[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Hey everyone. I'm Cheryl Broom, host of Higher Ed Conversations and CEO of GradComm, and I'm here with this month's quick take. So one of the best things about owning a marketing and communications agency that focuses exclusively on higher education and particularly in community colleges, is that we.
[00:00:20] Cheryl Broom: Have a lot of data. We get to do campaigns and work with colleges all over the nation and really dive deep into what we are seeing students respond to when it comes time for marketing campaigns. And I wanna share. Some of the insights that we got from some recent analysis we did based on different age groups.
[00:00:43] Cheryl Broom: So I asked our director of research and our director of digital marketing to segment the work that we did in 2025, both in terms of surveys and in terms of digital media. I took a deep, deep dive into this. It's actually July when I'm recording this. Because it's taken me six months to sort through all of this and come up with some insights that I thought that you could use.
[00:01:06] Cheryl Broom: So I really want to talk today about the different age groups and how we should target them, what transformations they're looking for, and where's the best place to place our media? What are the best tactics? And so this is kind of a callback to episode 81 where I talked about target transformation and tactics.
[00:01:26] Cheryl Broom: And it's a great like overview of how we approach marketing here at GradComm. I recommend you listen to it, but if you haven't. Just follow along. Super easy to catch on. And I think let's dive right in. So what do we look at? Well, we looked at almost 10 different surveys, five media habit surveys, and four surveys of students who did not enroll or who stopped out.
[00:01:50] Cheryl Broom: Prior to completing college, and that represented almost 4,000 students in total. We also looked at about $2 million worth of digital media placement across display, meta, TikTok, and YouTube. And I really wanted to understand where our students spending their time, how are they discovering programs? What do they need to hear from colleges?
[00:02:19] Cheryl Broom: What is getting in the way of enrollment and how all of these things change when we look at students' age. So there was so much in this research it was really fun to go through and maybe I'll. Put together a conference speech on this so I can dive deeper into this later. But for today, I'm just gonna spend the next 10 minutes with the highest level insights that I could share with you.
[00:02:48] Cheryl Broom: And hopefully there are some nuggets in there you can take away as you're coming up with your next campaigns. So let's talk about target audience. And my first insight, and this is not gonna surprise you, is that age matters, but there's a caveat. Age matters, but age is most useful when you consider it alongside life stage, previous college experience.
[00:03:15] Cheryl Broom: Whether or not somebody works, whether or not somebody has family responsibilities and what their actual college and career goals are. So we're gonna talk broad today, just about age, but I also really wanna emphasize that when you're creating messages and campaigns, that it's even better to look at age and then look at.
[00:03:38] Cheryl Broom: Other things that would impact your target audience, whether that's maybe a 30-year-old with a family, a 30 5-year-old that wants to upskill a 22-year-old who has some college, but who has stopped out. So it's even better to get more granular and more precise in your marketing. But for today's discussion, we are gonna talk about younger students.
[00:04:00] Cheryl Broom: Those are students under the age of 25 and older students, and those are students age 26 to 50. So target audience, younger students, 25 and younger, no surprise using Instagram and TikTok. They say what's interesting that they learn what program they're gonna take through personal connection, high school or college person.
[00:04:27] Cheryl Broom: They do recall seeing college marketing, particularly college social media advertising, but their decision making stage is, is happening when they're talking to people. They express a lot of uncertainty about class requirements and future value of their college education. So they're uncertain if they're gonna actually be successful, depending on what class they're taking, and they're uncertain that their degree is gonna hold value in the future.
[00:04:56] Cheryl Broom: And they say that they need more clarity, reassurance, and support from their college. So how do our older students look? Well, students age 26 to 50, were more likely to use Facebook, unlike our younger students who are making decisions about what program to attend by talking to high school or college personnel, these students are discovering programs.
[00:05:20] Cheryl Broom: S through self-directed searches. So that could be searches on Google, on Yahoo through ai, maybe on Reddit, but they're actually directly searching for programs. A lot of these students were the first in their families to take college level classes, and they're really worried about how they're gonna balance work, family, and financial responsibilities with the demands of going to college.
[00:05:45] Cheryl Broom: So that's a little bit about our target audiences. I always like to start out any marketing campaign with asking who are we targeting and trying to get as precise and specific as possible. So let's move on to transformation. So we know our two target audiences, they're really broad. 25 and younger, 26 and older.
[00:06:06] Cheryl Broom: So got a broad target audience. What are they looking to do? How are we gonna transform them? What promise are we offering and what are they actually seeking? So we know different groups are using different platforms, but they're also trying to solve different problems. So calling back to episode 81 of this podcast, the Three T's of marketing, I talked about asking yourself, how is your college going to transform a potential student's life?
[00:06:35] Cheryl Broom: And this is where your messaging comes into play. So for younger students, they talked a lot in our surveys about. Concern over requirements uncertainty about whether classes support their future goals. Cost concerns. They complained or cited lack of academic or career support and they said the stop out students said that they felt like a lot of their classes weren't interesting or like flat out were not useful.
[00:07:03] Cheryl Broom: And so when I look at their responses to our surveys. I would wanna start working around transformation themes that has to do with showing them a path forward, showing them that the college is going to get them on a path to future success. I would wanna focus directly on how valuable college is and how much this investment is worth.
