5 Examples of Effective Higher Ed Brands and Why They Work

Your brand is at the heart of all your efforts as a marketer. Ideally, it helps you craft your messaging, identify your audience, and steers you toward certain strategies and approaches and away from others.

But what does it take to have an effective brand in the first place?

We’ll approach that question by looking at five examples of higher ed brands that are doing something right. Each illustrates a distinct component of an effective brand.

Let’s take a look.

The above screenshot is the hero section of their site. The headline defines the gist of the school very simply while the subheader gives us a bit more detail about what that means. Essentially, this is a school that is oriented around meeting the audience’s needs and making a degree easy to get.

Scroll down the page and you’ll see this theme reinforced throughout in the way they let you look for programs, the features they highlight, and the alumni stories they tell.

The attribute I want to highlight here?

It’s clear.

When a school has an effective brand, you know right away what it is and what it means.

In a time when attention spans grow ever shorter and skimming is the primary way web content is consumed, presenting your message with clarity is key to engaging your audience quickly and helping them decide whether they want to explore further.

I don’t know about you, but that gets my attention. Scrolling down, the page tries to back up this claim with lots of data. We see a set of rankings, like number 2 in the list of best alumni networks and number 3 in best internship opportunities. Four comparatives expand on the idea: We learn more, we earn more, we lead more, and we play more.

What do I notice about this brand? It’s compelling. In other words, the promise the brand is communicating is something lots of people naturally care about. They are saying, essentially, “This is a great place that produces great outcomes in the areas that matter.”

The lesson for your brand? Give people a reason to care. Talking about outcomes can make this concrete.

This Christian college of about 5,000 students in High Point, North Carolina bills itself as “The Premier Life Skills University.” To call yourself the “premier” anything is usually tough to pull off convincingly. In this case, however, you don’t see many schools emphasizing this idea of life skills. Job skills, yes. But they mean something a bit different.

What their brand is doing effectively here is identifying something distinctive about their institution. When I talk to schools about their brand I always want to know what it is that makes them unique. People often think first of things like small class sizes, caring community, job-focused programs, etc.

But these are things many schools could talk about.

When it comes to your brand, you want to zero in on those things that truly set you apart from others in your peer group.

What’s the virtue this brand exhibits? It’s creative. It’s different from what you are used to seeing in higher ed marketing and is effective in at least getting the audience to wonder if there isn’t more to the University of Wyoming than they may have guessed.

It’s tempting, when thinking about your brand, to work from your audience back to your school. What I mean is this: you start with figuring out what the audience wants and then create a brand you think will appeal to them.

To a certain extent, this feels unavoidable. You do need to at least consider how you will communicate who you are and which features of your identity you should emphasize given the students you hope to attract.

And yet, though your brand can and should evolve in this way, it is vital that it stays firmly rooted in the reality of who your institution is. Otherwise, you’re marketing a product that doesn’t exist — and you’ll wind up with lots of unhappy students who fell prey to a bait-and-switch.

The school began in the 1970s as a graduate program in psychology that bucked the current trends in established academic institutions both in terms of its curriculum and its format. It offered a form of distance education long before many others because the founders were committed to bringing about social change by making education more accessible to those who traditionally weren’t able to take advantage of it.

This same ethos shows up in their messaging and their practice today. Look at the text from the homepage above:

What do I see here? Authenticity. This isn’t a branding campaign they thought up in response to the current trendiness of themes like social justice. This is who they’ve always been. It runs deep.

As we noted at the outset, your brand is foundational. If you want to make sure it is doing all it can for you, use the examples we’ve looked at here for inspiration and take a careful look at your own brand. Is it:

If not, maybe now is a great time to think about how you might strengthen it in one or more of these areas.

In this popular resource from Caylor Solutions, you’ll get…

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