Storytelling has the power to take stats and figures and turn them into sensations and experiences. We create meaning, find purpose, and ultimately make decisions by listening to a story. When it comes to choosing the right college, stories can be more important than any other marketing tool. Narratives are an important communication tool, and storytelling in higher education marketing is a crucial component that grabs prospective students’ attention and truly shows them why they belong at your school.
By incorporating storytelling into higher education marketing, admissions professionals can engage students on a deeper level. They can create emotional connections and differentiate their institutions from others in a lasting, meaningful way. When students connect with the stories you tell them, your school will stand out from the crowd. So, give them a reason to remember you.
Let’s explore actionable tips to craft stories in the admissions process and put them into action in marketing plans.
The Importance of Storytelling in Admissions
Imagine that you’re a prospective college student on the cusp of adulthood. The future spans before you as an endless array of possible paths. That’s a feeling that is as overwhelming as it is freeing. You know that college is an important part of your next step, but you’re not sure how to choose between the thousands of options spread before you. Many of them boast nearly identical dorm rooms, class offerings, and generic smiling faces on their website.
As you explore higher education options, you’re looking for more than statistics about success rates or tuition packages. You want to see beyond a stock photo of students throwing a frisbee on the grass in the quad. You’re looking for a place where you can truly picture yourself belonging, making connections, and stepping into the next phase of your life with confidence and joy. After all, this place will be your home for the next several years. So, you’ll be investing not just tuition dollars but also your time and energy into making it your own.
For many prospective college students, choosing a university is the most important and serious decision they’ve made at this point in their lives.
Stories turn information into relatable, memorable details that foster emotional connections. Using narrative to engage students as they search for the right school positively impacts decision-making and improves brand loyalty.
Storytelling in higher education marketing is about making the generic specific. When prospective students can fill out the story with detail, feeling, and meaning, it will be much easier for them to imagine themselves as part of the plot!
Pulling your institution’s values, culture, and student experience into a story gives prospective students the power to see themselves stepping into the world you’ve crafted.
Identifying Your Institution’s Core Story
Stories are most impactful when they’re authentic and meaningful. In order to truly craft meaningful storytelling in higher education marketing, you’ll need to begin by identifying your institution’s core story.
What’s unique about your school and its offerings? What drives your mission and vision? What values do your faculty, staff, and students share?
Perhaps you’ve got a deep commitment to the arts and can showcase the creative talents of your students and faculty. Maybe your school is driven by cross-cultural connections that thrive in stories about studying abroad. Bring forward institutional philanthropy values by highlighting service work and social good in your storytelling.
Once you’ve identified these core components, you can use the experiences of current students, alums, and faculty to showcase the institution’s impact along these crucial elements. Ensure you invite participants with a genuine interest in these topics and specific experiences to share.
Don’t be afraid to get granular with the details. Stories are held together by specifics. Layers of depth come from descriptions that only those who experienced it firsthand can share. Whether you’re talking about the heat of the burner in the science lab, the sound of the crowds on the football field, or the peaceful calm of a late-night library visit, bring it to life.
When the narrative you’ve created is consistently shared across all channels—website copy, social media posts, physical marketing materials, and in-person tours—the story will cohere in a convincing and powerful way. Students will remember your school as the one that felt real and made them imagine themselves taking action that mattered.
Crafting Stories That Resonate With Prospective Students
Storytelling in higher education marketing is about more than simply restating your values in narrative form. It’s about connecting those values to prospective students so that they can see themselves in the story.
It’s crucial to understand prospective students’ motivations and concerns. Are they looking for diversity on campus, academic rigor, clear career paths, affordability, or an active campus community? Knowing these questions—and how your school’s resources truly answer them—is vital to bringing forward a story that makes sense.
Recognizing students’ concerns, whether that’s budgeting for college or having study resources to do well in classes, can help you illustrate pain points with care and honesty. Illustrate the solutions in story form to help prospective students see themselves succeeding on your campus.
- Share a video of a real-life tutoring session to help quiet concerns about academic support.
- Invite a current student to talk about work-study options and add the video to the website’s section on financial aid.
- Incorporate real-life examples that make the intangible fuller, more relatable, and easier to imagine.
Resist the urge to make these moments too polished or overly produced. The more you can use real-life testimonials from actual students, the more genuine and compelling they’ll be. Prospective students are used to slick marketing campaigns that avoid getting too specific, but this is an opportunity to be more open and real.
Personalizing Your Storytelling Approach
Your school likely offers different benefits for different populations, and your storytelling in higher education marketing should highlight this variety with personalization.
Tailoring stories based on student demographics, interests, and backgrounds gives prospective students multiple pathways into the narrative.
First-generation college students will be excited to hear from alums who successfully navigated their college studies and went on to meaningful careers. College athletes will be excited to hear from current players who know what it’s like to juggle classes with practice.
Identify the segments of prospective students who can benefit from learning more about how your school meets their needs. Then, tell the stories they need to hear!
How do you make sure that the right students get to see the content created for them?
FlippedApp is a tool that allows admissions teams to connect with prospective students who match specified criteria, making it easier to tailor stories and communication to the right segment of your audience. When you match directly with students who share key characteristics, you can personalize content that speaks directly to those interests and needs.
You can also share this personalized content through a variety of media, including targeted email campaigns, virtual tours, and one-on-one communications designed to answer specific concerns and delve into individual interests.
Delivering Stories Across Multiple Channels
Storytelling in higher education marketing is an excellent opportunity to ensure cohesion across multiple channels.
Social media is an excellent way to deliver short snippets (including authentic video testimonials from current students and alums), as well as longer-form content such as interviews with former students and faculty.
Virtual tours can incorporate storytelling with pop-up written and video experiences built into the tour. Embedding this content into the most relevant parts of the tour will create a more immersive and memorable experience that connects with stories at the moment they’re most important.
Storytelling is not just for virtual options, either. Incorporate storytelling into in-person campus tours, admission events, and one-on-one interactions by building stories into scripted content and training staff on how to build narrative into their content.
Measuring the Impact of Your Storytelling Efforts
Like any marketing metric, storytelling in higher education marketing should be evaluated for its effectiveness. As you tweak your approach, you can use these data points to streamline your marketing response.
When you build in virtual tools—such as FlippedApp, which can connect students who are an ideal fit to the elements most likely to hold their attention—you should ensure you also have access to engagement data. Measure how often the stories were viewed, how long users stayed engaged, clickthrough rates, and how they interacted with them through likes, shares, and comments.
As you gather this data, incorporate the feedback into your future plans by tweaking length, formality, and delivery options for future storytelling content.
Achieve Better Storytelling With FlippedApp
Storytelling in higher education marketing is an important tool in your recruitment toolbox. Using the natural human drive for narrative can make admissions efforts more effective, engaging, and successful.
Foster deeper connections with prospective students when you help them picture themselves on campus and in the classroom through storytelling.
Explore how FlippedApp can complement your storytelling efforts by helping you engage the right students at the right time. Find out more and schedule a demo today!