There's "Levels" To Knowing Your Audience

We're pleased to announce that CRI is joining us as a guest author on Glacier's blog. In this post, they'll be sharing their expert insights on a fascinating topic. 

After 600+ market research projects with Canadian universities, you tend to learn a thing or two.

And despite working with over 60 different schools, CRI has yet to find two that draw the same profile of students.

Sounds surprising? Let’s dig in deeper.

For example, at School A, extroverts make up over a third of the entering class while School B attracts a large population of introverts. A third school draws students consumed by anxieties while at another, just 200 km away, many students just want to get their degree without the rah-rah of campus life and clubs.

These aren’t pure hypotheticals either, these are all real cases where CRI has helped schools get a nuanced understanding of who they are really attracting. Armed with that knowledge, you’re able to stop marketing to the mythical “average student” and create true impact with the prospective students you want to connect with most. So, without further ado…

What is psychographic segmentation?

Psychographic segmentation (or psy-seg) is an analytical tool to group your entering students by their shared values, emotions, interests, beliefs and lifestyles.

What can psy-seg offer your institution?

There are three main benefits that psychographic segmentation offers:

A deeper understanding: Having insight into your entering students’ decision-making processes puts your team in a best-case position to craft more impactful strategies and messages.

A competitive advantage: Only schools with a detailed psychographic snapshot of their new students can harness targeted messaging to its fullest potential.

A data-driven path forward: Psy-seg data can guide both recruitment efforts as well as resource allocation for entering students.

How does it all work?

Picture this:

Your school is marketing to a pool of 10 prospective students - each with individual needs, interests and motivations, none of which are apparent or known to you.

A reasonable strategy would be to focus 10% of your marketing resources on each prospect in the hope that you reach those most interested in and most suited to what your school has to offer.

But if you knew from the psychographic profile prepared for your institution that your greatest chance of success was with three of the ten students, then you could focus 33% of your resources targeting the needs and interests of just those three students.

Psychographic segmentation gives you the capacity to direct your resources where they’ll make the most impact. It can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your recruitment spend by letting you tailor messages and tactics to the unconscious and conscious needs, interests, and motivations of the types of students your school is most successful in attracting.

How can I find out more?

Check out CRI's website and get in touch with the CRI team to learn more!