If you think about the best brands or products – from Coca-Cola to Amazon to Apple – they all have one thing in common: they know
their customers extremely well. Market-leading companies spend millions of dollars to try to get deep into the mind of their customer and
understand their needs and motivations. As schools face increasing competition to attract students, using the same tactic of developing
customer personas is a smart step to add to your marketing plan.
In its simplest form, a customer persona is a fictional representation of your current or in some cases, ideal, customer(s). Though every
customer is unique, many of them share certain commonalities that allow you to group them by type and to create marketing programs that
target that persona. By going through the persona-building exercise, you can bring your customers to life and create more targeted marketing
messages.
You already have a lot of the data that you can use to build simple customer personas. For example, let’s say that you operate a K-6 school
located in an urban area. You primarily serve a demographic that is in a lower socioeconomic level. Just based on this information, you
can build a basic customer persona.
So just based upon customer demographics, you know an awful lot that allows you to be a more effective marketer:
A demographic persona or segmentation is a great perfect first step, but if you want to dive deep into your customer, then the best way to
do that is through individual interviews or focus groups to truly get at their motivations and desires. This “attitudinal” segmentation is
much richer and allows your message to resonate with your target market. These attitudes might be:
Having messaging that resonates with customers on an emotional level is the most effective form of marketing you can create, but it can be difficult to pull these out of customers. This might be when you bring in some professional help.
I recently worked with a client that wanted to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. This charter school defined itself as an
“alternative” high school and generally gained students through referrals from the traditional school system. Though enrollment at the
school was strong, they were disproportionately attracting higher numbers of senior and junior level students versus freshman and
sophomores, as well as students with significant behavioral challenges.
Our first step was to spend time talking to the parents and the students who currently attended the school. The first key insight that we
gained was that the use of the term “alternative” was very polarizing. Though this is a term that is very common in the educational sector,
what the client had not appreciated was that to a parent or a student, this phrase conjured up images of students who had consistently been
in trouble with law enforcement.
When students were queried if they considered themselves students who were in trouble with the law,” they all answered “no.” By removing
that phrase from the public description of the school, they are now able to attract students who originally didn’t believe that the school
was a good fit for them. They had potential students self-selecting out before even engaging with the school.
Additionally, by clearly defining their six target student types, based upon social and emotional needs research, this client could have
better and more fruitful conversations with the schools who were referring students to them. Their referral base had been caught in this
narrow definition of “alternative” as well.
The client was also able to explain to referring schools, based upon customer feedback, that many of these students felt out of place in
their traditional schools much earlier than their junior or senior year. Suddenly, the conversation shifted away from the senior who had
been a discipline challenge and a drop out risk, to the freshman who was being bullied – the ideal student type. This school is now at
record enrollment (and opening up an additional campus) but more importantly, many students who could benefit from this different type of
school environment are being served rather than dropping out.
Building personas allows you to bring your customers to life in a way that you probably haven’t done before. But not only that, it allows you to tailor your marketing to your target customer.
Nick LeRoy, MBA, is the president of Bright Minds Marketing and former Executive Director of the Indiana Charter School Board. Bright Minds Marketing provides enrollment and recruitment consulting to private, Catholic and charter schools. For information about how Bright Minds Marketing can help your school improve its’ student enrollment, send an email to nick@brightmindsmarketing.com or call us at 317-361-5255.
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