the goals is a smart move. If your goal is to enrol five thousand new students, then you can define tasks such as social media campaigns, local community campaigns, content campaigns, including video content, written content and more. You will also begin assigning tasks to stakeholders. Tasks such as social media managers, audience research, analytics and suchlike. Know who will be responsible for which section, what their goals and objectives are and what their definition of success will be.
- Define your audience – It is not so simple to say your audience is anyone who wants to study at university. The more niche you can be with your audience targeting, the better your strategy and resulting campaign will be. The audience of the ‘Mature Age Student’ requires a much different strategy to those just leaving high school. The audience for the humanities school is much different to the audience looking at STEM subjects. Knowing who you want to target helps understanding their wants and needs; helps you to know how you can help solve their problem; helps you speak their language.
- Set a timeline – You need to determine how long your recruitment strategy will run. It can’t run all the time, as during semesters you won’t have anyone enrolling and so you’d be wasting resources. A six month strategy running from October through to March would be a good example, as it catches students before exams, and goes right into the first month of Semester 1. Having a timeline is important as it is Timely, the T in a SMART goal. You can map out goal posts, create reports full of time-based statistics, discover when you get the most bang for your buck and hence refocus your strategy to the busiest and most successful time in that six months. If you don’t establish a timeline, then the strategy tends to just wither away and become this thing that happens in the background.
- Establish your value proposition – What is it about your university that makes it stand out above all the rest? Why would a student want to study with you? What value do you give to them? While the goal of a good recruitment strategy is to bring more students to your university, to benefit you, the marketing and the message needs to be all about them. How do you benefit them? What features and benefits do you have that make up your value proposition? Do you have strong ties to the community, or does your school have the best science labs? Is there a strong connection to business or the environment? Your value proposition must also resonate with your target audience, else the strategy may not fire.
- Choose the right channels – If you’re wanting to recruit more science-based students, signage at the local football ground may not be appropriate. This is a very simple example, but you can see where we’re going. Know where your target audience hangs out, and go there to speak to them. Sending professors to local high schools, choosing the right social media channels to get your message across, all are choices that need to be researched.
- Implement tools and technologies – Research the best tools and software to help build, run and measure your strategy. You will need analytical tools to track the recruitment journey for each student, databases to record student enrolments. You will need video and image creation and editing software, and how about a powerful project management tool?
- Create content – Now it’s time to create content that speaks to your target audience, resonates with their values, represents your university and brings in a solid return on investment. Video content is a core component of a strong strategy. Social media platforms are optimised for video content, giving your content a much broader reach and potentially more engagement. Video content has increased mobile device consumption, where it is estimated over 75% of all video content is played.
Student Recruitment Strategy Ideas
Understanding who you are trying to recruit, plus knowing what you have to offer them, you can build a winning strategy that will have students enrolling with your school from day one. Here are some key ingredients for a successful strategy to win them over.
- Use personalised and engaging communication. Speak their language. You’ve identified your target audience, now speak to them so they understand. If your target audience were community and socially minded then you tell them about money raised through charitable efforts, people in the community you have helped, and the courses you run so they can do the same. If you’re aiming for the scientific students, then use scientific language, talk about experiments and laboratories. Don’t be afraid if other niche audiences don’t understand the language, they’re not the target audience.
- Utilise social media. This is a fundamental part of our lives and to not use these channels is a missed opportunity. Fun videos on TikTok and YouTube, educational videos on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Connect with your audience and have a conversation through comments. Social media is a great way to connect with a larger audience.
- Showcase university life. Look at these university promotional videos including testimonials, for inspiration. Show potential students what a day-in-the-life would be like, highlight university events, create institution overview videos and more. Craft stories for your students to understand and make an emotional connection to.
- Scholarship and competitions. A great way to generate interest and sign ups is through competitions and scholarships. Book vouchers, gift cards for on-campus stores, merchandise, or full scholarships to the university, are all good examples of how to garner interest and attention.
- Campus tours. Virtual tours to show off what campus life is like, is a great way for students to get a feel for where they could be studying or living. They can discover more about your campus from the comfort of their own homes, to help them make that big enrollment decision.
- Interactive online events. Connect with students before they arrive at your campus with interactive online events. Q&A sessions, presentations from current and past students, workshops around key subjects, events that benefit and inform the potential students, are all good examples for online events.
- Student ambassadors. Some of the best forms of marketing are testimonials and reviews. What better kind of review than from students who are currently studying, or who have completed their study and went on to great success, thanks to your university? Student ambassadors carry a level of legitimacy because they’ve been there and done it. Pending enrolments are highly likely to listen to and believe their stories.
- Blog and website updates. Content is king. Always keep your audience updated with what is going on- news, views and reviews. While this is a great strategy in general it is also a solid SEO strategy. SEO is the practice of ensuring your website and online presence is delivered high up in search results. If someone is searching for science degrees, and you have up to date content that can answer the student’s queries best, then your website will be presented first.
Find the right strategy for student recruitment and you will find success. They are a chance to showcase your university’s academic achievements as well as give people a glimpse into university life and extracurricular activities. Online and video content can give an inside scoop about what you have to offer, so much more than simply words and still pictures.
Ivory Media can help you build a solid recruitment strategy. We have a creative team and all the tools on hand to produce virtual tours, testimonial videos, online events and more. We work with your marketing team to ensure your brand voice is heard loud and clear with your target audience- new students. Contact Ivory Media today and let’s get that ball rolling!
