Personae Marketing Part I: Understanding How It Works for Higher Ed

Prospective students are not all alike, and treating them as if they are all the same is the perfect recipe for wasting marketing dollars. But how do you determine what messaging to use for each of your target audiences? 

Fortunately, the answer is both simple and within reach: The key to successful recruitment lies in determining four things: 

1. Who they are, 
2. What they need, 
3. How to speak to them, and 
4. Where they look for information. 

This marketing technique is called personae-based marketing.

The Case for Personae Building

Personae are all about tailoring recruiting strategies to specific populations. The more known about a target audience, the more effectively marketing and recruiting plans will perform. The challenge is to base our strategies on the needs and actions of real people—prospects who have a high likelihood of becoming our students and finding success at our institution. 

To do this we need to understand:

• Who are our prospective students?
• What motivates them?
• What would incentivize them to enroll in our program?
• What obstacles are in their way?

In Marketing, we call this Building Your School’s Personae. Personae are abstract representations of real people that provide a level of detail sufficient to construct effective marketing strategies. 

Here are a few examples:

Susie B. 

Summary: Susie is a high school senior with below-average grades. She’s never really taken school seriously and now is starting to realize she should have. She has not applied to any four-year colleges and she suspects she wouldn’t get accepted if she did. She works in a pizza joint and is tempted to just keep working her minimum wage job. However, her parents have made it clear that she needs to be able to support herself, and to do so she needs to learn a trade. 

How she becomes a student: Susie needs help finding a clear path to a career she can believe in. She’s unsure if it’s worth it to actually spend money on an education. Whoever is going to recruit Susie will need to convince her that she can get a useful certificate or degree in a short amount of time that will translate into an enjoyable, profitable career.

What matters to Susie: Susie cares about a Path, a Program, Price, and the Potential for a long-term career.

It reads like a story, doesn’t it? 

With this much information, we can quickly understand that prospective students like Susie will primarily be interested in short-term certificate programs at a local community college. We don’t know specifically what program, and we can only assume HOW we will likely connect with her—maybe at an information session on our campus, in an online search or maybe she’ll walk onto campus at some random time and day seeking information. 

Regardless, given what matters to Susie we have some pretty good ideas about WHAT information we want to provide to her to assist in her decision about her educational future. 

Finally, we also know that if we are a large university that excels in providing degree programs and does not invest in delivering training programs we probably don’t want to spend money recruiting Susie. She’s just not likely to enroll at our institution. 

Now, here’s another example persona:

Kara H.

Summary: Kara is a young single mother working in the healthcare field. She loves her job, but her place of employment requires continuing education classes to keep her license current. She has limited time and resources. She doesn’t own a car, so she prefers online coursework that empowers her to manage the many demands on her time.

How she becomes a student: To catch Kara’s eye, a school needs to showcase convenience, affordability, and safety. And they need to offer online courses.

What matters to Kara: Kara cares about Programs, Price, and mostly about finding a program that is flexible in helping her meet her goals.

Continuing ed classes are available from most community colleges, some universities, and many other providers. In this case, we know Kara needs healthcare related continuing ed programs and that they have to be fully online.

As opposed to Susie, where we can only guess HOW we will make a connection, we can be confident we’ll find Kara online. That means we need to invest carefully in our website, particularly in the program pages where both Susie and Kara will either find what they need to become a student or they’ll keep looking, almost certainly on a competitor’s website. 

Let’s look at one more example. Compare the persona above to a target persona we created for a prestigious business college:

Erin R.

Summary: Erin is a rising associate at Coca Cola with a dream of becoming a partner in a top consulting firm or starting her own product firm. She’s a little bored at Coke and ready for a change. 710 on the GMAT, two promotions in five years, already making over $75k annually and looking to get her “card stamped” at a premier MBA program in order to move up in the ranks. Expects to make over $100k upon graduation. 

Demographic Snapshot: 28, married, no children, lives in an apartment complex in the Buckhead area of uptown Atlanta.

Education: Graduated Cum Laude from Dartmouth with a 3.7 GPA majoring in organic chemistry.

Employment: Started with Coca Cola out of college and has moved up to a management position.

Application Quality: Erin’s academic background and work performance are exceptional in every way.

Desired Outcome: To cement her Rising Star status through acceptance into and completion of a top-10 full-time MBA program. 

Likely Alternatives:

• Emory University
• University of Virginia (UVA)
• University of Chicago

Priorities in Rank Order:

• Prestige
• Placement
• Programs

How She Becomes a Student:

While Erin appears married to a top-10 university, this is a proxy for:

1. Acknowledgement of her excellence
2. A promise that she will receive an exemplary experience in her program
3. The knowledge that she will have access to premium job placement upon graduation

There is a lot more detail in this personae and, not surprisingly, that requires a lot more effort and expense on our part. Also not surprisingly, the additional detail allows us to take our marketing strategy to an entirely different level. The more we know about our target audience, the more effective our marketing and recruiting plans will be. 

