Welcome back for part 2 of my mini-series about what lifestyle branding can teach us about engaging students and alumni. I know, you’re all here for the stickers. If you don’t get that joke, it means you missed my previous post! So, check it out for a quick look at why I think college and alumni brands are the original lifestyle brands.
Lifestyle Brand Tricks to Excite and Engage Alumni & Students: Part 1
For me, this quote from the A Group, a marketing and tech firm focused on faith-based nonprofits, captures the connection between colleges and lifestyle brands perfectly: “A lifestyle brand owns, elicits and represents emotions, values, identities and aspirations of its users. It speaks to the human experience beyond just the problem the product solves or the solution the brand offers. It helps people express who they are and empowers them to be who they want to be.”
What especially gets me is that last line about empowering students and alumni “to be who they want to be.” Isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to achieve with our messaging? I’m going to assume you said yes! Here are a few more ideas for how to do that. Don’t worry, my philosophical treatise about the importance of stickers is at the end!
But before we get to that you need to…
Build Community
There’s a reason almost all lifestyle brands invest a lot of time and energy into creating social media communities, and that’s because these channels are a great place to cultivate shared values and build engagement with their actual customers. My advice is to make your channels more than a source for deadlines and due dates. Rather, find a way to curate content about things that matter to your audiences. Give them a reason to scroll and give them a reason to share.
Hashtags & filters, informal polls, giveaways, are all easy ways to do this. For alumni, how about selfie stories about their favorite classes or professors, or why they give? Encourage participation by attaching a giveaway to it (like alumni shwag!) and you’ll be building content and community in no time.
When it comes to ads…
Inspire First, Inform Second
Lifestyle brands don’t lead with their products, they lead with their values, and your ads should, too. As Steve Harvey writes on Medium.com in the article, “Identity and ideology: What is a lifestyle brand?”, “Successful lifestyle brands earn the loyalty of their customers because they convince them that, with a little help, they can become the person they want to be.”
When it comes to telling stories through ads, I would encourage you to stop thinking of stories as needing to be confined to a single telling. I know the fear is you only have one chance and one ad to tell your story but the truth is, today’s prospects don’t just choose college during a single sitting. They engage with you over a long period of time and if you’re doing it right (by using remarketing tactics like website retargeting), they’ll see your ads across multiple platforms and mediums. This is something I talked about in a presentation on storytelling I did at NCMPR’s District 6 conference in 2021. The basic idea is to think about telling individual stories that add up to a bigger story.
The framework I use basically applies classical drama’s 3-act structure (which divides stories into beginnings, middles, and ends) to ad campaigns. Some ads speak to beginnings (where the hero needs inspiration), some ads speak to middles (where the hero struggles and needs support), and some ads speak to happy endings (where our hero graduates or achieves career success). Keep in mind, these should be effective ads on their own but they should also add up to a complete picture of what your community college’s values are all about.
And finally…
Give Away Stickers
I know this sounds silly but there’s a serious point to be made. Lifestyle brands give away stickers for the same reason bands do—not just because it is free advertising, but because they are conditioning you to claim their identity publicly.
There’s a reason there’s no shortage of people wearing Harvard and MIT sweatshirts who never went to either school and it is because those brands represent identities that people want to claim. Now, I’m not saying you’re going to break into a national market with regional community college T-shirts but you never know… you could be the next Compton College.
But here’s the point: Getting your alumni and students to start claiming your identity (by putting your sticker on their car or your hat on their head) starts with cultivating an identity that they want to claim.
And that, of course, is what lifestyle marketing is all about!
Lifestyle Brand Tricks to Excite and Engage Alumni & Students: Part 1
