How to Build Student Personas. The Essential Marketing Tactic to Boost Education Enrollment. made with

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1 How to Build Student Personas The Essential Marketing Tactic to Boost Education Enrollment made with

2 Table of Contents 1. Hello! 2. About Parisleaf 3. Intro to Student Personas 4. What is a student persona? 5. What's the importance of developing student personas? 6. How to Create Student Personas in 6 Steps 7. Get Our Free Fillable Persona Template 8. Thanks.

3 Hello! Here's a quick glimpse into what you will learn in this guide, and why it's crucial to your role as a higher education marketer. As each chapter in this ebook builds on the chapter before, it's important to take the time to read the complete book, even if some of it is review to you. We've kept each chapter short and sweet! Key Takeaways In this ebook we'll cover: The importance of student personas in today's higher ed marketing All about personas - what they really are and what components they should have Step by step how to build your student personas for maximum results using purpose, research, and our exclusive student personas presentation template How your completed Student Personas will help you and your marketing team: Understand who your best students are, tell your students' stories at a glance, focus your marketing efforts, and attract more of your ideal students We built this ebook specifically for you, the busy higher education marketing professional, after understanding you as one of our own personas! We hope it will help elevate you even further in your role, which we know to be challenging and extremely important.

4 About Parisleaf Parisleaf is a branding and web design agency located in Gainesville, Florida. We work with higher education, nonprofits, startups and business incubators to tell their stories and maximize the difference they can make. We believe in sustainability, responsibility, authenticity, and making our passion the center of everything we do. We look for clients who echo these values, and for those we do our best work. Our success depends daily on the process we'll share with you in this ebook. When we meet with clients to begin a project, the first step is always Discovery. Discovery is a deep process to find out who an organization is, why the market should care, and exactly whom the organization aims to serve. By pinpointing whom colleges serve, and aiming well-designed, emotionally compelling marketing materials at those populations, we've successfully increased enrollment and interaction for independent colleges and university colleges nationwide. Visit our case studies for more details. Whether we eventually work with you or not, we'd love to share with you one of the most important parts of our Discovery process, which is how to build effective student personas to attract more of your institution's ideal students. With thanks for your time and energy investment in reading,

5 Intro to Student Personas Great higher ed branding starts with narrowing your focus. Build your personas to know exactly whom you serve and how to attract them. "Question Everything" "Go Anywhere" "Be It All" Over-simplistic college taglines like these are cluttering higher education logos and websites across the nation. To whom do they speak? Pretty much any kind of student. Which isn t who you re trying to attract. Why not try the medicine yourself? Question everything in higher education branding.

6 Go mentally anywhere for a few moments, and try to picture your ideal student. Just don t try to be it all. As the saying goes, by trying to appeal to everyone, you ll appeal to no one in particular. Instead, hone your own student personas. A higher education student persona should be modeled after the classic marketing persona, also called a buyer persona. The best way to refresh your institution's brand - which if you re not doing periodically, is costing you enrollment - is to know exactly whom you serve by creating a variety of student personas. And whom you serve changes every few years. Generational behavior, attitudes and technology use are changing at the speed of light. So if your brand or personas haven t been updated in over five years, you re definitely not speaking to your most relevant audience. Personas are the stories that must drive everything you do in branding and marketing. Next, we'll cover exactly what a student persona is and why it's crucial to your marketing efforts.

7 What is a student persona? It's like a marketing persona but for higher education. A marketing persona is a semi-fictional, realistic, detailed character who represents the type of customers you want to attract and what their story is. It s sometimes called a buyer persona; in higher education the buyers are students (and donors, researchers, anyone you want to attract, but we'll stick to students to keep this e-book concise). So we call this a student persona.

8 Components of any marketing persona include the: background challenges questions hopes dreams of this representative character. These details tell a story that will become the frame of reference for everything you do in branding, design and marketing. In the context of creating a persona for UX/UI (user experience/user interface design) for your website, you will also want to include components such as: what the persona looks for in your website how they use the site what they feel is missing from the site To begin envisioning your higher education student personas, think of basic examples of each of your ideal students. Each of your personas will have their own story. Who they are, their interests and concerns, their hopes, dreams, attitudes and behaviors. The best persona encompasses everything from the character s background to their electronics device and apps preference. Benji Haselhurst, our senior designer, puts it beautifully in this blog post: Personas are the flux capacitor to your DeLorean. They are more than just a face and a name, they are sages, advisors and ambassadors to the real world. You need personas, these ambassadors to the real world, and you need them to be current. Next, let's look at why student personas are critical to your marketing mission.

9 What's the importance of developing student personas? Your higher ed student personas represent the prospective enrollees who will make your college shine and, most importantly, help you continue to attract more of those students. When you find out exactly who your personas are and what makes them tick, and when you then gear everything you do towards them, you'll see a remarkable difference in the type of students you're attracting and retaining. It's the difference between targeted marketing and throwing spaghetti at the wall. We recognize that you're likely not throwing spaghetti and that your higher ed institution has likely gone through this process before. But if it isn't being done periodically, it needs to be done again.

