In the current higher education landscape, colleges and universities are facing an increasing amount of competition as well as a declining pool of applicants.  For most institutions, the marketing team bears the responsibility of communicating the university's brand story and demonstrating the impact and value to potential students and other key stakeholders. As a result, the role and expectations of marketing and communications departments across institutions of higher education continues to expand.

If your marketing resources fail to keep up with your workload or if your department is constantly squeezed with multiple deadlines from multiple sources, you are not alone.  To help you see how others in your shoes have effectively dealt with similar challenges, we have compiled a list of unexpected lessons we have learned from our work with some of the nation’s most effective college marketing departments.

Here's our list of 18 unexpected lessons from leading college marketing departments:

1. Taking Shortcuts Can Be Effective

In today’s technologically connected society, messages are delivered and absorbed quickly. Communication snapshots, tidbits of information, images, and emoticons can be effective to get the attention of prospective students and communicate value propositions. Plus, incorporating shorter messages means your team will cut down on countless hours spent copywriting and editing.

2. Spend Less Time on Admissions

Too often marketing is seen as an extension of the enrollment department. When marketing departments spend too much time focusing on prospective students, marketing and branding can suffer in other areas.  It's important to remember that all four of the following pillars of communication are critical in meeting an institution’s financial goals:

1. Overall Branding
2. Admissions
3. Internal Communication for Students, Faculty, and Staff 
4. Alumni and Development

3. Get Feedback from External Sources

Hire someone for feedback on your marketing structure, collateral, goals, plans, and more. A higher education marketing consultant will be able to speak for your audience in ways your internal team would be unable to do.

4. Play Favorites

Not all departments are going to be equally as receptive or open to working with marketing. Partner with those across campus who want to partner with you. Then, when your good results are more visible, the others will follow.

5. Take Risks

Always challenge the status quo and measure energy when a new idea is introduced. Look for ideas that get people talking. Indifference is a silent killer. In some cases, it can be a red flag when everyone loves your work. It means it is too familiar, too safe, and too comfortable to make a memorable difference.

6. Get Inspired

Pretend you work for a Fortune 500 company or a startup. Don’t just look at your local college/university competition for marketing ideas. Ask yourself what the team at GE, Apple, or Nike marketing would do to stand out from the competition and use that as your source of inspiration.

7. Broaden Your Communication Channels

Focus on a comprehensive and integrated marketing communications strategy that includes cross-media commitments to print, digital, events, and broadcast. Just because a communication channel is old, doesn’t mean it is dead or ineffective. Look for ways to stay current, but don't let go of older methods that are still working well. 

8. Be Transparent About Flaws

The best way to make your school more relatable is to be real and authentic. Sharing the good with the bad makes your institution more interesting, memorable, and human.

9. Brand Your Internal Team

Marketing teams are notoriously poor communicators to their internal constituencies. You may be very busy people conducting invisible marketing efforts campus wide but may also be underappreciated and underutilized. Presidents may be in the dark. Deans may not know where to turn for strategic help. Remedy this lack of transparency by developing and following an internal communication strategy so your campus constituents can see and understand the value of your work.

10. Avoid Predictability 

Playing it safe is a risky strategy for a marketing department, as it’s a strategy unlikely to grab an audience’s attention and generate growth. You will be judged, or you will be ignored. Key stakeholders – students, faculty, staff, and alumni – don’t coalesce into engaged brand ambassadors around the status quo. Give people fresh, innovative ideas to rally around, and watch as your unpredictable marketing efforts get people talking, generating excitement, and jumping on board to become fully invested brand ambassadors.

11. Temper Brand Consistency  

It’s okay if the art school materials don’t look identical to those from the business school. Your marketing collateral should feel consistent in branding, be high quality, and imbue a connection to the school, but you can’t bore your prospect into liking you. Allow room for creativity and differences across departments. An art student won’t be attracted to the same collateral as a potential business student, so differentiate your materials for your audiences. Focus groups can be a great way to understand what students are looking for, and what types of platforms and materials they’ll be most likely to gravitate towards and respond to.

12. Prioritize What Matters

When working on content, spend much of your time crafting a wonderful headline, finding a great photo, and writing a good caption. This may be a more effective strategy than spending too much of your time on the body copy. The header and image will be responsible for turning a scanner into a reader. Without a grabbing headline, no one is going to read the body copy anyway.

13. Be Distinctive

Producing more of the same will make your school next to invisible for prospects. If you look, sound, and feel like every other institution, you will not stand out from the crowd. Focus on your unique value proposition and the individual stories from your students and graduates. Collecting and packaging student success stories is a way to show how your institution is unique because every person’s story is different. Don’t underestimate the value of your students and graduates as brand ambassadors!

14. Embrace Obstructionists 

When individuals within your institution impede your progress, befriend them, add them to your marketing task force, and make it their responsibility to improve on your vision.

15. Design With Purpose

Good, creative design is an economic tool and a competitive advantage. One of your first marketing hires should be a creative director.

16. Skip Rankings 

Prospective students don’t look to make the superior choice, but instead look to avoid making a bad choice. Share student-stories along with hard facts. Stories are relatable, and can make readers feel safe, accepted, and like they fit in. When you share infographics or statistics-- rather than rankings, which may or may not mean anything to prospective students--focus on impressive statistics like 98% of our students work in their chosen field or have been accepted to graduate school within a year of graduating or 100% of our students participate in a semester abroad.

17. Stand for Something

Your target audiences want less to think about, not more. No one goes to a store to buy everything. What is your niche and your value proposition? Start there.

18. Pick Your Battles Wisely

Fight for reputation-building marketing pieces (print and web) and ignore the coffee-and-bagel flyers in order to propel your school from who you are today to who you want to be. Use the 80/20 rule. You can invoke much of the necessary change by insisting on a few carefully chosen projects in your institution. Let go of everything else.

These are just a few tips that the most successful higher education marketers have suggested. What would you add to the list?