Use Your Brand to Fuel Your Content and Your Heart to Tell a Great Story

Filtering is what ensures that the stories you tell will be distinguishable from all the other stories told by your peer schools. The vast majority of stories pushed out by colleges follow a predictable formula. There is a sameness about them and most are uninteresting. This is unfortunate especially because there are wonderfully rich tales waiting to be told on every campus.

I know there are. Hundreds of people have revealed them to me, the deeply personal details about why they chose to attend or teach at their particular school or college.

Here are few examples:

From a first-year student:  “Where I grew up, people only looked me in the eye if they wanted to hurt me. I built a guard around myself. Here, people looked me in the eye and then asked how they could help. I love the people here. I can relax around them and that allowed me to learn.”

From a tenured faculty member:  “I arrived for my first round of interviews to join the faculty on the eve of garbage day in our small town. Not just any old garbage day, but the annual “Clean Up Our Town” day where the crew picks up anything you put on the curb, no matter how big or heavy or stained. It was late. Cold. Dinner came from the convenience store. I looked around and said to myself, “‘What’s become of me.’” [Spoiler alert: This story has a very happy ending.]

From a senior student:  “Here, we make an effort to connect with other students even when we know we don’t agree about most things. We have difficult conversations and that’s okay. It’s hard to dehumanize someone you sit next to at lunch.”

These reflections provide insights into the humanity of a school and are poignant reminders of the bonds that are formed by people who, for the reasons of brand, were all drawn to be together at one specific school.

Stories that reflect this bond are powerful. Once heard, these stories are not easily forgotten. They get into the heart and stay in the head.

I remember these stories years after first hearing them. They’ve never left me. It’s content “gold” that every institution must tell and that future students crave to hear.

But it’s not easy. Producing engaging content on an ongoing basis is challenging.

Here’s a checklist of “Do’s and Don’ts” designed to help you build meaningful and compelling brand stories.

• While a story must be relevant to the brand, the story really isn’t about the competencies of the school. It’s about the effect the people of a school have on each other. Base your decision on whether or not to invest in producing a story on the degree to which it will resonate with a specific targeted audience. If you don’t have personas for each segment of your prospective students and their influencers, and for alumni, donors, and the media you wish to engage, then stop everything and get the personas established. Only then will you understand what truly matters to your audience.  
• Don’t try to “sell” the institution, rather, craft your content so that it will activate a relationship (or enhance an existing one) with a specific audience. For admissions marketing, know what concerns each group of your prospective students have at each stage of the admissions funnel. Map that out so you have “buyer’s journeys” at the ready, and then build your story library so that you cover each concern.
• Don’t be afraid to amplify the aspects of your brand that are unique, fun, and possibly self-deprecating. Schools that have the confidence to be themselves have a much better shot at becoming a brand (i.e. “hot”) school. It’s okay to tout your strongest outcomes, but don’t do that at the expense of your personality. People forget what you tell them, but they are far less likely to forget how you made them feel. So, do mix into your content library stories about traditions, beloved members of the dining hall staff, your unique vernacular, and how out-of-the-way your campus really is or how deep-in-the-middle of a chaotic urban center it is. One of the most successful stories that one of our clients produced is a video about how difficult it is to pronounce the college’s name. It garners the highest click-through-rate of all of our ads in all of our markets and has morphed into best-selling bookstore items based on the video’s “say it with us” chant.

Your brand vitalizes your school. It’s the thing that everyone can “touch” to renew pride. Your brand is the emotional and the rational all wrapped up in unique and heartfelt stories of human achievement. Tell your stories as though lives depended upon them, because, they do.