Creating highly useful college student personas is essential for educational organizations looking to connect with their target audience and improve their recruitment efforts. At Meritto (formerly NoPaperForms), we understand the significance of understanding your prospective students and tailoring your approach to meet their needs effectively. In this blog post, we aim to guide you through the process of developing comprehensive student personas that can truly make a difference.
What is a Student Persona?
A student persona is a fictional representation of an ideal student for your institution. It is based on research, data, and interviews with real students, and is used to understand the needs, goals, and challenges of your target audience. By creating student personas, institutions can better understand their audience and create targeted marketing and recruitment campaigns that resonate with them.
How to Build a Candidate Journey?
- Research: Begin by researching your target audience, including current students, prospective students, and alumni. Look at data such as demographics, behaviours, and pain points.
- Interview: Conduct interviews with students to gather more qualitative data on their needs, goals, and challenges.
- Analyse: Analyse the data you have collected to identify patterns and common themes.
- Build: Use the data to build a fictional representation of an ideal student for your institution.
What to Include in Student Personas?
- Demographics: Include information such as age, gender, income, and location.
- Goals and Challenges: Identify the goals and challenges of your target audience, such as why they are interested in your institution and what obstacles they face in the enrolment process.
- Decision-making process: Understand how your target audience makes decisions and what factors influence their decision to enrol.
- Communication preferences: Identify the communication channels that your target audience prefers, such as social media, email, or in-person events.
- Brand Affinity: Understand what type of institution your target audience is looking for and what attributes they value in an institution.
How to Create an Attractive Student Persona?
- Analyze the data: Analyze data to identify common characteristics that define your ideal student. This could include things like age, gender, location, interests, and goals. The goal is to identify the key characteristics that are most important to your institution and that align with your recruitment goals.
- Define your student persona: Using the information gathered, create a detailed and specific persona that represents your ideal student. Give them a name, age, background, interests, and goals. Make sure that the persona is as specific as possible and represents the characteristics that you want to target in your recruitment efforts.
- Use the persona: Use the persona to guide your marketing and enrolment efforts. Tailor your messaging and targeting to appeal to the persona you have created. This will help you to more effectively reach and engage with your ideal student.
- Test and refine: Test your persona by comparing the results of your marketing and enrolment efforts to the data collected in the CRM system. Use the results to refine your persona and make it more accurate. Continuously update the persona by collecting new data and analyzing it regularly to ensure that it stays relevant to your student base.
- Continuously update: Continuously update the persona by collecting new data and analysing it regularly to ensure that it stays relevant to your student base. This will help you to stay up-to-date with the changes in the student market, and make sure your persona aligns with your recruitment goals and stays attractive to your ideal student.
How to use student personas?
Customised messages get the best response from both customers and students. Students anticipate that information, like emails or social media updates, will satisfy their particular requirements at particular times
To develop tailored marketing initiatives that respond to students’ motivations, worries, and interests, student personas can be used.
- Use student personas to guide targeted marketing and recruitment efforts by tailoring messaging and targeting to the characteristics of your ideal student.
- Use student personas to inform and improve the admissions process, student engagement and retention efforts, program development, and staff training.
- Continuously update student personas by collecting new data and analysing it regularly to ensure that it stays relevant to your student base and aligns with your recruitment and retention goals.
Final Words
Creating highly useful college student personas is an essential step for higher education institutions looking to connect with their target audience and improve their enrolment efforts. By following the steps outlined above, institutions can build personas that accurately represent their target audience and create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them.