Everyone knows that content is king. I’m also a firm believer that nothing is better at marketing than a good word of mouth story from a trusted friend about their experiences with your brand. Storytelling is some of the most important and authentic content that we can create. When it comes to college marketing that almost always revolves around stories that happened on campus. It doesn’t matter if you are in recruitment marketing to prospective students or alumni/development marketing to former students. It is those stories about your institution that really make people feel like they can be or are part of the community.

The one common element of almost every single story is that it happened on campus. It’s so easy to overlook our campus, but just how critical is it to the way we market?

Campus provides our stories a point of reference

I’ve already mentioned it once but (almost) everything happens on campus! As you tell the story certain landmarks and locations help people to visualize your story and provide those critical points of reference to help them relate to the story. Every story happened in a specific location. This can be the piece of the story that brings it to life for someone as they visualize that location in their mind.

Campus holds all the history

Sometimes the story is about campus. The history of each institution is the history of that campus. There are hundreds (probably thousands) of colleges and universities that are well over a hundred years old, and during that time a lot of memorable events have happened on campus. Maybe there are National Historic buildings or monuments on campus. Maybe there was some event of local or national importance that happened somewhere on campus. These are all extremely valuable facts that have interesting stories to go with them. These also make great stories that “sell” how wonderful your school is!

Now when we talk about the history that has taken place on campus we don’t want to take anything away from the memorable events that have taken place for individuals on your campus. Events like a former student who kissed their future wife in a special location or an activity that bounded friends for life or a classroom where an important skill was taught that impacted someone’s career indefinitely are all incredibly important pieces too. You might not know the story, but just thinking about a location on campus might trigger it in the mind of an important audience member.

What is more important?

Sure incredible faculty among other things can make your school stand out, but didn’t your campus have an impact on your ability to recruit that faculty? There is no denying it, campus is vitally important to every single person associated with your school and brand, except that growing online student population that we keep hearing about.

The biggest problem with the campus is that we simply take it for granted. It’s always been here and always will be, right? Isn’t that what is so valuable and important about campus though? That feeling that campus has and will be there is a comforting and reassuring fact. Sure some buildings will come and go and campus will grow and shrink, but the core essence of the institution remains on the grounds on which it resides. This is a good thing and one that we should always be marketing.

So the question is how can we as higher ed web and marketing professionals do a better job of “marketing” our campus? A couple of ideas you might want to run with could be:

• Are you sharing pictures of campus through Instagram and Facebook?
• Are locations around campus tied into Foursquare and provide a little history about the location?
• How about writing more news articles about the history of a building or location?
• Do you have a good campus map that shows the beauty of campus or just a 2D black and white .pdf map?
• Do academic sections specifically share where they are located on campus?
• Is there content on the website about each location on campus? This could include the history, what happens in this location, a schedule of events and any number of other relevant information.

How is your school marketing this important asset? Is your school under marketing this valuable asset?

Want to learn more about how to better market your campus?

Next Tuesday, July 23rd at 2PM EDT, Michael Fienen and I will be running a free webinar discussing the question ”Is the interactive campus map the most important website feature?” We’ll be diving deeper into this subject and discussing how this specific feature on an institution’s website is valuable to help you market your campus.

Sign up for this free webinar today.

Photo credit: You are here by Mario Klingemann

This post was written by Kyle James