Identifying your ideal clientele may seem like a no-brainer if you’re in the student recruitment business. For high school and/or college students and their parents, you’re promoting your institution or program. Is that the case? It’s critical to know who your audience is and what they want in order to connect with them effectively. Finding out more about your target audience and creating buyer personas will help you better understand how to communicate with them.
Improve Your Understanding of Your Audience by Analyzing Your Existing Data
You can begin the process of establishing a student persona by reviewing your current database. Determine the general characteristics of your existing students, such as where they’re from, how old they are, and what they want to do with their lives. In addition, you may want to keep track of which students are most interested in a particular curriculum, as well as their preferred method of delivery (online, in-person, or hybrid learning).
This kind of data can tell you which programmes have a larger male to female ratio and which programmes are more popular with overseas students.
It is possible to employ an overseas student persona like this one to help language schools improve their marketing strategies.
You now have a better idea of who the majority of your students are. As a result, you’ll be better able to identify and attract others like them—your ideal customers—in the future. In order to improve your foreign outreach and student recruiting activities, you should collect this data and get to know your international prospects.
Your school’s digital metrics will be available for you to use as a source of information during this process. Use website and blog analytics to find out which areas of your school’s online presence get the greatest number of visitors. Comparing the content on your most frequented pages with the highest bounce rate may be worthwhile.
A Checklist for Analyzing Your Data
You’ll want to ask yourself a few questions as you go over the data from your institution. By doing this, you can be sure that the data you’re using to develop student personas is accurate and useful. The following questions can be used by your school to establish a template for its student personas. Background, motives, and concerns make up the bulk of these inquiries.
Background:
- Is there a single person in charge of making major decisions?
- In terms of demographics, what is the normal age and region of your potential customers?
- Why do you think you have such a wide range of potential clients?
- How did they find out about your institution?
- How do they prefer to communicate?
Motivations:
- Is there a reason why students prefer your school over others in the area?
- Is there anything you can do to improve the experience of your students at your school?
- According to your students, what distinguishes your school from the rest?
- What do your students think is the best part of your school?
- As a student, what are some of the measures that you use to measure your success?
Concerns:
- Are there any common questions or concerns that students frequently raise?
- The most typical misunderstandings that pupils have regarding the school are as follows:
- Have any of your students faced any difficulties in the past, or are there any major roadblocks in their way?
Using the answers to these questions, your school may construct authentic and realistic student personalities. Your school’s existing inbound efforts can be revised and improved upon once this information has been gathered and compiled in a concise document.
Bring Your Community Into the Data Gathering Process
Reach out to your community and do interviews if you don’t have the information you need. You may gain a clearer understanding of your school’s impact and value by surveying current students and alumni, which you can use to examine your unique selling proposition and your student personas.
Consider consulting with your admissions department on the effectiveness of your lead generation and conversion campaigns. Recruiters and admissions officers at your institution can provide you with insight into the most prevalent worries and motivating elements that students use to decide whether or not to enroll. This would help you get things done more quickly.
If your students are minors, don’t forget to take their parents’ concerns into account. In these circumstances, parents frequently have a significant influence in deciding the outcome. A parent persona could help your school better target its marketing efforts.
Templates that help schools construct realistic student personas for targeted marketing can be found in the form of a persona template.
Create a Student Persona Template After Conducting Market Research
Your school’s specialized audience will only be reflected in the data you receive from your digital analytics and conversations with the community. You’ll need to do a lot of market research to see the larger picture. Look at your competitors’ social media and blog accounts in order to see how their customers interact with the information they post.
This stage can help you complete your analysis and fill in any holes produced by a lack of data or knowledge in addition to providing inspiration and insights for your content development plan.
Searching for programmes that are similar to your school’s offerings can be a good first step. You can also use free or commercial social media tools to investigate and track hashtags on various social media accounts. Doing so enables you to identify and monitor new conversations and trends that could influence how you wish to position your institution and speak to your prospects.
The higher education sector includes blogs and white papers that may be of interest to you in this regard. These steps may lead to new opportunities or industry best practices that can help you better improve your digital marketing approach and increase enrollments in the process.
Make Your School’s Prospects Interested in Attending by Crafting Appealing Key Messages
By analyzing your data, you’ll be equipped to craft messages that resonate with your audience. In this section, you can include information about your institution that you think is valuable and relevant to your target audience. It’s possible to adjust these ideas to the specific needs of your college student personas. That way, you can focus on what’s really important to better attract, hold the attention of, and ultimately convert your customers.
Messages that can be used to strengthen the personalities of higher education marketers are summarized here.
Students aspirations and concerns are addressed in these important messages in a way that shows how the school is responsive to their wants and needs. With these important points in mind, schools can better interact with more potential customers and increase the effectiveness of their overall digital marketing strategy by developing or enhancing content.