college marketing strategy Archives - Ruffalo Noel Levitz Blog: Higher Education Enrollment, Student Retention, and Student Success

When it comes to filling your academic programs, it’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what’s relevant to students.

February 22, 2018 by Ashley Spain, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Marketing, RNL Leave a Comment

To be more competitive when recruiting students for specific academic programs, you need to create an academic journey to nurture their exploration.

“Why should I study at your campus?”

It’s a simple question, but it is the cornerstone of student search. Academics plays a pivotal role—do you have my major? is one of the first questions students have when they start their search. But students today also require more than seeing if you have the major they want or reading descriptions of your academic programs. They want to know if they are a good fit for your programs, and if your academic programs and your institution will meet their needs.

In addition, the competition for students in their search for the right college and the right academic programs has grown more fierce in recent years. Students now can find information on institutions across the country and the world with a simple search. According to our E-Expectations research, 60 percent of college-bound juniors and half of college-bound seniors search for the school name and program name when searching for colleges online. Nearly half of those juniors and about 40 percent of fall seniors search for program names. At the same time, your competitors are getting increasingly creative in how they recruit students for the programs they want to fill. How do you stand out from the competition and engage the students who will make your academic programs shine?

The key is to create a targeted, personalized journey for prospective students, one that engages them the first time they learn about your institution and the academic programs you offer. This generation of students has grown up in the era of personalization and content tailored just for them. These students expect the same kind of customized experience during their college searches that they encounter when shopping online, browsing websites, and using social media. That personalization—the feeling that your institution not only has the major a student wants but is the place for them to pursue their academic dreams—is how you will outmaneuver your competitors and shape enrollment in your programs.

It goes way beyond filling seats

Beyond meeting the enrollment targets for your academic programs, ensuring prospective students are well-informed about—and find themselves a good fit for—specific majors means they will make more informed enrollment decisions. Those decisions are about more than where they go; what they choose to do is just as important. With a carefully created, personalized plan building early awareness, you can do better in connecting students early to the right major—and then in exceeding their expectations as they pursue their opportunities at your institution.

Successfully shaping enrollment for your academic programs means letting go of your old plan

We have written previously about why the traditional college communication plan is broken. But it is especially critical, in an era of increased competition for students and greater expectations for personalization, to engage on an individual level when recruiting for your academic programs. Your outreach needs to feel relevant and customized for them. This cannot be done effectively through linear or static communication streams that highlight aspects of the majors you are targeting.

Instead, students are looking for an academic journey for choosing the right academic programs. They want to be empowered and drive the experience, finding information and making decisions at their own pace and in the order they prefer. They find their way to their enrollment decision and want to access the information they want when they need it.

Think of it in the context of a conversation with a prospective student. Rather than providing a flow of information at planned stages—which may not meet a student’s expectations or needs for their college search—each exchange and each piece of information or interest the student shares will tailor that conversation and increase their engagement. The benefit is, in giving students more freedom to shape their exploration of your institution’s academic programs, you increase your opportunities to steer them toward a decision to apply.

Ideally, you create an academic journey that creates that experience for them. This journey should have three key aspects that engage the right students for your academic programs and nurture them toward enrollment.

Invite students to engage by tapping into their academic interests on a personal level (for instance, by using an interactive “fit quiz).
Empower and educate students as they research your institution, letting them find the information they want in any order they desire, rather than along a present timeline of communications.
Engage students until they enroll by connecting them with relevant information—career possibilities, financial aid information, faculty profiles—and reaching out to their parents to make them advocates for your institution.

Read how to create this academic journey in our white paper

Download our white paper, Majors Matter More Than Ever: Creating an Academic Journey for Prospective Students. You’ll read more details about how student expectations have driven the need for an academic journey approach to filling your academic programs.

Get your copy now.

Flipping college marketing communications with prospective students

August 20, 2015 by Dr. Raquel Bermejo, Associate Vice President for Market Research, RNL Leave a Comment

To engage prospective college students, you have to promote true interaction, not just an invitation to learn more about your institution.

