Participate Now: Mythbusting Enrollment Marketing

Teens love getting email from colleges, right? And mail from a college is so awesome, isn’t it?

Or maybe not.

Announcing the Third Annual Mythbusting Research Study

We’d like to know what you think about tactics colleges use to boost visibility among prospective teenage students and encourage them to apply. So we’re inviting college and university marketing, communications, and admission professionals to respond to the survey we launched in partnership with NRCCUA® (the National Research Center for College & University Admissions™) to find out.

You can respond right now!

We’re asking similar questions of teens. Once these surveys are completed, we’ll compare their responses with those of college and university professionals and find out where they overlap. But the really interesting findings are where we uncover gaps in the responses.

We want to understand how teen prospects use and perceive college and university recruitment materials, and we are particularly interested in their reactions to your digital communications.

This approach mirrors what we’ve done the past two years with the other surveys in our Mythbusting series: In 2015, we explored admissions tactics, and last year we focused on how teens perceive higher ed websites. (You can learn more about our findings from that research by downloading our white papers and taking advantage of the webinars in which we discussed key findings.)

What You Can Learn From Mythbusting Research

There’s plenty of research available on how teens use their devices, what they do on social media, and how they behave when they shop for shoes or other consumer goods. And there are also plenty of studies about how teens respond to various college marketing strategies and tactics.

However, we’re not aware of other research that explores what college marketing and admission professionals think teens like or do when they’re researching colleges and compares that with what teens say about the various tactics and strategies we use to market to them. And here’s the thing: What they say they do, or like, as far as college marketing is concerned is often counterintuitive. Knowing how they feel when they are college shopping can help you make decisions about how to tweak marketing to be more effective in appealing to teens.

Ready to share your thoughts? Take the survey now.

I wrote about past findings in a blog post on Inside Higher Ed where I noted that:

Teens explore official and unofficial social channels and use them to gauge what a college is like. But what they do with their friends (texting, sharing Snaps, or commenting on Instagram posts) isn’t something they necessarily want to do with family members, colleges, or brands. They’re not likely to interact on college-sponsored channels; don’t expect questions or likes. But if they do engage there, it’s fine to interact with them.

You can learn about some other insights from our past Mythbusting research in these blog posts:

“Though It’s Hard to Measure, .Edu Social Media is Valuable to Teens”
“Teens, Video, and Your .Edu Website: The Results Might Surprise You”

You also can obtain your own copies of the white papers about college marketing and websites (and learn when we release this year’s white paper detailing our findings about college marketing).

This year’s survey closes August 11. Participate now.