Mixing Your Mediums: Why Your Recruits Respond to It
Here's a lesson we've learned over two decades that you should learn from...
If you’re the average college coach and recruiter, here’s how it works:
You looooove social media. You’re on it, you’re creative, you can do the graphics, and it’s all just a natural for you. And, you’re proving to yourself that you’re on the right track because you get likes, follows, and all the good emojis every time you post. And most importantly, your recruits tell you they love your stuff. So obviously, social media is the way you should be recruiting, you tell yourself.
So why didn’t your prospect classes turn out all that great the past three years?
The coach 50 miles away you compete with loooooves phone calls. Texting, no such much - he didn’t grow up with it, but when he first became a coach he learned to master the recruiting phone call. He has his whole first call with every recruit to a tight 45 minutes - he loves to call it “his spiel” - but admits sometimes he loses track of time and it goes about an hour or so. Forget social media, he loves talking on the phone because he gets to hear the prospect’s voice, they hear his, and like I said, he’s got his routine down. Sure, it’s getting harder and harder to get prospects back on the phone after that first marathon call…but he leaves voicemails, and lets them know he’s really interested in them. Hasn’t been getting a lot of his prime prospects the past couple of years, but it worked when he first started recruiting so he’s going to stick with it.
So why is something that used to work so well not working so well anymore?
In both cases, they’re doing their best. They’re the average coach who focuses on one or two prime ways to communicate to their recruits, and they do o.k. once in a while with it all. But, like the average coach, the lack of real recruiting success has turned this part of the job into the least favorite and most dreaded part of this job.
Time to become above average. Here’s what you need to understand first:
If the messages aren’t delivered differently, you look and sound like everybody else.
And if you sound like everybody else, it makes it tough to win recruits.
The key to winning more recruits - since they are making buying decisions based on stories that are told - is to keep them interested over a long period of time. Most of you need a long period of time to put in the hard work of changing a recruit’s mindset from “mildly curious about your program” to “hoping you ask them to commit”.
In the business world, that’s called branding.
You’re not running a company, but you are trying to achieve the same thing: Attract more of the right customers (recruits) to commit to gain interest in your brand (interact with you, and show signs of interest like coming to visit campus) and eventually buy your product once they’re sold on it (committing to your program).
One of the key components in that effort - which most ‘average’ coaches fail to plan for adequately - is the mix of messaging that takes a different, multi-layered approach to communicating with recruits. I’ll save time by giving away the secret: You need to use all the communication mediums available to you.
Here’s what they are, and what we’ve seen work best in terms of your use of these tools:
Social Media
Best use:
Tell a visual story of your campus
Give recruits an inside look of what it’ll be a part of your program, and what your team personality is all about.
Make them laugh.
Worst use:
Trying to sell your program by making a logical argument to ‘prove’ your campus is best.
Relying on it as your sole marketing effort to recruits.
Phone calls
Best use:
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