Take a look at what we know about Erin. Does it give you ideas about the types of programs Erin would seek? How about the delivery modality? Would the school where you presently work be interested in recruiting Erin? If so, how would you go about connecting with her? 

Building and refining personae is both a science and an art, and we often give them names like in the examples above. Let’s dive a little deeper into how we construct a persona. Spoiler alert: The trick to success is connecting with enough individuals to be able to extrapolate a generic profile that captures the essence of most—since it will never be all—people with whom we want to connect for a given program.

How to Build a Set of Personae

Our challenge now is to build a set of personae representing the different types of individuals who are likely to enroll in, and complete, a given program. When creating each persona, start with stratifying the programs you wish to include. It’s fine to group programs together if they have a lot in common, such as a MBA and a MHA, but the more differences between programs the greater the need to create a unique persona for each program. 

Now that you know which programs you’re targeting, next comes data gathering. There are three common methods used to collect this information:

• Reviews of existing student records
• Surveys
• Focus groups

If the target program is already up and running the best place to start personae development is with those who have already chosen the program. Demographic information is available from their student files, and I have never been turned down by existing students when I requested their participation in a survey or focus group. 

On the other hand, if the program does not exist at your institution, you’re going to need another strategy for building a persona. Looking at similar programs is a great place to start. Keep in mind, however, that the more divergent the substitute students are from the target group, the less effective the persona will be. Obviously, don’t sample undergraduate students for a graduate program.

Here are typical areas to explore as you work through this process:

• Who typically enrolls in the program?
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Prior education and work experience

• What do those students want and why?
  • Career advancement
  • Personal fulfillment
  • Monetary considerations
  • Prestige
  • Other

• Where are they looking?
  • Online website search
  • Online lead generators such as US News & World Report
  • Social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram
  • Print publications, such as newspapers, inserts, direct mail campaigns
  • Other

• What attracts those students?
  • Convenience
  • Flexibility
  • Prestige / Accomplishment
  • Credentials earned
  • Delivery modality (Online, Classroom-based, Hybrid)
  • Cost
  • Other

• What obstacles to enrollment will you need to overcome?
  • Lack of convenience
  • Delivery modality limitations
  • Cost
  • Rigorousness of admissions criteria
  • Other

• Where do prospective students find information? Be very specific!
  • Social media 
  • School, department or program website
  • Print materials 
  • Other media (TV, Radio)

Next, we put the data to work in a marketing plan.

How to Use Personae in Marketing Plan Development

How do we get from a set of personae to a marketing plan? This is actually the easy part. This process requires building and testing of hypotheses. Your hypothesis may look like this: 

“We believe this prospective student is looking for ______ and will respond to messaging like ________. We believe they will find us through ________ avenues, and we can reach out to them through ____________.” 

Let’s use the most detailed example, Erin. Based on the information provided, our marketing plan would include:

• First, and foremost, we need to be a top 10 school OR a noteworthy school that is able to provide the experience and outcomes that Erin seeks. 
• We know she’s considering UVA, Emory, and University of Chicago, which suggests she is open to relocating. Thus, Erin is not likely interested in an online program. She might, however, respond favorably to a hybrid program that provides an amazing, exceptional, unique experience.
• The persona identified who we’re competing with, so we’ll want to know where those schools recruit (LinkedIn, Facebook, digital ads, Better Homes and Gardens, Delta Flyer magazine, etc.). We need to be right there beside them to connect with Erin.
• And to beat out the competition, we will use what our persona tells us about marketing messages. It’s right there in the “Priorities” list and the “How she becomes a student section.” Crafting messages around those concepts will maximize our chances of success. 

Now, create a plan to test your choice of channels and messages. Be sure you can track everything; this is a research project after all. Maybe you’re using LinkedIn to connect with prospects who look like Erin. Start collecting data and measuring results. This will usually result in some good ideas for tweaking the next hypothesis. When possible, A/B test, changing only one factor at a time and recording results. Because your programs, and the individuals you recruit, constantly change, you will constantly adjust to assure success.

This is a data-driven process. So go slow, deliberately adjusting as you learn more and more about recruiting for this program. And while the process will transfer to every subsequent program, the details—the solutions—will be unique.

Conclusion

The  more detailed your understanding of your students, the better your marketing plans will perform. After collecting information from a sizable number of individuals or focus groups, you’ll be able to determine:

• Where to focus marketing resources to get in front of prospects that have a high potential for success in our program.
• The content of the messages you want to deliver to attract and ultimately secure prospects.

You still need an amazing website that is designed to present the information that prospects need, including career information, program details and success stories.

We’ve covered personae marketing strategy and how to identify your personae, and we touched on how to actually use personae in your marketing. For a deep dive, check out the next two parts in this series on personae marketing: 

• Personae Marketing II: How to Determine What Your Personae Need, 
• Personae Marketing III: How to Speak to Your Personae, and 
• Personae Marketing IV: Where Are Your Personae Looking for Information About Your Programs?.