PS&L Blog

In my last post about the big 3 – social media, mobile platforms and buying local – I focused on social marketing and in particular the power of Facebook for higher education marketing.

For this post I want to talk about mobile and how that will impact colleges and universities in 2011.

Let’s start with some facts.

There are 350 to 400-million cell phones in the US and that number is growing exponentially.  According to the cell phone industry trade press by the end of 2011 half of all cell phones will be smart. Add to this the fact that every two years most families buy a new set of phones. It’s not inconceivable to think that in 2-3 years almost all of your younger prospects will be reachable through their Smart phones. Even more immediate is the fact that already many of your non-traditional prospects are accessing your websites through their Blackberries, iPhones or Droids.

This is important for the college recruiters to know because more and more people will be accessing your websites through their mobile devices. If first impressions or usability of a school’s website were not critical, then this might not be such an issue. But consider this fact from a NRCCUA 2010 e-Expectations survey: 16% of prospects will drop you from their list and more than three quarters of them will be disappointed if they are not satisfied with your web presence and don’t find what they need.

If you don’t offer a website that reads well in a mobile platform, it will start working against you rather than for you. I am not suggesting that you sub-optimize your current website to make it read better on the smaller smartphone screens. Instead build a separate mobile site that focuses on key areas of your website.

When creating your mobile site, here are four critical considerations you need to follow:

• Use your web statistics to find out what most of your potential students are trying to accomplish when they visit your existing website. Then optimize your mobile site to support those pages.
• Keep your graphics to a minimum. For mobile users, information is king.
• Maintain your brand identity. If they are interested in your college, they will eventually look at your website on a computer. You don’t want there to be a disconnect between your mobile site and regular website.
• Prepare for multiple platforms. Because change is constant in this growing market, you need to use a mobile platform delivery service that can work on any device whether it be an iPhone, Droid, Blackberry on the next big thing.

Apps are becoming a bigger and bigger piece of the Smart market, and colleges and universities should consider how an app might benefit them. If you can’t afford to build your own, you should consider finding those apps that have a broad appeal to your target prospects and advertise on them.

But at this juncture, the first step is to create a mobile site. It’s easily doable.

In my next blog post, I’ll be talking about how you can apply the buy local principles to your college recruiting.