In higher education, there is no “one size fits all” recruitment strategy. Some schools hardly need to lift a finger to receive a record-breaking number of applications  while plenty of other schools are wondering if they’re even going to survive the demographic decline. Across the country, approaches to recruitment are going to vary significantly from school to school. And even within a single institution, enrollment strategies will vary based on various criteria:

• The degree program:
  Some programs thrive without much recruitment effort while others struggle to fill even small class sizes.
• The degree level:
  You’re not going to recruit undergraduates and doctoral students the same way.
• The student demographic:
  Reaching and engaging first-year students will differ significantly from how you do the same with adult learners.
• The timing in the enrollment cycle:
  Building your application pool early in the cycle versus targeting late to enroll students in the summer is going to look vastly different.

In this regard, community colleges are no different. There is no “one size fits all” approach to community college enrollment marketing but there are certain traits they share that can guide your strategy. According to the American Association of Community Colleges:

• More than half of community college students are non-white
• 43 percent of all community college students are over the age of 22 with an average age of 27
• Well over one-third (37.3%) of public community college students are first-generation immigrants (13.8%) or have at least one foreign-born parent (23.5%)

In addition, we can safely assume that the overwhelming majority (if not all) of community college students live within a very close proximity to the campus. This essentially means that community colleges primarily cater to an overwhelming number of:

• First-generation students
• Low-income students
• Minority students
• English language learners
• Students with learning disabilities
• And many other “at-risk” students

Crafting Your Enrollment Strategy

Armed with this information, here are the steps you should take to craft your unique enrollment marketing strategy for your community college.

1. Identify Your Campaign Goals

Because of the “one size fits all” rule, you’ll need to identify your overall goals for each and every campaign you produce. Are you targeting high school students or adult learners? When will the campaign run and for how long? Are you promoting the school in general or a specific program? What is your overall goal with the campaign? Is it branding and awareness, form conversions, phone calls, etc? These questions need to be asked each and every time you run a campaign because it informs the copy, the creative, the tactics & platforms, the type of landing page used, etc.

2. Know Your Audience

Based on your campaign goals, identify the demographic, geographic, and psychographic traits your target audience shares. This will allow you to target and hone in on the ideal prospect that will most likely help you reach your goals. You may be targeting high school students, their parents, adult learners, or a combination of audiences.

3. Check Your Website

Your institutional website is your most important communications tool because it is the one touchpoint that nearly 100% of your prospects will engage with. It is also your most accessible (available 24/7/365), has the widest reach (global), and has the most depth (thousands of pages covering every possible aspect of your institution).

Because of its importance in the recruitment process, you’ll want to make sure that it is ready to inform, engage, and convert website visitors.

If it’s not, then you might be wasting precious marketing dollars on a campaign that isn’t as buttoned up as it need to be in order to achieve maximum Return on Investment (ROI).

4. Choose Your Platforms

Each campaign will require a certain mix of marketing tactics to achieve its goals. You might have student lists that you can email or add to a social media list for digital marketing. You may want to geofence local high school and follow interested prospects onto their other devices such as laptops and Connected TVs. Or you may want to cast a wide net in your ideal feeder region with data targeting and impression retargeting via programmatic advertising. Your campaign goals and defined target audience(s) will inform you of the right platforms and tactics to choose.

5. Get Creative

Once your foundational strategy is in place, it’s time to get cooking on the production of your marketing assets including copy for all ads and landing pages, social media graphics in multiple sizes per platform to account for various ad placements and devices, and the development of unique landing pages for each theme in a single campaign.

DO NOT send prospects to your main website where they will lose the information scent from the campaign, where the focus on conversions is diluted, where they can get lost going to other parts of your website, and where you’ll lose the ability to confidently track the effectiveness of your campaign.

Also, don’t be shy about creating numerous ads per platform. This approach will allow you to test messaging and creative and see which combinations are most effectively resonating with your target audience. You can also rotate ads for a creative refresh which works especially well in campaigns with longer flights.

6. Focus on Conversions

This is piggybacking off of the information above but it’s imperative that your ads drive users to landing pages (or lead forms on social media platforms) that allow you to engage users and get them to submit forms, make phone calls, apply, schedule a visit, etc. This is the ultimate goal of your digital marketing efforts so it’s important that you are hyper-focused on conversions at the end of this process. If you do it right, you will eliminate any extraneous information that could distract users from helping you achieve the most important outcome from all of your efforts – a lead.

7. Monitor and Optimize

Once it’s all said and done, don’t let your campaigns sit idle. You’ve put a lot of hard work into your campaign to get it to this point so don’t let your guard down just yet. Monitor your campaigns daily. Look for ways to optimize and improve them. Perhaps you can turn off underperforming ads, run A/B tests, tweak your audience profiles, etc, etc. Doing so will help you maximize your campaign’s potential and help you reach (and hopefully exceed) campaign goals.

Your community college is unique and your recruitment strategy should be as well. Put the time and energy into the strategic planning and execution of each recruitment campaign and you’ll be sure to achieve the highest ROI possible.