Now that you’ve kicked back and enjoyed your summer (ha!), it’s the perfect time to refocus and revitalize your brand efforts for the upcoming year. From aligning your brand image to understanding and engaging your target audience, to driving meaningful connections, brand-building is an ongoing and ever-evolving process.

Enjoy the first issue in our series on being brand ready!

Plan Time to Connect with Your Stakeholders

When was the last time you reached out to your prospects, students, parents, alumni, and other key stakeholders? Do you know how they feel about you? Have their needs changed? Are you delivering on your promise? Is one of your competitors doing a better job? What can you do better?

Many institutions conduct comprehensive brand studies every 5-7 years, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. To be truly aligned with your customers, brand marketers need to be constantly learning and adjusting. Use one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or targeted online surveys to answer questions you have, right now. Identify key audience segments. Determine the optimal modality based on your budget, resources, and timing. Make sure you consider the academic calendar (i.e., don’t schedule research during midterms, finals, and over breaks). Once you identify the blackout periods, you might find you have limited opportunities to connect.

Don’t overshoot the means to the end. If you want to understand how employers feel about your students, schedule 4-6 interviews with companies that hire a lot of your grads. If you launched a new program or made a major policy change and want to know how students feel, schedule 2-4 focus groups to get a directional read. Make it easy for people to say “yes”. Use qualitative insights to inform quantitative surveys to reach and validate findings with a larger audience.

Ensure you create the right environment to gather authentic, unbiased feedback. In other words, don’t have the dean interview students. Don’t have the head of HR ask employers what’s not working. Don’t stack the deck with respondents who are your strongest brand ambassadors. Having an outside partner who knows how to recruit, create a balanced respondent sample, and is an expert in creating questionnaires and guides to pull out and pinpoint the information you need is invaluable. Make sure the time you put into consumer research generates relevant and useful information for you and your team.

Finally, consider how you can support your university partners, like the schools and colleges, Student Affairs, Advancement, and even HR. With targeted research and insights that help them deliver on their brand promise at the local level, you can extend your expertise, build trust, and identify key insights that will help you elevate the institutional brand.

As the owner of the institutional brand, you should know the brand better than anyone else. To elevate your story, identify and advocate for improvements, and take advantage of messaging opportunities, ensure consumer insights are at the center of your strategy.

To learn more about GreenLight, our expertise, and services, and how we can help, visit www.thegreenlightteam.com.