Sponsored post by 25th Hour Communications
With the passage of Texas Bill HB 8, Texas has prioritized funding for community colleges based on measurable student-focused outcomes. In doing so, they have also changed your marketing strategy and landscape. While you have created your marketing plans to recruit students and achieve your funding goal, now you not only have to recruit them, but you have to change your strategy to also focus on retaining them and helping them achieve their goals. By adopting student-centered marketing, emphasizing program relevance, providing comprehensive support services, and nurturing strong partnerships, community college marketers can effectively contribute to the success of their colleges and help students thrive.
To assist in achieving these outcomes, prioritize student needs and aspirations in your marketing strategies. This involves adopting student-centered marketing approaches that resonate with prospective and current students across all platforms and in relation to all audiences. More than ever before, marketers need to develop personalized communication strategies to engage students throughout their academic journey, from application to completion. It’s important that you know your prospective and current students. What are their consumer behaviors? How and where can you reach them and what type of content moves them? All of the answers to these questions now carry greater weight than in the past.
Emphasizing the relevance and value of programs is even more critical to attracting and retaining students. This involves things like showcasing the alignment between programs and students' career goals. Have you conducted market analyses to identify high-demand fields and emerging industries? These will no doubt be tough conversations and will involve all areas of your institution from academics to administration. But marketers can take the lead in this arena by understanding labor market trends. You can align program offerings with the needs of employers and position your college as the provider of relevant, job-ready education, while building new and strengthening existing partnerships with local and regional employers along the way.
Highlighting the comprehensive support services available to students and showcasing your institution's commitment to their success will be evermore important. It will be pertinent to prominently feature the wide range of support services offered by your college. By emphasizing these services, we can assure prospective students that they will receive the assistance they need to thrive academically and overcome challenges.
Achieving measurable student-focused outcomes requires new and different marketing approaches. Greater collaboration with admissions, financial aid, student support services and all other college departments is now one of the keys to successful marketing in outcomes based funding models.
25th Hour Communications is the only marketing agency with extensive experience working in and assisting colleges in converting from enrollment-based funding to outcomes-based funding. With offices in Texas and across the U.S. we are ready to help you make the changes you need to help your college be successful in this changing funding model.. Email me at deweyp@25comm.com if you would like to find out more about how we can help!
THIS IS A SPONSORED POST - Sponsored posts are a way for TACCM annual sponsors to share their message and integrate their messages into the stream of site content. 25th Hour Communications is an annual sponsor of TACCM.