University students have seldom looked at the brands. Instead, many institutions use reputations for their graduates and their average grades to attract students. However, you understand that this isn't enough without experience in the market. The world knows the difficulty this industry faces with every student — even leading professors. As market competitiveness continues and funding is falling, academic institutions start to recognize that identifying their own strengths is important.
University branding is a promise – that great idea you'd offer to students. The use of university branding is a good strategy to create a personal connection with a specific audience and encourage them to invest in a particular program or project even when the costs may seem high. Typically, higher education institutions struggle with a brand identity due to a lack of information.
You need to develop and promote the University's identity in terms of the student population. All the universities have programs that don't really explain your uniqueness. You have to show your students how different you are from thousands of other universities worldwide. The objective is to get students into your classroom.
This can only work by adopting a university brand strategy.
As you may know, technology has transformed our learning industry dramatically. Historically universities used to print and TV advertising and word of mouth in an effort to get students to attend universities. But today, there are countless opportunities for contacting future graduates. Presently branding runs far beyond just logos and slogans. In the era of the Internet, people seek value, confidence, and meaning in the investment that is in place - universities are no exception. However, 49% of businesses lack a clear digital marketing plan.
The university logo and brand identity need to be updated. It's all about being unique but still presenting a great image. Some important factors can be considered, including your logo's ability to resemble the logo of other institutions. A branding services company helps you design logos of your own importance in personal terms. This may provide the best opportunity for students to showcase their university mascot or academic heritage.
In most university marketing strategies, emotion is incorporated instead of numbers. Developing an emotional strategy can assist potential learners in remembering your university identity. It's important for you to get some positive feedback from your university. This approach works because consumers have similar feelings if marketing does not tell them otherwise. For example, if you use first-generation students to advertise the positive effect of your university on their lives, they'll resonate with other students in similar circumstances.
In the current scenario, marketplace competition exists in all fields. As you know, plenty of universities offer great courses for their students and amazing staff. Branding a university requires identifying strategies for a distinct advantage. Upon analyzing your strengths, you will already know your main distinguishing features and strengths.
Universities can create an innovative selling proposition that accentuates areas where they excel. When a university starts a new project, it examines several things, such as its customer personality, products, and unique sales proposition. Universities have their own USPs, highlighting the areas of study they excel the most. There is a wide selection of educational universities competing to win similar attention.
During marketing, narratives became a key part of this process. Telling a student about the story at your university may help strengthen a bond. Your university is part of a broader community, and your surroundings can influence the decision to attend.
When you explore university branding ideas, you may have noticed that it is unfortunate that there is the “same” as many strategies. For example, numerous universities use family shields, and some try too hard to modernize the logo. Their slogans also tend to be a mishmash of sentiments about institutions being unique or special in some way. To make your university branding campaign shine, it is important to consider how your institution differs from others.
In a world of emotion and affinity, the storytelling aspect is increasingly integrated with marketing and branding. A story is one of the most powerful tools for branding a university. All universities have stories. There is always the chance your story has its origins. Check out the origins of the university, how it was developed over the years, and why it was founded.
Studies suggest that 41% of university staff believe social media is the most effective way of increasing enrollment.
Whatever your university's goals may be, social networking can help achieve them effectively. When you establish your social presence, you increase the likelihood that students will consider your university.
Social media is an enormous effort that requires time and money, and therefore measuring your campaign value and ROI is extremely important. This involves calculating metrics based on social media goals. In some cases, you may want to monitor a person’s brand exposure to a university program and monitor their views and traffic. In addition, you can use social media to track post engagement rate, mention of the account on the site, as well as audience engagement.
Several social media sites can provide you with opportunities for engaging students. LinkedIn and Facebook offer great opportunities to connect with current and former students and faculty as well as establish yourself as an expert. Aside from visual marketing e.g., Instagram and Snapchat are ideal for promoting the university brand using aesthetically stunning photos. Instagram has the most potential students.
Like all organizations, each university has to define its values. In a competitive environment, universities must identify which are unique and how they can drive enrollment. Here branding of higher learning is important.
In order for you to achieve your goals, it is imperative that your target audience be able to identify and understand your brand. Unlike all consumers, all learning experiences are different. For example, the computer course offered in a few universities may appeal, in part, to certain students, while the degree offered in other universities attracts more students. Identify classes that your faculty excels in. The perfect way to focus your marketing strategy is by selecting a specialty that matches your brand. A successful university branding campaign requires understanding how to stand out against other universities.
Consistency has an important role to play in university branding. When choosing the logo that accurately represents the values of your university and you pick colors that make your students swell in joy, the importance of maintaining this aesthetic in every aspect of the job is obvious. Keep in mind that consistency is no simple aesthetic issue. Invest in the tone of your communication team to create your website.
Typically university branders use unidentified meaningless taglines to accompany their logos, which are often not easily recognized by anyone. Scratch the surface, and there is nothing depth, nothing to understand, and surely nothing to feel. So before putting together the name or slogan for your university branding campaign, make sure it considers your marketplace.
Podcasting can be an excellent marketing tool for the digital era and resembles webinars. Universities can create a lasting impression with a podcast series as their cost-efficient production makes creating a regular series a complete possibility. Stanford University is a good example to hear podcasts for educational brand development.
Using virtual reality and augmented reality is becoming a regular part of the everyday life of the population. How can you utilize it? Google Earth VR is proving more important in education, and more universities are using the platform to expand their educational offerings — and it is possible to expand the concept by creating fully immersive VR campus tours like at Princeton University.
Webinars are very useful because they have incredible value and provide the mobile convenience most students and others desire. By presenting an online webinar that addresses a topic specific to the university and inviting prospective students to tune in, you will be able to present the brand's history, its values, and USPs and reach out directly to the audience.
