THE PERSONA PROBLEM: Marketing teams often develop personas to gather key characteristics of target audiences and apply them to their marketing campaigns. While these personas are meant to be a valuable targeting aid, Cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, Rand Fishkin, argues that they often aren’t actionable or helpful. He writes that they often have “demographic and psychographic traits that are hard-to-apply at best and stereotyping or biasing at worst.”
Why you should care: The next time you build a persona, try out Fishkin’s advice to make it actionable, data-credible, and customized for your unique situation. While segmenting your prospective graduate contacts by age, for example, is arguably better than lumping all candidates into one list, there are still so many more unique challenges faced by smaller groupings of individuals. “There is no one right way, because there is no persona format that’s going to work well for more than a handful of organizations/applications,” Fishkin writes. “Almost every one should be custom-built to solve the problems you’re having.”
SHORT CONTENT IS IN: After a five-month beta test in India, YouTube Shorts will be introduced to U.S.-based users this month. Rivaling TikTok and Instagram Reels, the feature allows users to share vertical 15-second videos in a swipe interface. “While Gen Z users flooded TikTok, causing its astounding early growth, YouTube, the second largest website globally, will launch Shorts to more than 2 billion monthly active users,” according to a HubSpot post.
Why you should care: While TikTok’s user base is fairly young, YouTube has such a vast reach that tapping into the platform could be a smart move for all kinds of educational institutions and programs. If you already have a YouTube channel and video marketing strategy, consider sprinkling in related short-form videos. From admissions Q&As to step-by-step application tutorials, the opportunities are endless. HubSpot recommends optimizing your short videos, identifying short-form topics, and auditing the current short videos you’ve used on social media channels to repurpose them on YouTube.
THE GAP BETWEEN EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY: While we’ve talked about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education institutions as a whole, we haven’t narrowed into continuing education providers. According to a recent survey by Modern Campus, there were huge areas where schools failed to meet student needs. For instance, only 10% of North American higher education leaders rated their website as “very effective” in terms of facilitating student engagement and registration.
Why you should care: "Modern colleges and universities address their engagement gap by making it unbelievably easy to not just enroll but also provide students with clear, personalized career pathways,” said Brian Kibby, CEO of Modern Campus. “The data from this year's State of Continuing Education report spells out the risk of not meeting the needs of modern learners.” If your institution can find ways to successfully and smoothly meet the needs of all students (especially during the massive shifts brought on by the pandemic), you will thrive, not just survive.
Each week, The Enrollify Podcast equips you with insights into how the latest trends in marketing and technology are affecting enrollment managers. Every episode is designed to inspire new, creative ideas for how to optimize the resources you have to generate the results you need.