[ebook excerpt]
Student personas are fictional, generalized representations of your school’s ideal applicants. The strongest student personas are based on market research, as well as on insights you gather from your existing student body.
They help you understand your prospective students better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your different audiences. Depending on your school’s size and program offerings, you could have multiple personas. If you’re new to personas, start with your core student applicant that drives the most traffic to your website. You can always develop more personas later if needed.
Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:
- Interview students, alumni, and faculty to discover how they feel about your institution.
- Analyze your contact database to uncover trends about how your audiences find and consume your content.
- When creating forms to use on your website, assign form fields that capture important persona data (e.g., age, gender, state residence, program interest, preferred social media platform).
- Consider your admissions officers’ feedback on the prospective students and applicants they interact with most.
To learn more about how you can create and use student personas to recruit higher quality prospects for your college or university, download a free copy of our ebook.