According to a new survey conducted by Google, opinion is generated within just over a minute of each site's contents. Therefore, your university brand must be digestible. Your content must also be interesting, engaging, and simple to digest. Logos and imagery should represent your institution in an instant.
University departments looking to stand out should spend a significant amount of time on Facebook and LinkedIn advertising to attract new and potential students. In other words, beliefs and distinct attributes of the university's programs can be highlighted in general or programmatic content. You must make sure the pictures of the participants are of real students. Show the strength of a person by showing it to students, meeting with fellow students, and even presenting a class
The goal should be to make your university an important educational destination for students. Students are targeted primarily by an interest in a specific field of study and geographic location. Create a persona depending on the student who is in the enrollment funnel, what they've done before in a certain area of the site, and how they can find out the right course.
Promote it, but not stop at it. Focus on what students are likely to achieve when they graduate, such as high earning opportunities, higher career potential, and more opportunities for advancement. Apart from helping raise the scholarship for your students, you can use these resources to differentiate your university from the competition to attract potential students' attention.
You need to make your program faculty credible thought leaders in their respective fields. Highlighting research and your university leaders is crucial for attracting great minds to a university and ensuring that its brands remain at the forefront of the industry.
Although it is no traditional branding strategy for university, focusing on your staff and faculty can help show which has stood behind its promises. Furthermore, if this brand-building or message strategy is used properly, it will help strengthen parents' confidence in the university for their children because you can see that they care for their children's happiness.
Your choices are virtually identical to those in student targeting. Some content is good on paid media, so experimenting will be essential. The effectiveness of your content will ultimately depend upon the objectives you outlined.
By choosing e-learning leaders for guest blogging on your website or using one of your social media channels, not only are you going to prove your digital skills fully to today's budding readers, but you can provide an exciting new way of communicating with your audience.
In modern times, many advertisers appear every day. Universities should utilize paid social media advertising to reach desired students. Content can vary - from broad information focusing on a university's strengths and unique qualities to programmatic content. This information is meant as a tool to make sure to use real student pictures. Show them at the university, collaborate with others, or just talk. This is where branding professional services come into the picture. They help you identify your niche and help create suitable content accordingly.
Applicants are always looking for information regarding careers they are interested in and pursuing. In order to reach these people, you should demonstrate the career prospects in one specific field and how the program can give them the skills they need in the job market. To make these data highly click-worthy, try putting them in different formats. For example, produce engaging infographics, blogs, and guides to discuss career prospects and trends.
Use user-generated content to improve your social media profiles. Prospective students are looking for authentic content from people who know your university better because of their experience. Creating hashtags for universities is an effective method of developing the local community and provides participants with the chance to have their photos posted to university sites or blogs.
Photo Credit: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/university-branding-on-social-media/
Don't just promote your program. Instead, emphasize the opportunities available to students following graduation, including career development, enhanced earnings potential, and a desire for change within the profession they work within. You could also utilize this information to promote scholarship rates at universities to stand out from the crowd of universities trying to attract prospective student interest. University branding services can help your school with its marketing and communications in order to increase your visibility and improve brand recognition among your target audience.
Video content is a format that consistently works for any platform on social media. Videos can provide you with an exciting and compelling story to tell. For example, you can post videos to advertise events and share campus news and achievements. Another possibility could be posting evergreen videos ranging from study tips to time management tool benefits to earning certain degrees.
Ulster University was renamed the University of Ulster in 2014 to gain traction in the modern university sphere. Part of the revamp replaced the famous interconnected ‘U’ in the emblem with something that could convey sophistication. The university was relaunched as an overarching initiative that helped it identify forward-thinking. Their newest logo definitely achieved this. The gold and blue colors convey prestige and professionalism that were otherwise impossible with the current logos.
The University of Manchester strives to provide a brand identity that is immediately identifiable and authentic. One of the most compelling attributes of the university’s branding strategies is that the logo uses its original founding date. Several universities display their date on their logos to remind their students of their historical heritage.
Liverpool University Hope has been accredited as a university since 2006. Having upgraded this university identity led to re-branding the university, which is designed as part of a larger prestigious educational institution community. As a result, Liverpool Hope University created a brand identity that showed how much potential this institution could give its potential students. The Liverpool Hope University logo is a striking red logo that is displayed alongside the star-shaped graphic.
Oxford University has become an internationally famous university. The university has been deemed the oldest university in the English-speaking world for decades and supports over a dozen prominent alumni. Oxford University knows its brand has contributed to its success. This is why Oxford University provides links to its guidelines for its branding.
Almost every university learns that branding is critical to survival today. University branding isn't just an attractive concept anymore unless the institution is competing with e-learning and other academic programs. Universities have to make themselves unique and convince students of their investments. Brand marketing at universities is essential in building your business. You are looking to enhance your image in the decades since your university was established.
A university seems like an enterprise. Student loans are exchanged for services like education. It is important to note that higher-education institutions are experiential by nature. Everyone enters the university with different expectations and with different outcomes.
We offer the opportunity to enhance your institutional value through the ability to showcase your members' best experiences. With a wide variety of branding services and products from our team, we can provide you with quality enrollments and successful recruiting campaigns. Unlike other universities, each has different recruitment requirements, and we'll listen and suggest different means for attracting a targeted pool of students.
Looking to Grow Your Brand Online?
A
Very interesting insights.
K
Great suggestions
P
I have learnt a lot from this blog! Good piece on university branding!
B
Great read!
L
Can rebranding help to get better results?
C
What are your thoughts on having the university professors going live on Instagram and talk about their university? Is it a good idea?