Community colleges can streamline and optimize marketing efforts with AI—as long as they stay aware of its pitfalls
AI has been swiftly making inroads into nearly every industry since even before ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. The remarkable authenticity with which Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact is both incredibly promising, and—when users run up against its limitations—simultaneously disillusioning.
But as AI tools become both more popular and more refined, the distinctions between their opportunities for success and their pitfalls grow clearer. AI excels at absorbing repetitive tasks that require consistency and speed, and at surfacing new ideas from large collections of data. Community college marketing teams are regularly tasked with both, and an intelligently implemented AI can smooth the way, particularly in an era of tightening and uncertain resources.
AI hasn’t yet reached a level of sophistication where it can take over jobs wholesale, but newer iterations of the technology are only growing more powerful, making it strategically important for community colleges to stay ahead of the game. Particularly when incorporated as an assistant and efficiency booster, AI can help community college marketing departments increase their pace, target their efforts optimally, and deliver experiences that leave an impression for prospective students. Here’s how.
Work faster
In a world where community colleges’ marketing departments are increasingly being asked to do more with less, AI offers a convenient pressure valve for certain kinds of work. Large language models can’t replicate human efforts and their output is by no means perfect, but AI can shine when asked to handle repetitive or standardized tasks.
Boilerplate messages that require light personalization can take up a great deal of time, but with supervision from humans, AI can streamline the process of both creating and sending the content. By the same token, AI can help an overworked marketing department satisfy less-intensive requests for content from other teams, and reserve marketing’s focus for higher value work. And because AI engages smoothly with other algorithms, it can provide essential support for quickly assessing the readability and SEO-readiness of marketing content, helping to shorten the time between writing and publication.
AI systems also excel at automation. In an environment where contacting a prospective student first can make all the difference in earning their enrollment, marketers can leverage AI to speed communications. Intelligent systems can automate the process of sending emails, texts, and social media messages, reply to prospective students with standardized copy, or generate suggested first drafts for marketers to edit.
Practical tips:
- Develop templates for repeat tasks, and use AI to fill them in.
- Ask AI to recommend appropriate hashtags for social media.
- Learn faster by using AI to turn complex information into more consumable content. E.g., feed your AI a research document and ask it to turn it into a 15-minute podcast.
Work smarter
The core purpose and competency of AI systems is to ingest large datasets and surface patterns. For community colleges, this means that AI can examine historical information, from enrollment rates to marketing campaign results, and unearth surprising insights.
Analyzing KPIs from previous marketing efforts can help colleges narrow down what’s working and what isn’t: whether messaging about a particular career path is boosting engagement, for example, or social media posts about job fairs are bringing people to campus. With this information, marketing teams can optimize their spending and focus in on the strategies that will drive enrollment.
Moreover, historical student data like fields of study, internship participation, or transfer rates to four-year institutions can reveal links and trends that will help colleges speak to prospective students’ evolving needs. If one career pathway shows particular success or growing popularity, colleges can choose to emphasize it in marketing materials, or pursue relationships with employers in the field.
AI also aids in sentiment analysis, “listening” to public comments like reviews and social media posts in order to distill prevailing opinions that can guide marketing campaigns. And when it comes time to add paid advertising to the conversation, AI can help marketers optimize their messaging, timing, and channels to make the best use of existing advertising algorithms.
Practical tips:
- Keep track of useful prompts! For example, telling your AI to “keep answers concise and avoid repetition” will cut down on AI-fueled information-dumps.
- Curate high-value documents to guide your AI responses. For example, upload a file of your course catalogue and direct your AI to use it as a primary source. Some AI programs limit the reference materials their AI are allowed to use to only those supplied by the user so as to limit the risk of AI hallucinations.
- If you’re conducting researching, use AI to gather sources and then ask it to grade each source’s value and credibility. You will be able to assess for yourself as you read through the documents it provides whether it chose well.
Deliver better service
Today’s prospective students are of a generation that has grown to expect robust self-service options, including chatbots. What this means for community colleges is that virtual agents can offer a significant boost, both to the productivity of human staff and the customer experience for students with questions.
Virtual agents are available at any hour, and can be trained on college-specific information as well as broadly relevant information for US college students. Chatbots can answer frequently asked questions about enrollment or student life, and guide students through essential paperwork like FAFSA. In fact, chatbots can go a long way toward lowering the barriers to enrollment for prospective students by informing them about available resources that are frequently underutilized.
As a content tool, AI can help marketers craft and deliver personalized outreach that directly addresses prospective students’ needs and interests. Drawing from communication history, demographic information, and other context, AI tools can generate talking points or message drafts geared toward individual prospects, saving marketers time while opening the door to one-on-one relationships.
…But exercise caution
While AI tools can deliver wins for community colleges, especially in a moment of financial uncertainty, they are far from infallible. Problems arise when AI’s scope grows beyond the tasks that it consistently succeeds at, and when users exercise too little review over the tools’ output. Questions about evolving AI technology can also create hesitation among consumers who worry about its accuracy or the security of their personal data.
To be a facilitator and not a hindrance, AI should serve as a copilot for skilled human marketers, rather than sitting in the driver’s seat itself. Any content it generates should be thoroughly reviewed—both for accuracy, and to ensure that it doesn’t perpetuate any biases present in its training data (something that could be especially relevant for the prospective students of community colleges, who are more likely to be part of marginalized populations).
Practical tips:
- DON’T copy/paste AI answers uncritically. AI is known to invent or “hallucinate” answers, and can be misled by poor quality information on the Internet.
- DON’T trust AI with high-value messaging. People connect with people.
- DON’T let AI create new barriers between students and administrators. AI relieving workloads by dealing with low-hanging fruit is good, but AI can’t stand in for knowledgeable, experienced administrators who are crucial for handling the unique needs and concerns of students.
When community colleges find their ideal students, the results change lives. Aperture can help.
AI can be a significant help for a strained marketing team—but a poor AI strategy risks being worse than none at all. When considering an AI implementation, colleges should be sure to thoroughly define their use case and develop a detailed roadmap. In the end, human connection is what will drive meaningful relationships between colleges and students. AI should serve to enable it, rather than replace it.
When it comes to generating meaningful content—the kind that will connect with prospective students and lower barriers to enrollment—human writers play an essential role, and likely always will. Yet for marketing departments that are already stretched thin, the burden of creating high-quality content is often still beyond their reach.
This is where we come in. At Aperture Content Marketing, we offer colleges a rich library of marketing materials backed by deep research and crafted to drive engagement. We excel at the kind of content creation that can sometimes lead AI astray: information-driven materials backed by credible sources and vetted by a team of content experts with a history of work in the community college sector. Colleges can use material as-is or customize it for their institution to bolster modern, multichannel marketing campaigns.
To learn more about Aperture’s offerings and see firsthand how they can enhance your marketing strategy, contact us today.