Remember the days when you could fill your enrollment quotas by inviting a group of parents and high school seniors to your campus and then sending out flyers afterwards?

1. College Recruitment Strategy: A
Simple 5-Point Plan to Enroll
More Students Today
Remember the days when you could fill your enrollment quotas by inviting a group of
parents and high school seniors to your campus and then sending out flyers afterwards?
Those days are long gone.
As students become more and more selective with the colleges they choose, a college
recruitment strategy is an absolute must. And if you don’t want to become a part of the
63% of colleges that didn’t meet their enrollment goals in 2019, that strategy has to be
sustainable.
This article covers the 5-point plan that will help your higher ed organization immediately
attract and convert more students in the upcoming year.
But before we dive in, let’s define what a college recruitment strategy is!

2. What is a College Recruitment Strategy?
A college recruitment strategy is a set of workflows and processes that you can
easily scale to enroll quality students and fulfill your admissions goals.
Simply put, if your college doesn’t have a college enrollment recruitment strategy,
you’re probably shooting random marketing messages in the dark, hoping that
prospective students will read them and come knocking on your door.
If you want to meet your enrollment goals, you need a marketing message that is
both very specific, and able to stand out in a highly competitive market where
students are constantly being bombarded with messaging. A college recruitment
strategy makes that possible.
While every recruitment strategy depends on the institution and the recruiters
themselves, our 5-step framework will help any student recruiting team better
identify their perfect target audience, create a convincing and powerful message,
and make the student enrollment process way more efficient.
Here’s how it works.

3. Table Of Contents
•Step #1: Create Detailed Student Personas
•Step #2: Coin Your Marketing Campaign
Message
•Step #3: Define Underused Marketing
Opportunities
•Step #4: Train Your College Recruitment Staff
•Step #5: Analyze Performance Data And Enhance Your Enrollment Strategy
Step #1: Create Detailed Student Personas
The easiest way to make any marketing message convincing is to address it to the
right person at the right time.
As a higher education organization, you likely already know who your students are.
Student personas help you take that knowledge to the next level.

4. Student personas are semi-fictional archetypes that represent a segment of the
target audience you want to enroll in your university.
Personas can be anything from “a senior high school student interested in math” to
something much more specific and tailored.
Typically, the more detailed your student personas are, the better you can
understand the core needs of your prospects and develop specific marketing
campaigns that resonate with them.
Here’s how to create highly-specific student personas that can function as a
backbone for your college recruitment strategy:
•Survey current students. Conduct polls and surveys among current students to
understand how they learned about your organization and why they chose your
college over your competitors.
•Research and analyze current enrollment data. Integrate your learning
management software with a higher ed CRM to gain insight about your best
performing students and how they were recruited.
•Create several personas. Don’t restrict yourself to a single persona, as all students
are different and enroll for plenty of reasons. Try creating several personas to refine
and implement over time.

5. From GPA to areas of interest, a detailed student persona tells you exactly who
you're looking for to the point that your marketing messages practically write
themselves!

6. Step #2: Build Your Marketing Message
To create effective marketing campaigns you have to account for several things at the
same time. Below are some of the most crucial factors to a successful college
recruiting strategy.
How can you stand out among the competition?
The field of higher education as we know it is becoming more and more competitive
with every passing year. Digital education platforms are growing by the day, while
thousands of colleges are offering attractive online programs as alternatives to brick
and mortar education.
In many ways you’re no longer competing with a handful of organizations in your
city— you may be competing with the whole world.
That’s why it’s important to identify your main competitors and analyze their
marketing strategies as soon as you have some student personas to work with. If you
decide to advertise blindly instead, you risk burning through your whole ad budget
trying to compete with organizations that are saying very similar things.

7. After you’ve identified your competition and their strategies, consider creating a
perceptual map to use as a guide for future reference and further analysis.
Product-level Marketing vs. Brand-level Marketing
While both product-level marketing and brand marketing play integral roles in
helping institutions attract more students, it’s important to be able to discern
between the two. Brand marketing includes messaging that makes you unique
compared to your competition, while product marketing’s main goal is to inform your
prospects about your product and how it can help them.
Here are some tips to help you create the most engaging and memorable marketing
messages in your niche:
•Actively use your student personas. Your student personas should be tightly
connected with your marketing messages. Personas help make marketing messages
more targeted, which leads to better results.
•A/B test your marketing campaigns. No one can create a perfect message from
scratch. Fortunately, every major marketing platform (Facebook Ads, Google Ads,
landing page conversion software, etc.) allows you to A/B test your marketing
messages and select the best performing ones.