Colleges spend enormous amounts of money, time, and resources communicating with students through campus marketing. But are all those communications presented in a way that resonates with how today’s students learn and process information?

From the research we have conducted, the answer appears to be no. We have conducted many focus groups with prospective college students, sharing with them examples of college communication. In one instance, we showed them a brochure that had a question on the front—a question that they found thought-provoking and interesting. They looked inside, where the brochure proceeded to describe the experience of being a student at the college and the benefits of attending.

Here’s where we lost them: they wanted to know how they could answer the question that was asked on the front.

This example illustrates the change in how students learn today, and how they want to interact with campuses. After doing extensive research on current pedagogical and instructional strategies, we have discovered that adopting a flipped learning paradigm is the right step—or rather the right “flip”—for your communication strategy.

What is flipped learning and how has it changed how students process information?

There has been a revolution in student learning. Long gone are the days of the lecturing teacher and the passively listening students who were expected to absorb the lessons. Students need to be—and desire to be—engaged in debate and interaction for the content to stick. Enter flipped learning, a teaching concept that prioritizes student engagement.

When adopting flipped learning, teachers create lessons, lectures, and other traditional instructional content for consumption outside of class at the student’s preferred pace. Since direct instruction is delivered outside the traditional classroom, “teachers can then use in-class time to actively engage students in the learning process and provide them with individualized support.” (See this white paper on flipped learning, p.4.)

Research supports the key elements of the flipped model with respect to instructional strategies for engaging students in their learning. It has proven to improve students’ academic performance. (See Prince, 2004; Hake, 1998; Knight & Wood, 2005). Active learning has increased student engagement and critical thinking while improving student attitudes in general (O’Dowd & Aguilar-Roca, 2009). There is also evidence of flipped learning helping to develop students’ higher order thinking skills (Kharat et al, 2015).

How can the flipped learning paradigm apply to college marketing strategy?

As we continue to develop communication to engage a high school audience, we need to embrace the fact that this group needs to discuss, needs to debate, and needs to express its opinion in order to retain and remember information.

At its core, flipped learning provides the opportunity to employ key active learning principles like analysis and evaluation more often. In the classroom, students ask questions, answer questions, and receive valuable feedback in real time. We want to mimic this engagement process and their desire for interaction as much as we can.

Instead of engaging students in this fashion, colleges tend to tell students why they might be the right fit and what their institution has to offer the student. Rarely do students have an opportunity early in the process to say what they are looking for or why they think they might be a good fit for the school. This is the flip in the communication strategy—providing an opening for the student to share back to the college and engage in a truly two-way conversation. We believe that this flip will lead to better engagement and ultimately more of the right students finding the right college.

How can campuses flip communication with prospective college students?

Engage higher order thinking skills. Simply asking a prospective student to remember something about a campus will yield less than 7 percent content retention. Asking a student to analyze a message and create a response will yield upwards of 80 percent content retention. (See here and here for discussions of content retention.) That has considerable potential for students retaining key messages about your institution.

Give students the opportunity to start a conversation. Campus response forms currently gather basic information about a student. With a flipped communication approach, those forms allow the student to ask questions, say what they want from a college, and start a unique and personalized conversation with the institution.

Create digestible, meaningful, and transparent messages that meet expectations. Understanding what someone expects to see when they open an email or letter is the first step to increasing engagement. Once we have their attention, we must deliver information in small doses that is relevant to interests and the process at hand.

So why flip communication with prospective college students?

First, existing communication strategies could be more effective. As the increase in stealth applications shows, students are less and less compelled to respond to college communications. Is it because they are not learning in the way they prefer or allowed to really engage a campus? Are they asking, “What’s in it for me?” and not seeing much reason to respond instead of simply opening a browser and researching an institution on their own terms?