[00:07:26] Cheryl Broom: I want to show them. All the different possibilities and how the college is gonna help them choose a direction. I think that a transformation that would be impactful to this group is showing them how they can see themselves as someone who belongs. And that they are worthy of being someone who can come to college and can complete that, they're worth it.
[00:07:50] Cheryl Broom: And I would also like to focus on how their classes that they're gonna take are going to inspire them and move them towards a meaningful goal. So that's how I would take the information that we've learned from our research and start thinking about how are we gonna transform these students and inspire them and get them excited.
[00:08:10] Cheryl Broom: For our older students, 26 and over, they talked a lot about convenience. They have a lack of time. A lot of the schedules that the college offers are inconvenient for them. They need to work. They felt that some of the classes were demanding, and they just said that a lot of the instructional formats didn't fit their lives.
[00:08:30] Cheryl Broom: And that was one of the reasons that our stop-out students and this age group said that they didn't complete. They said they want faster completion, more online classes, more hybrid classes where they can choose if they can be online or in person. Requirements that are less time consuming and childcare support.
[00:08:49] Cheryl Broom: So transformation, what messages would we send to this group? Well, I would wanna talk about moving forward, how the college can help them move forward and complete faster. The options that you have to support busy students. I would wanna talk about moving them from being underemployed to advancing to somewhere.
[00:09:11] Cheryl Broom: Better where all this time and energy is gonna be worth everything they're putting in. Perhaps showing a student who has gone from overwhelmed to supported to completing. So showing that student journey and how the college can help be a guide, and then really convincing them that college can fit in their lives so that it can transform their lives and there is space and that you are gonna make that space possible.
[00:09:39] Cheryl Broom: So the practical takeaway here is the message should begin with the student's problem and the student's future, not the college's list of features. Your features should fit in with how you're gonna transform a student. So I just have a couple more minutes 'cause I try to keep these quick takes to under 15 minutes.
[00:09:58] Cheryl Broom: So we talked about Target, we're looking at two age groups. We talked about transformation, what's important to these students. And now I wanna talk about tactics. I never wanna start with tactics. I did kind of like preview a little of them in the beginning because everybody wants to talk about tactics.
[00:10:14] Cheryl Broom: 'cause tactics are tangible and they're fun and they're easy to decide. The, the transformation, the messaging and your target audience is where most of the work should be taking place. But let's talk about tactics because that's where we are in our, in our process. So. Across age groups, we found some interesting things.
[00:10:35] Cheryl Broom: So I already told you that the younger students are looking at TikTok and Instagram and the older students are looking at Facebook. But some other things that we found didn't necessarily have to do so much with where they're getting information, but what.
[00:10:51] Cheryl Broom: Type of ads that they're looking at. We found that across ages and across platforms, ads featuring real students testimonials and authentic campus experiences outperform more generic creative. We particularly found that student perspective videos performed especially well, and shorter videos held attention more effectively.
[00:11:21] Cheryl Broom: Creative worked best when it felt natural to the platform. And by natural, I mean it should feel like they haven't left the platform. Like they're scrolling and they feel like it's just something that's part of the platform, not an ad. And that Spanish language creative for those colleges that had it.
[00:11:40] Cheryl Broom: Consistently outperformed everything. So Spanish language is just doing great. We found for younger audiences, like I already said, Instagram and TikTok do great. Search is great. Anything with video is gonna do good. YouTube. Spotify performed really well, but more than anything, a mobile first vertical creative that had a fast hook and authentic student voices.
[00:12:11] Cheryl Broom: We saw not only the most clicks, but the most actions taken on landing pages. So practical takeaways from this. Choosing the right channel, super important, but choosing the right channel is not enough. You also need to ask, is your creative authentic? Is it reflecting the student's life and goals? Is it designed for the platform?
[00:12:35] Cheryl Broom: Is it in the right language? And are you allowing enough time and frequency for people to respond? All right. So, wow, so much. I could like talk for another half an hour, but I'm not going to, so if you've, if you've made it this far, we're at the end. Just a couple really high level things that we find in our stop out and do not re return surveys.
[00:12:58] Cheryl Broom: There's a lot of operational barriers. Confusion, registration, limited class availability, inconvenient schedules, lack of responsiveness, too few online options and insufficient support. So beyond just insights around marketing, we consistently see some operational barriers that we encourage our college partners to take a deep dive into.
[00:13:20] Cheryl Broom: We all know that marketing can explain, it, can encourage, it can connect, but it can't fix a schedule that doesn't work or an enrollment experience that does not support the student. So research, support, research, points to three practical lessons. Understand the person behind the audience. Speak to the change that the person is seeking and choose your media and your creative.
[00:13:47] Cheryl Broom: Based on evidence and not assumptions, the strongest college marketing does not begin with the platform. It begins with the person. When we better understand who students are, what they wanna change, and what may stand in their way, we can create marketing that's more relevant, more respectful, and more effective.
[00:14:08] Cheryl Broom: And if the ideas of target transformation and tactic were helpful today, I go deeper in episode 81 where I share the three T's of college marketing. So I encourage you to check that out and you can find that episode wherever you listen to Higher Ed Conversations.