Your school brand may be the secret sauce your admissions is missing!
It’s your favorite time of year: enrollment season. This is when schools are celebrating new records or reevaluating their entire strategy. But long before you start tallying the enrollments, your school’s brand is impacting your admissions. So if your numbers aren’t where you want them, here’s three ways that your school brand could be playing a bigger role than you realize.
1. Your logo is your first impression. Is it the right impression?
Think of your logo like an outfit worn to a job interview. Before the interviewer asks you questions or shakes your hand, they see you. And the fashion choices you make will impact what their first impression is. Before prospective families walk through your doors, they’ve already encountered your school’s brand. And it leaves an impression.
There’s two primary questions to consider when thinking of the impact and effectiveness of your school logo.
Does your logo convey a high-quality experience?
This one is a pretty straight-forward ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ A professional, high-quality logo suggests to prospective families that your school will deliver a professional, high-quality experience. The opposite holds true. A logo that looks amateurish, low-quality, or cheap will tell prospective families that they should not expect a premium school experience.
Professional and effective logos are simple, memorable, and relevant. In simpler terms, a good logo won’t leave people thinking it was cobbled together in Microsoft Paint! Many schools have a logo that has been there from the start, thrown together out of necessity, not out of strategic thinking. Holding onto a dated, amateur logo will impact the mindset of prospective families long before they even think about filling out an admissions form!
Does your logo convey your school spirit?
This question should be asked even if your logo is high quality. You may have a professional logo, but does it feel relevant and expressive for your school? Does it properly reflect the school spirit within your building?
Maybe the logo gives a playful feeling, suggesting the energy within the walls is vibrant and electric. But you know within the building, the energy is very reserved and ordered, far closer to a preparatory academy than a summer youth camp. If your school logo doesn’t properly convey your school spirit, it will attract the wrong families, or you’ll have many confused families on school tours.
Your admissions process will be more effective and yield higher results when the leads you get are quality, relevant leads. Having a school logo that matches your school spirit will help qualify those leads before they even arrive on campus.
2. A cohesive brand system build trust.
Trust is THE most important currency in the admissions game. Trust takes time to build, but you can lay a strong foundation by having a cohesive brand system for your school.
A brand system is a consistent, strategic approach to how your school is represented. From your visual designs to key words to how you speak to families, having a determined approach will ensure consistency in how your school shows up in the world.
A helpful way to think about it is this. A strategic brand provides internal alignment for external influence.
Within your building, your team is all on the same page about who you are, who you serve, and how to talk about it. All of this, when executed, will impact the way people on the outside feel and think about you.
Imagine if prospective families already felt a sense of trust before they attend an open house! By having consistent visuals and messaging, you can lay that foundation of trust early on in the admissions process.
3. Positioning yourself will help make you a clear choice.
Prospective families are facing choices. What kind of schooling should they pick? What kind of extracurriculars are important? How far is too far to drive? How much should they spend on tuition?
Brand positioning for your school means identifying what makes you the right choice for your ideal families and how you communicate that best when talking with them. It also means you speak about it in comparison to your competitors.
Let’s say you’ve determined these three facts:
- Ideal families highly value athletics.
- Your school’s athletics teams regularly go to state championships.
- No other school within 30 miles has as good an athletics department.
Imagine all the value lost if you don’t position this front and center! What if all you talk about is your reading program and your new science lab? The ideal families won’t stick around long enough in the admissions funnel to hear the facts about athletics that will make them excited to enroll.
Brand positioning helps you understand how to talk about your school in the right way to the right families. It tears down the decision barriers in your path, (and it also prevents you from building them yourself!)
Your school brand can work tremendously in your favor if positioned in the right way. And when it is, you’ll find your admissions list bursting with ideal families ready and eager to make a positive decision.