Marketing in Higher Ed: Messaging at Colleges & Universities
By Patrice Meadows — May 1, 2018 11:00 AM
Marketing is all about communication. If you don’t know who you’re communicating with, what they want, or how to help them, you can’t market effectively. Understanding each of these factors is what makes effective messaging (and marketing) possible.
What is messaging?
Messaging is a strategic approach to communication that achieves a specific goal. Often, this manifests itself in marketing with organizations messaging to individuals, other companies, or governmental entities.
Effective messaging is usually guided by a messaging platform that explains how to communicate with audiences based on what brands know about their needs, interests, and behaviors. If you read last week’s blog post on buyer personas, this should sound familiar. Buyer personas summarize critical information about sample customers from each audience segment.
You probably use messaging every day without knowing it. Something as simple as changing how you communicate with others to influence their behavior qualifies as messaging. Below are some of the elements of more formal messaging platforms.
Elements of messaging platforms:
- Value Proposition
- Key benefits
- Messaging pillars and proof points
- Style guidelines
How to create a winning messaging strategy for your institution
As with anything, crafting a winning messaging strategy means doing a lot of work. To help you get there, we’ve highlighted three musts for creating messaging strategies that work.
How does it look in the real world?
While it’s easy to understand what messaging is, why it’s important, and how to develop a messaging strategy; translating all of that knowledge into action often proves difficult. Below are a few examples of how colleges and universities use their websites to message prospective students.
Mount Royal University uses the ‘Why MRU?’ page to highlight unique selling points. This page showcases how existing students benefit from MRU resources to convince prospective students to attend.
The University of Scranton's homepage conveys central messages to prospective students. Their tagline, ‘opening doors’ communicates the university's unique selling point to students. Three message pillars support this USP and explain how students benefit from attending the university. Messages highlighting value, prestige, and student experience draw prospects further into the site where they’re presented with more targeted messages associated with each pillar.
Want to know how the University of Scranton uses Cascade CMS to build a mobile website? Read this case study to learn more about their experience.
How do you share key messages with prospective students? Share your secrets below or tweet us @hannon_hill. Don’t forget to check out the next entry in our Marketing in Higher Ed series where we will share tips for managing content across platforms.
