7 Ways to Identify Your School’s Differentiators
To stand out in a crowded market, you need to know exactly what makes you different. Identifying your differentiators will help!
content marketing
If you write and create marketing content, I don’t have to tell you about the power of connection to your audience. Personalized content is about taking that concept to the next level.
You’ve probably heard the advice that you should “write to one person,” because if you try to create content for everyone you’ll connect with no one.
That’s good advice.
But how can we do it better than we’ve done it before?
Can you get closer to a true one-on-one connection before you’ve even met your prospect?
Let’s explore some ways to use personalized content to create deeper connections, nurture prospects and drive enrollment.
Here are the basics about the three ideas we’ll cover.
Think of these ideas as ranging from basic to moderate to advanced. I hope you’ll find one or more useful, whatever your level of experience and capability in content creation.
At its most basic level, anyone can do this exercise to make blog content more personalized. It requires no special software or a great deal of time, but can help a lot.
Enrollment marketing personas are profiles of imaginary persons who represent your audience.
What is your persona doing right now?
Are they on a mobile device? Social media? At work?
What are they seeing?
News stories? Nature? Other students in a library?
What are they thinking?
Are they wondering about the future? What questions are they asking?
Most importantly, what are they feeling?
Excited? Scared? Frustrated?
It helps to write all your answers down. Take a good look at what’s in front of you and consider how you can speak more clearly to this person.
TIP: The most useful keywords are the feeling words. Really focus on those.
After you’ve done this exercise, it should become clear that your persona’s questions are not really about your school. Not at first.
Your goal is to create a connection with them first – their questions about the future, education, etc. in general – then connect them with what you have to offer further down.
There are many examples of personas you can develop that are useful in enrollment marketing, including different types of prospects, influencers and donors.
An email newsletter is a completely different animal from a blog. Your audience isn’t made up of strangers anymore. These are subscribers.
Treat them like you know them, or lose them.
The problem with email newsletters is that they are typically one-size-fits-all content. It’s everything you want to say to everyone, period.
This is a missed opportunity to connect.
In email marketing, personalized content has to be built around more than your imagination. It needs to be driven by what you know about your subscriber … and if you don’t know anything, ask.
Periodically survey your subscribers to find out what they want to see. Anyone who doesn’t fill out the survey will continue to receive your general newsletter.
But those who do will be much more likely to open future emails from you. The more surveys that are completed, the more segmented your list becomes – and it pays off.
‘Email segmentation is an effective marketing strategy that can increase your email open rates by 203%. According to HubSpot, “marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.”’
– Neil Patel
If you know your subscriber is interested in STEM, send them a STEM-heavy version of your newsletter. Musical theatre? Give them the arts version. And so on.
Maybe your personalized content is a lead story based on your subscriber’s interest in student government, Greek life, cultural clubs, or another area. The rest could be general information.
One way to do this is to simply have one newsletter for student athletes and another for non-athletes.
Or you could be more nuanced, say with a “middle” category for students who are fans or have a high interest in intramural sports, but aren’t necessarily into participating in intercollegiate programs.
In search campaigns, you don’t know your prospects yet, at least not well. It’s difficult to create a sense of one-on-one connection while you’re compelling them to act.
You can use the information you do have to create multiple versions of digital and print pieces, but how do you know if it’s worth the time and expense?
The solution is an automated process that will:
With the right tools, you can do just that.
Consider the concept of email segmentation as a starting point. You ask them what they want, and you give it to them.
Now add some sophistication to that idea.
With advanced content personalization tools, instead of making multiple versions of whole content pieces, you can create templates in which you can automatically generate personalized components, or content blocks, that are responsive to prospect input.
Here are the basics in three steps.
(In reality, there are a lot more than three steps to this. Think of this as a simplified introduction to the process.)
Obviously, you can’t create enough versions of content to connect with every possible data point. Creating variable content starts with establishing a closed set of options.
You can have an open (unlimited) set of options in some ways, like your prospect’s name. You can have a [NAME] space at the top that can theoretically be anything. That’s a common open set.
But most of your content has to have a closed (limited) set of options. You can’t create content around every single career interest a prospect might have – you only offer so many programs. That’s a natural closed set.
In addition, you may want to refine your closed set. If you have 40 different programs, are you prepared to generate 40 different versions of every piece of content? Far more manageable to organize these into maybe 5-10 categories. That’s a refined closed set.
Once you’ve created all your variable content, you’re ready to trigger it.
You need to come up with a way to entice your prospect to fill out a form and give you the data that triggers your personalized content.
It might be a quiz, a game, a discount on apparel in your campus store – whatever it is, it’s a hook to get them to interact with you.
Even a handful of basic data points collected is gold.
If your prospect tells you they’re interested in playing soccer in college and their favorite color is red, you can now target them with soccer-themed messaging in big red letters!
There are many ways to use software like this to add an extra layer of personalization to your search campaign:
I routinely partner with ThinkPatented, whose Mail360 system allows you to set up automated personalization across comms, coordinating email with direct mail.
You can add other types of personalized content as well, including text messages and ringless voicemail messages.
If you’re interested in:
Or if you would just like to start a conversation about your desire to create stronger connections with prospects, I’d love to meet with you.
Because personalized content works. I look forward to showing you what it can do for your school!
You’re in luck! We’ve curated 25 awesome ideas inspired by top higher ed institutions across the country and put them in one handy guide: 25 Ideas for Great Admissions Content.
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Featured image by Ricardo Ferrando via Adobe Stock
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