Five Awareness Stages That Help Recruit Prospective Students

There comes a time when every student enters that stage in life where they decide on a college or university. However, not all students are at the exact same stage. It sounds confusing, but according to Author and Copywriter Eugene M. Schwartz prospective students can fall into one of five stages of awareness.

What are the five stages of awareness?

The five stages refer to the degree to which your prospect knows about their own pain point, general solutions, your product, and your products ability to solve their problem.

More specifically, these students can fall under the categories of unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware and who are the most aware. What stage they’re in largely depends on their stage in life, which we’ll touch on a bit later.

Why are these important?

Because they effect every student. From college graduates to those as far back as middle school. While that seems like a broad scope, you’ll learn how to break it down and see how understanding these five awareness stages make it easier to know what students you’re trying to reach and how to reach them.

The Stages

To know how to talk to students, you need to know where they’re at. That gets easier when you can identify what stage they are in. The five stages are:

Unaware Students

These are students who are either not considering school or haven’t even heard of your college or university.

Problem Aware Students

These are students who are familiar with college but aren’t sure it’s for them. They might even consider a tech school.

Solution Aware Students

They’ve decided they are going to college but are looking for general options – they haven’t landed on any favorites.

Product Aware Students

They’re comparing schools. They’ve most likely visited a few, researched scholarship and aid options, and even reviews some programs. They’re looking for something that stands out.

Most Aware Students

Students who’ve had your school in mind since freshman year of high school or even earlier.

Now that you know the stages, the next step in utilizing this is to account for the various prospective student types.

The ones that might instantly come to mind are potential students that are still in high school or graduate students. Some that are not-so-obvious might be transfer students or international students – or even students that currently attend your university. Let’s break it down.

Appealing to the Right Audience

The primary audience for college recruitment campaigns are juniors and seniors in high school. Because this is wildly understood by almost every college and university, competition for this audience can be a challenge. Targeting this audience requires communicating valuable information. Since these students are actively searching for options, they’re hyper-aware of value – more accurately, what they consider to be value in a school.

However, it’s not late high school students that should be your sole focus. Research tells us that the recruitment age for high school students begins earlier in their high school career. By the time a student is in their late freshman or early sophomore year, they’ve already begun contemplating their college options.

Typically, between the ages of 14 and 16, this audience spends a significant amount of time online. Their main platforms include social media, streaming video, and streaming radio.

In addition to potential students coming out of high school, also take into consideration transfer students. A little older than high schoolers, these students’ range between the ages of 18 and 25. Their main concern is finding where they “fit in” as their current school isn’t cutting it.

That then takes us to transfer students; this audience can include a wide range of individuals ranging anywhere from potential students seeking college options to older students looking to transfer to the state or seeking graduate opportunities. This audience will look similar to the transfer audience, ages 18 to 15. It all depends on what specific demographics your school wants to target.

Finally, consider the students that have just graduated and are interested in pursuing a graduate degree. Like the junior and senior audience, the graduate students are focused on education solutions and comparing their options. They want to find the right programs and are concerned with program efficiency. This group requires a more direct approach.

Approaching Your Audiences

Now that we have an idea of who is out there, it’s time to assess what approach you need to take when communication with prospective students.

We’ve put together a few examples using our client South Dakota State University.

You can see that we’re targeting potential students – namely freshmen and sophomores. For the most part, it’s safe to say that a fair amount of them aren’t thinking about college yet, hence we classify them as the “unaware” students. So, in response, our messaging tactic needs to be more of an introduction to college: “Nice to meet you.” “Come learn about the Jackrabbits.” “This is SDSU.”

That mentality differs greatly to high school students who are on their way out:

While some might still not be aware, there’s plenty who have already began thinking about their potential college. However, some might be wondering if it’s even for them – they might question the value of a 4-year-degree. That’s where messaging that highlights the importance of a degree can help sway the skeptical student.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, they may have grown up in a family that celebrates Jackrabbit pride and are already dead set on that as their school. So, for messaging, you wouldn’t have to do much besides open the door.

For a transfer student, they’ve already been in school, but not their ideal one. Acknowledging their problem, let’s say it’s “fitting in,” and highlighting that can move them into the solution stage. Offering them more of what they want, “easy transfer,” “quality academics,” messaging will appeal to them more.

Now, in the case for international students, they might even fall further back in the stages – some might be completely unaware of your school. But they’re similar to transfer in a sense that you might need to market solutions to their problems.

Finally, graduate students aren’t unaware of college, and they’ve figured out a majority of their problems. In this stage, they’re looking for a solution to earning their graduate degree. They’re more focused on asking questions like, “Which school has a great program?” “Which one offers online and in-person courses?”

Having searched before, chances are they’re already compared options and are most aware of what’s out there.

The stage of life doesn’t always guarantee what stage you’ll be at in searching for a future education. However, being aware of what stages exist and how each audience fits, will help set the stage for you to better communicate with the prospective students you’re trying to reach.