8. •Eliminate department silos. Different units within your organization can have their
own marketing campaigns and compete for the same student personas.
Collaborating instead of competing can make everyone’s marketing strategy more
efficient!
Now that you’ve successfully created and tested your marketing message, it’s time
to boost your applicant rates by identifying new marketing opportunities.

10. Step #3: Expand Your Reach With New Marketing Opportunities
Often the best way to outmatch your competition and enroll more students is to
engage students where your competitors aren’t.
Here are some great ways to expand your marketing reach and attract more
potential students.
•Try new marketing mediums. New platforms are emerging every year. A few years
ago Instagram and Snapchat were all the rage. Now it’s all about TikTok and other
platforms. When your competition is wary about marketing on new platforms, you
have a golden opportunity to command the market.
•Try new marketing formats. Traditional campus recruitment events have been
around for ages, and although face-to-face interaction is a powerful form of
communication, there are other marketing channels to consider. Augmented reality,
virtual tours, and live streams can present great platforms to engage students in
new, original ways.
•Find new ways of gathering data. The more data you have on your current
students and organization as a whole, the more you’ll be able to determine which
recruiting strategies will work. Investing in quality CRM platforms can help you
maintain, track, and analyze relevant data quickly and efficiently.

12. Step #4: Train Your College Recruitment Staff
Once student applications and inquiries start coming in, untrained recruiters can
quickly become a bottleneck.
Ask yourself:
Do my recruiters reply to all inquiries in a timely and professional manner?
Do they consistently follow up on all applicants to keep them engaged and
interested?
Are they utilizing several messaging mediums to boost open and reply rates?
According to a study from InsideTrack, a national agency behind over 4,000 student
success programs, a large majority of institutions are not using high-response
mediums such as SMS text to foster conversations with applicants. Additionally,
many recruiters are using inconsistent follow-up messaging strategies that are likely
doing more harm than good. .

13. Here are a few tips to help you make sure your recruiters are effectively closing
new students as they express interest in your institution:
•Provide adequate recruitment staff training. Online sales programs, webinars,
and invited experts will enhance your staff’s ability to convert inquiries into
applications.
•Use recruitment templates and scripts. Shape EDU CRM provides recruiters with
well-tested recruitment templates for email, text, and phone calls. The templates
were created based on several years of exclusive partnerships with leading EDU
organizations such as Woz U and SCI.
•Actively use automation. With smart lead distribution and automated email
campaigns, you can reduce response times to seconds and consistently reach out
to prospects when they’re most likely to respond.

15. Step #5: Analyze Performance Data And Enhance Your Enrollment Strategy
After you’ve gone through the whole recruitment funnel—from student persona
ideation to the finished application—you’ll need to look back at your strategy and
analyze what worked for you and what didn’t.
This is a critical stage of every enrollment strategy, because it allows you to optimize
and improve your results in several ways. When you analyze your performance data,
you can:
•Enhance your student personas. The more students you enroll through the use of
student personas, the easier it will be to determine which personas are accurate,
and which still need some work.
•Remove operational inefficiencies. Enrollment is a long-play game, and the more
you can optimize your daily processes, the more resources you’ll be able to save in
the long run. With data in hand, you can gather feedback from your recruiters,
eliminate department silos, and make sure your recruiters leverage technology to
reduce routine tasks and focus on recruitment.
•Learn your numbers. Analyzing your data will help you make sense of your
applicant rates, acquisition by channel, and any performance metrics you need to
facilitate decisions in the future.

16. A college recruitment strategy is not a one-off solution that you create and follow
for years.
To ensure your enrollment strategy stays relevant, keep a live document where all
your team leaders can access it and make relevant updates. An updated college
enrollment strategy allows your team to adapt to the shifting preferences of your
target audience, and saves you time, money, and effort on strategies that don’t
work.

17. If you want to gain a competitive edge in the current higher education landscape,
investing in the right systems can also be a huge help.
Shape CRM for higher ed is an all-around enrollment marketing system designed
to help universities attract students, prioritize leads, and better manage and
analyze their data.
Try Shape for free for 14 days, and see for yourself how a well-balanced CRM can
help you enroll more students with ease!
Article Source:- https://setshape.com/blog/college-recruitment-strategy