Recruiting Intelligence

You don’t need to be a CMO to know that there’s more to attracting students than coming up with a pithy headline for your Instagram ads and postcard mailers.

And yet, what we often see are institutions full of creative minds doing the same marketing initiatives year after year, not really realizing how they appear to their target audiences.

At the end of the day you want your institution to stand out in a field of sameness, ubiquitous blather, and endless repeats of campus images and smiling students with backpacks and laptops. You want to highlight your institution’s differentiators and deliver the right message to a targeted audience at the right time.

But we get it — whether it’s lack of budget, time, or most likely, both, swapping out last year’s campaign photos, shuffling around your headlines, and hitting a few buttons in Facebook Ads Manager are sometimes the only levers that are in scope. And establishing a feedback loop of performance analysis for continuous campaign iteration and optimization? An even more distant goal state.

So, before you reach for that updated “smiling student with backpack” image to juice your Fall 2021 recruitment campaigns, turn your attention to today’s post: 3 recruitment marketing ideas to help you reach students where they are right now.

We’re talking specifics on topics, audience, tone, and dissemination channels for campaigns that can set your institution apart and attract and nurture those high-quality leads you’re looking for. And what would an Intead blog post be without an insight on  how to use your data better?

Throw these ideas to your creative team and see if something valuable emerges from the brainstorm session. Something that truly fits your institution. 

Read on.

A bustling campus: backpacks slung over shoulders, coffee cups and water bottles in hand. These thoughtful, exuberant, media-savvy students filling your hallways, classrooms, and online portals, THESE are your most powerful recruiting influencers.

Last month, Intead teamed up with Unibuddy and Northeastern University to present our research on Peer-to-Peer platforms as student recruitment tools at the AIRC Conference. The discussion was lively. So many questions and ideas emerged. And now that research, and the guidance it offers, is available to you.

Consider this: When deciding where to apply for university,

• 57% of students said online conversations with an institution’s student ambassador were their most helpful resource. 
• 47% said friends and family were their most helpful resource.

Read that again.

Current students were more important than friends and family.

First-hand student experiences established trust and that came through loud and clear in these conversations. This student connection is SO significant to the recruitment process.

Read on for more insights and to download the full report…

Despite the dire headlines throughout the academic industry addressing the "looming crisis" and the excellent research on the topic from so many great sources (thank you Chronicle of Higher Ed), the availability of college-ready students is growing at a rapid pace.

How could we say such a thing!!??!?

Everyone knows the pool of high school students is going to fall off a cliff after 2024-2025, right? The demographic trends lines have shown this for years!!! The big academic marketing and analytics firms (you know who we are talking about) are pushing their predictive analytics services as your holy grail and so many institutions are buying into it.

Not so fast! Please, not so fast.

Welcome to our three-part series on Non-Traditional Student Recruitment. You will want to share this one with some key colleagues at your institution. There’s a theme to this series: Be Nimble!

Research and analytics must lead to action and results. And 36 million potential students could be evaluating your institution right now. Do you have the right advisers and team to help you be nimble and capitalize on the opportunity?

A recent comment from a highly experienced senior procurement officer regarding her institution’s contract with Intead, “There is no other company that could do this project for us.”

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

A time of change does require expenditure. Knowing where and how to spend is the key. The big question: Will the board-level advice you are paying for pay off for you?

Answer the bigger question that is actually going to improve your enrollment numbers. It is a question that your audience (students) are asking and you need to be able to answer:

“I want to move from here to there. Have others like me been able to do that?”

Read on for the clear direction for enrollment growth. It is not simple, but it is the future…