10 Otherwise your marketing team is just grasping at straws when it comes to creating content and marketing to attract the next wave of students that are ideal for your institution. To put it bluntly: your admissions office knows, at least on paper, exactly who it s looking for. But do you, the higher ed marketer, know what your prospective students are looking for in a college today? You may be shocked to find out it s not what you think, or worse, to realize that your institution s marketing isn t speaking to or even reaching those kinds of students. Here's why creating student personas is important, taken from the type of persona report we write for our clients: Through the use of these characters we call personas, marketers and brand designers can verify their decisions against real people s needs, and stakeholders can focus on creating a product that will provide these people with satisfying experiences. Once you develop carefully-researched student personas, you will keep them in mind at all stages of branding and development of visuals, including your logo, website, video, photography, and brand assets. You can try to do a rebranding or redesign without personas, and you can also attempt it with weak or inaccurate personas, but either way will be a huge waste of time and money. It's like building a house without a blueprint. Don t assume you know who your personas are and what they want and need until you build them with ample research. As we mentioned, personas are the stories that must drive everything you do in branding and marketing. In the next chapter, we'll explore exactly how to develop your student personas and their stories.

11 How to Create Student Personas in 6 Steps Step by step we'll walk you through creating your student personas to sharpen your higher ed marketing focus. Increasing your higher education institution's enrollment depends on how well your college brands itself to its ideal students. And as we discussed, the best higher ed branding is dependent on great stories told in student personas. Here are the six steps to create student personas for your college. This chapter also includes an illustrated student persona example and a link to a downloadable template you can fill in to complete your persona's profile. Step 1: Compose your persona survey questions. To do so, think about how you will use this persona. For example, will you reference it for a new website or videos aimed at prospective students? Or will it be for a particular ad campaign to drum up interest in a certain degree track? Be sure you include enough questions to get the data you need, but not so many that subjects will be disinclined to finish the survey. You can reference our easy fillable persona template here for question ideas. First write questions for one persona and their goal, say, your ideal liberal arts major student and how they would use your website. Later, you ll tackle the questions for other personas you want to know about, like your typical environmental sciences student, your typical business student, etc. Niche down as your institution s population and academic programs require.

12 Step 2: Find your subjects. Look for at least people in the demographics of age, location, interests, etc. which you're targeting. Begin, of course, with a good sized chunk (50% or so) of your existing students in the niche you're targeting. Be sure to include another good sized chunk of prospective students who are already interested in your college, plus relevant potential students who have never contacted your school (you can find them by running social media ads and working your network). Don t narrow it down too much; you want your survey to be drawn from a wide enough pool to get good data. Step 3: Research. Ask each of your subjects all of your questions. Don't omit any questions, or you'll miss important data. A handy way to record answers is by creating a Google Form that acts as the actual survey you send out, and connect to it a Google Sheet spreadsheet to collect all answers as they are submitted. You and your department can also conduct the survey live in person, by phone, or video call, and record the answers yourself on a fresh survey each time, representing each subject, so that they go into the Google sheet. Step 4: Compile all the answers and study them. What trends do you see? What story is starting to take shape? What general inferences can you draw from this group of answers? The idea is to morph a lot of data into one cohesive story of one individual who best represents all of the respondents. Were your respondents mostly female or male? What background were most of them from? What hopes and concerns echoed repeatedly in their answers? Those are the components you'll pull into your persona profile.

13 Step 5: Write the story. Using your inferences from Step 4, compose the conversational story around this character, and write it into a one-page profile that you can share with your marketing team. You can download our easy template here to put all the pieces together. It also makes you look good to your boss. Hey, that's what we're here for! Step 6: Add a photo. This is fun. Explore stock photos online and pick one that looks like your persona student. Take into account their age, socio-economic background, attitudes, etc. This is just for internal purposes with your team, so don't stress about the quality of the photo, just get the subject right. The ethnicity of the person in this photo doesn't need to stand for all the possible students who would fit this persona, but consider the typical ethnicity and even gender of your persona when choosing the photo. The photo is important because this is the person you want your entire marketing, branding and design team to literally picture anytime they do anything to market your college to this persona. Those are the six steps to building a student persona. Now turn the page to see an example where we've put all that together.

14 The Final Product As an example, here s an illustration of a sample persona: If this were one of your student personas, created from surveys of dozens of students, what updates would you make to your website? How would you tweak your marketing efforts toward this type of prospective student? Where would you focus your social media outreach? Would you look into video marketing to attract this kind of prospective students? How well you research, compose and use your personas will dictate how well your higher ed institution fills seats next fall. Do it right, and implement the marketing updates well, and you will attract the right kind of students - the ones who resonate with your personas. Be an enrollment hero by mastering student personas.

15 For more tips on how your prospective student personas might think, and why you need to know what s in their heads, check out these blog posts: Inside the Minds of Generation Z in 5 Videos Six Reasons Gen Z Won't Go To College: How to Update Higher Ed Marketing How Rising Seas and Gen Z Will Save College Enrollment Generation Z's College Search and Selection Using Social Media What You Need to Know About Gen Z's Financial Attitudes Nine Remarkable Generation Z Students and What Makes Them Tick Great! You know what it takes to create effective student personas. Need an easy way to compile the info and present it to your marketing team and department heads? On the next page, download our fillable persona template, and present your persona like a boss at your next marketing meeting.

16 Get Our Free Fillable Persona Template No need to design a presentation of your personas. Use our editable persona template, fill it in for each persona, and share. Your completed Persona Templates will help you and your marketing team: Understand your best students Tell their stories at a glance Focus your marketing efforts Attract more of your ideal students Be the enrollment hero! DOWNLOAD YOUR PERSONA TEMPLATE NOW

17 Thanks. Thank you for downloading our How To Build Student Personas ebook. We hope you've found it valuable. You can always contact us directly if you have questions about this process, or if you'd like to speak with us about partnering with you and your institution. Besides branding, we do user-centric web design, distinctive digital and print design, compelling marketing videos, results-driven copywriting, and much more. We look forward to continuing the conversation. 107 SW 7th Street Gainesville, FL info[at]parisleaf.com parisleaf.com made with