Recruitment and brand have a symbiotic relationship in the higher education space. A great brand helps you attract the best applicants and the best applicants enhance your brand. But no matter whether you’re playing at the mature end of the brand spectrum or still trying to get established, it can be difficult to know how to progress to the next level.

There’s no clear, predictable path to brand success in the recruitment space – only tools to leverage and learn with. This week, we’re suggesting four excellent tactics to add to your repertoire. Each of them reflects the kind of approaches to brand-building we take with our clients. Let’s explore four ways you can improve your recruitment brand.

Without a clear path to success, you’re going to have to establish your own performance indicators in the brand space – ones that correlate closely to key recruitment metrics. Measurement, after all, is the first step on the path to management. When doing so, it’s critical to remember that brands are actualised through peer-to-peer conversations rather than message-to-audience interactions. Once you know how often your university brand is entering the conversation, you know how much work you need to do to be noticed.

Quantitative and qualitative data approaches are both useful to understanding this equation. Try interviewing with members of your target demographic to get a picture of how deeply they are acquainted with your brand. Digital tools can also help you figure out where your brand penetration is right now. With a clear picture of where you’re at right now, you’ll have a stronger idea of what you need to do next.

There’s always a place for broad-based brand strategies in your marketing mix. Increasingly, though, universities are using digital tools to facilitate targeting on much deeper levels. Sometimes, your audience might consist of only a few key individuals. Citations, h-index rankings and other data points can help you target the highest performing researchers in extremely narrow fields. It’s a time-intensive process, but you’ll learn a huge amount about your audience. And the brand impact extends far beyond the few individuals in your target audience. That’s because academics operate in tight networks with high interactivity and information exchange. If you can persuade a few influential individuals of the value of your brand, they’ll help you spread the word. It’s the influencer marketing model with a data-driven twist that can provide fantastic results.

Academics want to work in the best environment possible, both for themselves and for their research. That means their needs when searching for partner universities are two-fold; they want institutions that have already attracted great scholars and that create an environment conducive to great research outcomes. It’s important, then, to make transparency your priority. Prospects need to know who is carrying out research and what their outputs are. Most universities understand this principle but struggle with execution. You need to go beyond owned news feeds and blogs to putting exciting research stories in the right places.

Storytelling might not be something we consider to be an important factor in the realm of science. Narratives, though, are simply the way humans organise complex information and changes over time. And everyone is receptive to them, including the academic community. It’s important, therefore, to do the work of finding the stories that capture the attention of your audience. That’s a process that requires feedback by default. Most universities, though, don’t do the work of figuring out which stories really resonate with their audience. Don’t make the same mistake – take the time to find out what the most interesting stories are and how to get them into the public imagination. Once again, the power of the qualitative interview comes in useful here, giving you a chance to engage deeply with audience interests.

This is a bit of a bonus strategy, but it’s important in summing up the above ideas. The chances are that your central marketing and recruitment teams aren’t going to have the in-depth knowledge they need to source the right stories and pick the right audiences. The role of faculties, then, becomes crucial in mobilising your brand assets. Make sure faculty stakeholders play a leadership role in defining the content of campaigns. Your marketers are there to provide a framework for them to build an active, engaging conversation around your brand.

The team at The Brand Education is full of great ideas for recruitment campaigns and beyond. Get in touch with them today to learn how to take your recruitment brand to the next level.