The most straightforward way to describe direct admissions is the school applies to the student.
And then you gotta be sticky. Your marketing, that is. Your content marketing needs to be sticky.
We’re familiar with the idea of sticky content. We spend our work days throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
It’s the guiding force for finding successful social and digital marketing tactics. Post, post, post, look at metrics and lean into what works and what sticks with audiences.
In the world of direct admission, where students have an increased power of choice, the challenge is to not just see what sticks. We need to know what’s stickier than all of the other schools that are offering a college classroom seat to that deserving student who is making the choice.
As Grant Leboff writes in Stickier Marketing, “The old paradigms of marketing, with which we lived for so long, are no longer relevant.” Leboff describes that a sticky marketing strategy can “create competitive advantage in a world where customers seemingly have a plethora of choices and where standing out appears to be increasingly difficult.”
Some students now no longer have to choose where to apply. They choose where to deposit.
They choose which school will have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars added to their bottom lines over the next few years.
Higher education is, after all, a business. A business looking for new ways to make money. Hello, direct admission.
Direct admission has been a thing for about 10 years.
It’s grown over the past decade. A January 2024 story in the New York Times reported that more than 400,000 students have been accepted through a variety of direct admission programs in places all around the United States.
Iowa launched a program in 2015 that automatically enrolled all students from an “approved high school” in the state in up to eight state colleges. This option is only open to students who met a minimum grade point average.
The flow from high school to college for Idaho students was simplified for a post-COVID world.
While Idaho offers comprehensive admission for qualifying high school students, other styles of direct admission include the approach used by Kelley School of Business in Indiana and the Milgard School of Business at the University of Washington. For these programs, high school seniors apply to the school and indicate a declared major or commit to a degree program.
Wait, you say, that sounds a bit like regular admissions. But it is a game-changer for students.
The ‘application’ is a formality. They know that, if they meet the clear guidelines set out in the criteria for admissions, they are guaranteed a path in higher education. All of the stress and cost associated with the 1900s-era romanticized idea of college search, is removed.
No need to spend time or money on college tours, no need to spend mental or emotional energy on waiting for a decision from some office. All of those old ideas about choosing a college are out the window.
The college chose them because they’ve demonstrated they can do the work.
Removing those stressors and obstacles is a move toward achieving higher education’s often-expressed goal of a more equitable and inclusive higher education experience.
“Direct admission had a pronounced impact on certain demographics. Racial minorities, first-generation students, and low-income students exhibited higher propensities to apply when presented with a direct admission offer,” wrote Johannes Helmold in “Colleges Try Direct Admission As a Response to Enrollment Crisis.”
So, the work of the higher education content marketer is changing again. No longer can we get away with student takeovers and day-in-the-life videos. Everyone’s doing those. Those aren’t sticky.
An American Express Business Class blog noted: “Delivering truly sticky content isn’t about bombarding target audiences with messages and promotions, which can turn off potential buyers or lead to diminishing returns the more they’re repeated. It’s about understanding how to accurately gauge how far along your audience is in the customer experience journey so you can deliver content to match.”
Students choosing which direct admission offer to accept are much farther along in the customer experience journey than the ‘prospectives’ we are used to thinking of as our primary audiences. Direct admission students are ready to invest.
The best strategic approach to sticky marketing for these students boils down to one thing, clearly expressed in this February 2024 post from CHRON: “Instead of branding a product, sticky marketing impresses directly upon customers how a business or product can help them. Create every marketing contact with customers to highlight how your company has a discernible value to them, not to hype your best qualities” [emphasis added].
Sticky marketing strategies for direct admission should focus on showing value.
Show the value of their education authentically, regularly, creatively, in unusual ways and with emotional resonance.
Each piece of direct admission marketing content should ideally answer one question: If I choose this offered spot, will this place of higher education connect me to the career I want?
Each piece of content should speak to a return on the student’s investment in their future. Even if they’re getting financial aid to pay for tuition, fees, room and board, there is still considerable emotional and intellectual investment made in pursuing higher education.
It’s difficult to move away from the guaranteed dopamine hit of high like counts on shares of sunset pictures and people reading under 100-year-old trees. Those images are nice, but not sticky. Because for these students, these direct admits, it’s a sense of purpose rather than a sense of place.
This is, after all, Generation Alpha that we’re talking about. Students who are looking for ways to make a difference in the world right away, who feel the crashing waves of the climate crisis on the horizon. They want to make a difference now — to be of value to their communities and the world right now.
For those students who are 16 and 17 years old, your regularly shared content, which demonstrates value in authentic and unusual ways, will stick in their minds over the next few years.
When they receive their direct admission offer, they will be excited to accept their place on your campus, skip the waiting and the worrying, and go right from filling out a form to shopping for their first-day fits.
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