The Importance of Brand Storytelling in Higher Ed Marketing
What is Brand Storytelling?
Storytelling involves transforming information into a compelling tale that includes a setting, characters, and a storyline. This technique capitalizes on emotional activation and imagination. In the business world, storytelling effectively conveys targeted messages and inspires consumers to act.
Storytelling can be leveraged in marketing for any industry to enhance brand loyalty among existing and potential customers and to persuade people to purchase a product or utilize services.
Effective Brand Storytelling in Higher Education
Higher education brand storytelling should support and fulfill concrete business objectives. The “service” is the educational experience, and the “product” is the degree. The problem you’re solving for is the educational void, which people are looking to fill with a higher education provider.
In order to effectively execute brand storytelling in higher education, we have defined 3 main principles to appeal to:
- Idealism: Those who are seeking a degree are often in a self-actualizing mindset. Appeal to concepts of possibility and potentiality—at the personal and global level.
- Impact: Tie strong, durable lines between education and “the real world.” People want to know their education will not only equip them but inspire them to make changes. Show personal impact stories (“I got a degree, which empowered me to [x]”) and institutional impact stories [“because we’re a top university, we collectively are achieving [x]”).
- Intelligence: This is a space where intelligence is expected. You can dial up some of the pedagogical, philosophical language (without getting esoteric). This elevates brand perception but also gives folks something to aim for—a level of wisdom and knowledge that’s just within their reach (but not beyond it).
Strategies for Crafting a Compelling Narrative in Higher Ed Marketing
To maximize the impact of storytelling in higher education marketing, you need an omnichannel campaign. This approach ensures that your message reaches your audience through multiple channels, reinforcing its authenticity and trustworthiness. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, brand trust increases significantly when consumers encounter the same message across three or more channels. This repetition helps to solidify your story as genuine rather than just a marketing tactic.
Harnessing Segmentation and Personalization for Higher Ed Marketing Strategies
Effective storytelling is not one-size-fits-all; it needs to resonate with the diverse segments of your audience. Here's how to integrate segmentation and personalization into your campaign:
- Start with the Universal Customer Journey: While there are variations and nuances among different personas, beginning with a universal customer journey can help streamline your planning. This foundational step allows you to map out the overall experience and identify key touchpoints.
- Identify Powerful Touchpoints: Pinpoint where segmentation and personalization will have the greatest impact in each digital channel. Whether it's tailored emails, personalized social media content, or targeted ads, focus on the moments that matter most to each segment.
- Prioritize and Execute: Once you’ve identified the critical touchpoints, prioritize them based on your resources and potential impact. Execute your strategy methodically, ensuring each segment receives a personalized experience that resonates with their unique needs and preferences.
Leveraging Visual Storytelling for Student Engagement + Interactive Elements
Visual elements such as videos and infographics are vital in enhancing brand storytelling. Research shows that people retain 95% of a message conveyed through video versus 10% via text. Visual mediums are essential as users tend to scan rather than read, and their eyes are drawn to visual content on screens, often pausing longer on images and videos than on text. To fully harness the power of storytelling, it's important to recognize that diverse content formats, including visuals, are integral to crafting compelling narratives.
How to Incorporate Visual Storytelling in Your Marketing Strategy
Visuals should be a part of every single story. Full stop. If you can't identify suitable visuals for a story, it's time to revisit and refine that narrative. Prioritize quality over quantity; one well-designed infographic can be far more impactful than multiple rudimentary charts. Ensure that all visuals are consistent and align with your brand’s visual identity. Get creative with your visual content—consider using pull quotes, numeric listicles, and other budget-friendly formats to enhance your storytelling without always relying on photos or videos.
Accessibility Considerations + Mobile Optimization in Brand Storytelling
To ensure accessibility, brands must adhere to essential requirements like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and UX best practices for all device types, including navigation and color contrast. Testing and adjusting designs for various devices is crucial to ensure that content is usable for all audiences.
Inclusive storytelling is equally important and starts with an inclusive brand story, integrating perspectives from diverse audiences through thorough qualitative research. Testing at different stages—before finalizing the content strategy, during development, and post-launch—helps refine the approach.
A useful inclusivity checklist to ensure content is respectful and inclusive includes:
- Consider global context (country, region, and ethnic groups if applicable)
- Consider personal context (i.e. social identities)
- Avoid assumptions
- Remove problematic language (We love using this guide)
- Consult DEI glossaries
Alumni Engagement Strategies
Alumni stories and testimonials play a huge role in higher education brand storytelling, especially with the increasing importance of ROI on degrees. It's essential to support emotional narratives with solid data proof points. Institutions like Brown University effectively use tools like Salesforce Tableau to collect and present alumni data, showcasing outcomes and adding credibility to their stories.
To leverage alumni networks, institutions can:
- (Re)engage successful graduates, alumni, and entrepreneurs to speak at events
- Create honorary degree programs for leaders in key academic areas
- Target influential speakers for graduations to expand the audience interest and elevate the perception of the university
- Circulate and promote alumni-generated content
- Heavily invest in young alumni engagement to ensure continuous participation and foster long-term loyalty
Measuring Success in Higher Ed Brand Storytelling
So, how do you measure the impact of storytelling on student enrollment in colleges and universities? Measuring the success of brand storytelling campaigns in higher education is highly specific to each institution. It's important to keep KPIs simple and focused, adopting the "one metric that matters" approach from Lean Analytics. Additionally, institutions should include internal KPIs that track the consolidation, efficiency, and cross-campus collaboration necessary for planning, building, and launching successful campaigns. By focusing on these targeted metrics, institutions can continuously optimize their storytelling strategies for greater impact.