For the adult learner seeking a nontraditional degree, the array of options can be dizzying. To stand out in this highly competitive and vast marketplace, your institution needs to capitalize on its brand when communicating to prospective students.
You already know to refine your adult/graduate/online program communications to ensure they relate to nontraditional students. But in today’s world, unless your program is demonstrably unique in the market, you’ll need to rely on your brand differentiators to help separate your offering from the sea of competition. Take time to research and test which brand characteristics are or can be meaningful to adult learners. These prospects have vastly different motivations from traditional students, so you may need to adapt your brand messages/voice within your communications. There are many ways to perform this research, including in-person and online surveys, gathering feedback from nontraditional admissions teams, and real-time testing of digital ad copy, to name a few.
Now, smartly weave those brand differentiators into your program messaging to help it stand out and appeal to the right student. Whether it’s a blog, landing page, ad, brochure, or any other communication, if you’re not somehow including part of your brand’s “DNA” into the messaging, you’re not maximizing the power of your marketing investment to yield the highest ROI.
Take the time to do this right as it could be one of the most important messaging tactics to boost your adult learner inquiries, apps and enrollments. The power of a well-integrated brand within your communications may be the difference in capturing or losing a prospective nontraditional student.
If you’re looking for a partner who understands how to extract, elevate and utilize key components of your brand to attract the nontraditional student, we’ll be standing by.