By flipping communication, you can spark engagement and create a deep and meaningful conversation with the student. You can ask students the right questions and give them a chance to develop answers, share other questions, and tell your campus from the beginning what interests them and what they want to know.

Real-time feedback is not just valuable for students, but also for institutions of higher education as well. Imagine if you had a clearer understanding of what a prospective student liked about your institution and what they were unsure of or had questions about. By flipping communication and seeking that engagement, you can start a conversation that pulls the student in and has the potential to be truly customized.

Do you have any questions and ideas about flipping communication or how you can make stronger connections with students through your communication with prospective students? Email me and let me know, or leave a comment below.

Six ways to prepare for a successful college student search program

May 27, 2014 by Ruth Sims Leave a Comment

Co-written with Pegi Anton

When enrollment managers and admissions directors ask us what makes a college student search program successful, they are usually wondering about things such as creative, offers, and mailing strategies. But while those elements are important, a student search program also requires a variety of institutional efforts to enhance its productivity and efficiency.

In our work with campuses using Noel-Levitz Direct for student search programs, we always advise campuses to have the following six strategies in place before they launch a student search program. These elements form a critical foundation that will support and strengthen the search itself.

1. Be prepared to follow up immediately with new inquiries.

When a student inquires, your institution or your student search firm should send an email fulfillment instantly and any paper fulfillment should be mailed within 24 hours of the inquiry. You also should have a specific plan for continuing communications with these prospective students.

You may already have a standard inquiry communications flow, but at the minimum we suggest that new search inquiries receive the following within the first 90 days:

An introductory brochure about your institution.
A series of emails (every other week is appropriate) that highlight your key marketing messages.
An introductory letter to parents of the inquiry.
A TUMAY (Tell Us More About You) card or electronic response mechanism that allows students to provide additional information about themselves for your CRM. A more sophisticated version of this strategy is to ask one or two self-disclosure questions at a time, providing multiple opportunities to engage with the inquiry.
An invitation for a campus visit or to a campus event.

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Using senior search to generate more college applications

May 1, 2014 by Pegi Anton Leave a Comment

Co-written with Andrea Gilbert.

When talking about student search, campuses usually think about search campaigns for high school sophomores and juniors. However, colleges and universities can also have success generating applications and enrollment with a focused senior search.

In many respects, a senior search is very similar to a traditional search for sophomores and juniors. You buy fresh names of seniors, develop a search campaign for them, and engage as many inquiries as possible. At the same time, the compressed period for a senior search does require campuses to adjust their traditional search strategies as there is much less time for relationship building. The list purchase in particular needs to be comprised of qualified leads who can quickly turn into inquiries, applicants, and enrolled students.

I can illustrate an effective senior search campaign by discussing how one of our Noel-Levitz Direct marketing campus partners, Midwestern State University, conducted one.

Building a qualified senior list through predictive modeling

Midwestern State University is a regional four-year institution that, prior to working with us, had declining local enrollment. It suffered from limited brand awareness and was squeezed between two large metropolitan markets that were within a two-hour drive. The campus had an immediate need to boost enrollment, which meant increasing the application pool as quickly as possible. A senior search would be an ideal strategy.

However, given budgets and the shortened time frame of a senior search, campuses have to be very strategic about the names that they buy. Frankly, we do not recommend conducting a senior search without some kind of predictive modeling qualification. Predictive modeling allows an institution to use advanced statistical analytics to assess the likelihood of a prospective student enrolling. For a senior search, this means a campus can zero in on prospects who have a good chance of not only applying, but enrolling if accepted, which makes for a much stronger list purchase.

That’s what Midwestern State did. They used the Noel-Levitz SMART Approach system, which applies a predictive model to the data-rich NRCCUA database of high school students. This allowed them to cultivate names that had a higher propensity to enroll and that had other desired characteristics as well. Not only did Midwestern State use this method to uncover senior prospects in their traditional markets, they also found students in new markets they would have otherwise overlooked.
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