As higher education marketing and communication become more competitive, university branding has taken on an increasingly crucial role in the process. The ability to help your institution stand out among its competition goes far beyond a logo. Instead, it’s the process of building a comprehensive framework that establishes a clear brand promise, messaging pillars, and visual identity that can carry through all your interactions with core audiences.
At its best, your brand platform needs to be both specific and flexible. It should clearly establish your unique identity, while also allowing room for more nuance as you communicate with different audiences like parents, graduate students, and alumni.
It also needs to be strategic, built to support your mission in ways that are relevant to your potential target audiences.
Successfully building your university brand can take months, and sometimes years. The good news is you don’t have to go through it on your own. These six tips can help you build your brand. And AI-enabled digital assistants allow you to not only successfully navigate these steps, but also boost your branding to relevant audiences throughout the process.
1. Research and Analyze Your Core Audiences
No matter the nature of your institution, a brand platform can only be successful if it considers and speaks to the needs and preferences of the core audiences you look to attract. For most institutions, these audiences likely align around the following themes:
- Prospective students, including both undergraduate students currently in high school and potential graduate students.
- Current students, again including both undergraduate and graduate students.
- Alumni, both those with a lifetime history of supporting your institution and recent graduates still finding their career footing.
There may also be secondary audiences in your university branding strategy that are important to consider, such as prospective parents, community stakeholders, and your own faculty and staff.
Research what type of messaging these audiences are looking for, along with their deeper-lying motivations. Why do graduate students seek out your institution, how does that compare to undergraduate students, and what factors are most important in making their decision? What do you know about the alumni who choose to support your school?
Ideally, both quantitative and qualitative analysis help in this step. Surveys are a particularly helpful tool to capture audience thoughts and preferences at scale. But they can’t go deep, which is where interviews and focus groups come into play.
If you already use an AI-enabled digital assistant, it can also become a valuable tool in this process. By analyzing the questions you hear from your various audiences, you can better understand the type of information they’re looking for and how you might want to craft their message.
2. Create a Messaging Platform That Aligns Mission With Preferences
Even the best audience analysis, of course, is incomplete. Simply catering to audience preferences means little if you cannot align it with the core truths and nuances of your institution.
Take a close look at your institution’s mission and history. What is unique about your school? Are there points in your mission or other foundational documents, like your strategic plan, that might resonate with your audiences based on your research findings?
This is where you start to build your messaging framework. Your brand promise, at its best, is a statement that reframes your mission in your audience’s terms, without straying from it. Meanwhile, your messaging pillars build on that promise with more distinct statements and truths that delve into subjects like academics, community, and affordability.
And again, your AI-enabled digital assistant can be valuable in making this step in your university branding strategy successful. Transcripts of previous conversations enable you to see just how your audience talks, and how they frame questions that are relevant from a branding standpoint. These insights, in turn, can help you create a brand promise and messaging pillars designed to resonate with them.
3. Test Your Messaging Against Your Core Competitors
The first two steps are focused entirely internally. Ultimately, any successful messaging framework has to work externally as well. Otherwise, you risk rolling out a great framework and messaging, only to find out that the university just down the road is using almost the exact same strategy and wording.
That’s what makes this next step so crucial. With your draft framework in hand, compare your messaging and wording to your competitor schools. Review their website, printed materials, and more. If they have chatbot, start a few conversations with it. The more direct competitor schools you can evaluate in this way, the better.
The information you learn in this competitive analysis will help you refine your messaging platform. What about those general messaging pillars above? Frame them so they become differentiators, able to communicate unique messaging about your academics, community, or affordability that competitors cannot just emulate. Again, internal documents like your mission statement, strategic plan, and others become immensely valuable tools to ensure you don’t stray from your core in your efforts to be unique.
Not sure what competitors you need to analyze? Take a close look at National Student Clearinghouse data. The information in the reports can be immensely valuable, such as showing which schools students who applied to your institution but decided to go elsewhere ended up. Admissions counselors and financial aid officers will likely also have a good idea of the schools your prospective students tend to compare you against.
4. Build a Consistent University Branding Strategy Across Channels
With a fully-fledged, validated messaging framework in place, it’s time to apply it to your various platforms. This is where you transfer strategic language into wording and messaging that appeals to your core audiences on the channels they choose to interact with you.
For example:
- In printed materials, you have space to fully explain and provide proof points for your messaging pillars and differentiators. Use the space to tell your institution’s story as comprehensively and compelling as possible.
- On social media, your tone becomes more casual and personal. Channels like Instagram and TikTok also offer an opportunity to get more visual, getting your framework across consistently in both images and video.
- Within different social media platforms, your tone may change depending on the channel. For example, LinkedIn may need a more serious tone due to its ability to attract more graduate students compared to Instagram.
- Your AI-enabled digital assistant should have a conversational tone that is intentionally casual, but without losing credibility or trust. Analyze your chatlogs to see whether you’re hitting the mark and how you can adjust as needed.
Clearly define your university branding approach on each of these and other platforms you leverage for brand communication. That allows you to ensure that even as you make channel-specific and audience-specific tweaks, the larger strategy remains consistent and in line with your background framework.
5. Involve Your Entire Campus Community in the Process
Strategic university brand messaging can only work if it extends beyond marketing materials and channels. Naturally, admissions will need to be involved as well. After all, you want admissions counselors at college fairs and during campus visits to speak with prospective students in a way that’s consistent with those materials and channels.
Ultimately, the support and buy-in should go beyond those offices directly involved in recruitment. Your core audiences, after all, will interact with other offices as well—from individual academic departments to your advancement and alumni departments.
To ensure this buy-in, it helps to get the community involved early. Consider, for example, including focus groups or surveys of faculty and staff as part of your initial audience research. Provide regular updates on where the process stands, and be sure to roll out the new framework when it’s ready at campus-wide presentations and town halls.
You will get questions and concerns. Not every faculty or staff member will agree with the exact direction. But when they feel their voice has been heard early, they will become more likely to support the work and its outcomes. Over time, it means a more successful brand messaging implementation with support across campus.
6. Test and Improve Your Messaging Based on Audience Feedback
Finally, don’t consider the roll-out of your new messaging framework to be the end of the work. After all, it has not yet seen exposure to your core audiences, who will be the ultimate judge of whether it is relevant to them.
Audience feedback about your new messaging can come in a variety of ways. You might want to measure improving click-through rates on your recruitment emails or action rates on your digital ads. You can also take it one step further, directly surveying your audiences for their opinion on specific messages.
At the same time, your AI chatbot can be an invaluable tool. Calibrated with your new messaging framework, it will begin conversations with your core audiences immediately. You can then evaluate analytics to see how users respond to the conversations, whether they took the desired action, and how their engagement differs from conversations before the current framework.
Boosting your university branding is a comprehensive effort. A strategic approach can help—and AI-enabled digital assistants can play a crucial role in that process. Get started now and create messaging that helps your institution stand out in a competitive environment.
