Gen Z can find information about the brands they’re interested in in just a few clicks. They don’t buy the bluster that fills older marketing materials. For them, a brand needs to be authentic about who it is and how it helps people. This includes colleges and universities they’re considering, too. Your higher education marketing strategies need to be authentic to get their attention.
They care a lot about ethical consumerism, too. Brands need to align with their values, or they won’t buy. Find that hard to believe? Around 81% of Gen Z consumers have changed purchasing decisions based on brand reputation or actions. Does your college match up to what you claim?
You can make your marketing more authentic. First, stop making your university the hero of your brand story. Your main characters are your future students. You’re their Obi-Wan, showing them how to take action. When you position them at the forefront of your marketing strategies, you’re helping other students just like them see your brand values in action.
Let’s make this easy for you to adopt. In this article, we break down 5 simple, accessible marketing strategies that shift away from boring institutional messaging to student-centric storytelling.
Table of Contents
Strategy 1: Let Students Create Content
People like seeing real people on social media. Beautiful videos – with scripts, storyboards, interesting shots, and artful editing – have their place, but they don’t feel wholly real. Use some professional videos and artwork, but mix in real students. Most of my Gen Z students are super comfortable creating and being on videos; take advantage of that.
Use Student Ambassadors
One of the best ways I’ve seen other universities do this is to hire students to be social media ambassadors. They create content, film videos, take pictures, and focus on what matters to them and their friends. Your marketing team can edit and approve that content before it goes live. You can also provide simple parameters and processes to help them improve.
Do Social Take-Overs
Do this only with students you trust and have trained (no one wants Moira and Alexis Rose taking over their social). A social media take-over lets them share immediate behind-the-scenes stories on campus for different events or show what a day running from class to class is like. This is a great way to bring in their stories and make them feel relatable. Prospective students can see exactly what campus is like for other students.
Set up an Interview Station
Pick a high-traffic spot on campus and send someone out to stop and ask students questions. Man-on-the-street style videos are popular on social media and let you get real answers immediately. You can edit out inappropriate or ill-fitting responses while keeping the authentic vibe.
Strategy 2: Highlight Career Outcomes, Not Classes
Classes and the professors who teach them are an important part of the college experience. Unfortunately for most of us professors, students don’t quite find us the selling point. What do they care about? What happens after they graduate.
Throughout your marketing, you can showcase real students who graduated and moved on to career success. Conduct post-graduate surveys to get an accurate picture of job placement, average salaries, and whether or not students are working within their major’s field.
Take those stories and identify willing students and alumni who want to talk about internships they gained, where they were hired, and how your university set them up for success. You can announce internships on social media or include interviews with alumni on your website’s program pages.
Most people really only care how you’re going to help them. Students need to see that choosing your school sets them up for success. Stats are great, but real stories land even better.
Strategy 3: Make Content Inclusive
Students with disabilities can often feel excluded. This is not a small group of students either. Around 21% of undergraduate students report having a disability. Your website and all of your digital content need to work for them.
Don’t make it worse. Follow basic web accessibility best practices so every student can use and understand what you’re sharing.
You can make simple shifts like:
- Burning in subtitles or adding closed captions to all video content
- Stop relying only on auto-generated captions (which misspell department names and terminology)
- Provide text alternatives for longer media like virtual tours and webinars
- Utilizing sign language interpreters for live events
- Ensuring all images have alternative text descriptions
- Keeping a guide to safe brand color combinations
Strategy 4: Simplify Your Visuals
Want to know why AI flyers are so bad? They overload the image with too much content. No one knows where to look or what to read first. It’s all too easy to miss important details. (They’re also just ugly and all look the same.)
Visuals on your website, social media, or even printed and posted in your building need to be clean, simple designs. Students should be able to decipher the main message in about 2 seconds. No one wants to stop, read a ton of information, and still not know if it applies to them.
Next time you create social media graphics or a flyer, cut the content to a minimum. Add only the most important information, and link to a simple webpage for those who want more. Use readable color combinations, larger fonts, and avoid adding a QR code if it’s a digital-only graphic.
When you add graphics with text to social media or your website, your ALT text description should include the information in the flyer. Remember: people using screen readers can’t get that information otherwise.
Strategy 5: Ditch the PDFs
PDFs are the literal worst. Marketing teams get dependent on them because they can create one in design tools like Canva faster than they can create a webpage. It’s great to email or for a download, right?
Ugh, wrong.
PDFs cause so many issues for everyone. It’s a terrible experience to open up a PDF on a mobile device, and that’s what a lot of your Gen Z students use to surf your website. They are also pretty inaccessible by default, so they can be impossible for students with disabilities to use.
Instead, convert course checklists, viewbooks, and application guides into mobile-friendly HTML pages. This helps students get the information they need while improving your SEO, GEO, and overall accessibility.
Removing Barriers Brings Students In
We all know that higher education is in a weird place. The only way to future-proof your institution is to remember who matters most: your students. Gen Z wants to see themselves and their values in your marketing. Invite them to be part of your higher education marketing strategies. Highlight the goals that matter to them. Make your content inclusive and easy to understand. All of this helps prospective students feel like the main character in your organization’s story.
When they feel truly connected to you, enrollment flows naturally.
