Marketing to Multiple Generations
With every generation, education marketers must consider changes in culture. Especially when marketing to multiple generations, you’ve got to mark the cultural differences well.
For years, Millennials have dominated the minds and strategies of education and enrollment marketers.
They are a large generational cohort, and so there have been enough of them to market to as traditional undergrad students as well as adult students.
But now there’s a generational shift happening. The first members of Gen Z are coming of high school and college age.
And this has significant implications for how enrollment markers should approach their brand messaging to traditional undergrad students.
But adult and online students who are returning to finish, further, or begin their higher education will still be in the Millennial generational window.
This generation gap will force enrollment marketers to begin marketing to multiple generations for the next four to five years.
Marketing to Multiple Generations Begins with Personas
If you haven’t gotten serious about identifying your marketing personas, now is the time to do so.
Well-defined marketing personas will help you and your team create laser-focused content for both your Gen Z, traditional undergrad (TUG) students and your Millennial adult and online students.
In my experience, the best marketing personas go beyond raw demographic data.
Take your stats, like “45–60 year-old female,” and craft something more personal like…
“Sally, a stay-at-home mom who worries just as much about her children now in college as she did when they were home — maybe more.”
Although “Sally” is fictional, this kind of marketing persona allows your creative team to create relevant, compelling content for audience members in that demographic.
Personas like this help us put a face to the data so that we can create emotive, or emotionally compelling, narratives that draw our target audience into our content.
Here are some thoughts to keep in mind when creating your TUG and adult student marketing personas.
