CASE Conference - Stamats - Teen Talk 2007 Survey
One of the first presentations here at the CASE Conference on Communications, Marketing, and Technology in San Diego brought up a few points which I was not aware of. Stamats conducts an annual survey of prospective students called Teens Talk.
Yesterday’s seminar (presented by Fritz McDonald) involved a recap of the 2007 results. Here are just a couple of point I found very interesting:
84 % of the surveyed juniors, sophomores, and seniors are looking at universities within 4 hours of home.
Universities should consider very strongly expenditures on a national level. Especially if their brand is not already strong locally and regionally. You cannot leapfrog your local area and expect to be successful nationally. Add to that the results of this survey and it further solidifies the opinion that national expenditures may not yield much in ROI.
When asked to identify items that were very helpful in the college selection process, the students in the survey identified the visit and oddly enough, the course catalog.
They also asked them what they are doing on college websites. The majority said that they would read current student profiles, faculty blogs, live journals, and view virtual tours if they were available.
The theory here is that the course catalog is real. Its not marketing speak, its not fabricated with lush images and sales-like text. This echos the fact that these students grew up with reality TV, online communities, blogs, and all the other much less filtered views of information and he world.
When asked what features they liked most in college websites. The number one answer was a description of programs/majors followed by pictures of dorms, classrooms, activities.
We need to make sure that these items are at the forefront.
Another point that needs to be hammered into our skulls is this one which I am sure you have seen before:
85% of online traffic is inititated from a search engine.
These visitors are not coming in through the front door (your home page). They search there way in. This will lead me into my next post concerning the use of 3rd party online networks and making sure that your institution or company is using them.
