Each prospect is different. Despite this fact, prospects who are looking at your school and its offerings likely share common interest, motivations, and concerns. These common factors can shape your messaging and impact how effectively you can communicate with your target audience.
This is where student personas come in, allowing schools to develop a semi-fictional representation of their target audience in order to better reach them. Schools using a student persona document can level up their digital marketing and recruitment efforts and enjoy a higher return on investment. To maximize your results and ensure continued success, your school will need to update these documents and stay on top of any changes within your audience.
Read on to learn more about the benefits you gain by updating your personas!
The Importance of Updating Student Personas for Your School
Your student personas include research and data to provide your school with the information it need. However, this information can easily be outdated, particularly in the digital marketing world where technology and consumer behaviours are constantly changing. Schools may change their program offerings, students may develop new needs, and new marketing platforms may rise over time—creating a need for your school to stay on top of evolving trends and shifting consumer attitudes.
By doing so, you ensure that the data you gather about your prospects remain accurate and actionable. This allows you to use your personas to the fullest extent, making them a powerful tool for your digital marketing and student recruitment efforts. The content you create using your updated personas will resonate more effectively with your audience, allowing you to rebuild relationships and fortify the connections you’ve made with them.
Example: Updating a student persona like the one below, focusing on specific demographic information as well as motivations and concerns can help schools elevate their marketing strategy:
Boosting Enrollment Numbers with Updated Student Personas
With an updated persona, your school can revisit the accuracy of your target audience’s background, interests, and motivations. This new data can be used in your future marketing strategy, tailoring your content production, ad targeting, and any other relevant efforts to better align with your new insight.
Not only will this allow you to reach your prospects more accurately but it will also allow you to better achieve your school’s key performance indicators. You’ll be in a position to use research-based profiles and data-driven marketing to generate results. This way, you’ll be able to market or advertise to the right prospect at the right time using the right channels. By knowing who is most likely to convert and how, you can more effectively increase enrollments for your school.
Considerations to Keep in Mind when Updating Your Personas
If your school is finding it increasingly difficult to connect with its core audience, then it’s likely a sign that your current personas are out of date. In this case, you’ll want to review your current personas and focus on how your prospects communicate.
This is the time to reflect on your school’s business objectives and program offerings. Conducting an audit of your current content strategy and inspecting your school’s student enrollment journey are also key considerations when evaluating the impact of your student personas. If your findings are not what you’ve hoped for, then it may be time for your school to update its personas.
