There are a number of reasons why universities and colleges try to recruit the best students or the most talented students.

My concern is not why, but how to recruit them.

There are many techniques that works when it comes to get students to enroll, but there are at least four techniques that I believe to work when it comes to recruiting the best students.

The best students have more options than the ordinary students, and I believe that talented people are more critical and that they use more logical reasoning when they decide where to enroll.

As I'm writing this, we're developing the marketing strategy for the college where I am working. Since our budget is limited, we can't really compete with the universities and some of the larger colleges when it comes to resources. We have to do things a little different.

We are competing with the big players and in one way or the other, we're closing the gap and building our brand - the right way.

We're listening

Here's a short story for you.

A few days ago, I was attending a meeting at the college where I work. All the deans were attending, and we were talking about marketing. One of the them said something like, "we don't have to focus on marketing, because everybody is satisfied with the quality of our website. All the information to new and potential students are at our website, so why use resources on marketing?"

Now, I have to give you my reply.

The College where I work is not using Facebook Pages to attract new students. The reason that we're not, is because we don't have a strategy when it comes to using social marketing. Hopefully, that's about to change soon.

At the moment, I'm reviewing last years marketing campaign for our college. I'm considering what we thought of as success, and what was not a success. Most likely, we'll continue with some of the advertisements, but with a different message.

What we're looking for is a campaign that will focus on two levels.

The first level is the people that have decided to attend a college or a university. We'll try to get their attention, and we'll tell them that our college is the best choice.

I am assisting four students with their paper/dissertation this semester, and I will be assisting them when it comes to writing their press releases as well.

I believe that when it comes to press releases, for the region we live in, there are two main goals that we need to focus on.

The first goal might be specific to the fact that we live in Norway, and a certain region of Norway. I am not really sure though, it might be fairly similar in the US and other countries as well.

Every business should have a branding model, even small ones, and especially large ones like the college where I work. At the moment, I don't think that we have a branding model. Therefore, what I'll be doing during the next months is to try to figure out how our college should be branding our services.

What is a Branding Model?

I have just been contacted by our computer science department, and they are looking for a way to attract students from India and China to our college in Norway. They didn't say why they wanted to focus on those two countries, and not some other countries in Asia or any other country for that matter.

We are having a major challenge at our college. I am not sure if our staff feel it's a challenge at all, but that's how I feel about it.

Let me give you a few examples:

Email

When trying to create a marketing strategy for a large organization like the college where I work, you need to think about a lot more than marketing. Let me give you a quick example. I have about 450 colleagues, and when creating the marketing strategy, some of us gather to do some brainstorming and discuss possible approaches. Yesterday, six of us had a chat about a new catalogue. We have one goal with this catalogue, and that's to get people to visit our websites, because our websites are really the main catalogue.