Students seeking higher education are not short on options.
Whether it’s their local schools nearby or national colleges and universities, students have a variety of choices on where to continue their education.
If you work in higher education marketing, your leadership is probably asking:
Sound familiar?
From our experience with higher education market research, brand awareness studies our clients answer these critical questions. A brand awareness and equity study can highlight critical insights to provide facts and data to guide your operations, marketing, and strategy.
In the context of higher education, brand awareness is more than just a potential student recognizing your logo or name. It is the level of familiarity and association a student, parent, or counselor has with your institution. We typically categorize this into two buckets: aided and unaided awareness.
Unaided awareness (or “top-of-mind” awareness) is when a person can name your school without any prompts when asked about colleges in a specific region or field of study.
Aided awareness is when they recognize your name from a list. When we conduct brand equity studies, we look at where your school sits in this hierarchy.
For example, a local community college might have high aided awareness but struggle with top-of-mind preference compared to a larger state university.
Recommended Reading: What is Unaided and Aided Awareness in Market Research?
Think of brand awareness as the foundation of your enrollment funnel. You cannot convert a student who doesn’t know you exist. However, the impact goes deeper than just visibility. High brand awareness often correlates with perceived quality and trust.
When a brand is well-known and respected, the “cost per lead” typically drops because potential students already have a baseline level of trust.
In our experience, schools that invest in consistent brand-building see more resilient enrollment numbers, even when the “enrollment cliff” or economic shifts impact the broader market.
Check out this case study: Higher Education Rebranding Survey
Growing your brand requires a mix of data-driven strategy and creative execution. It isn’t just about being “louder” than everyone else; it’s about being more relevant.
We recommend starting with a brand perception survey to understand your school’s current associations in the market.
Once you know your current baseline, you can tailor your messaging to bridge the gap between how you are perceived and how you want to be perceived.
To grow awareness, you have to play at the “top of the funnel.” This means reaching people before they are even thinking about applying.
One effective strategy is community engagement and “non-branded” content. For example, if your university has a strong environmental science program, hosting public webinars on local climate issues can build awareness with high school students interested in that field.
By the time they start their college search, your name is already associated with expertise and community value.
Social media is no longer just a place to post campus photos. It is a search engine for Gen Z. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are where potential students go to see the “real” version of your school.
When we work with higher ed brands, we often recommend leaning into student-led content. This “user-generated content” (UGC) feels more authentic and is shared more widely than polished, corporate-style videos.
Building a narrative via engaging videos is important as a study by Wyzowl found that 82% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Higher ed institutions and students are no exception.
While organic social media builds community, paid channels provide the reach.
For brand awareness, we recommend “display” and “social” ads that focus on storytelling rather than just “Apply Now” buttons.
Email also plays a role, but it should be segmented. If you bought a list of prospective names, don’t start with a hard sell. Start with an invitation to learn more about a topic they care about. In our experience, “educational” emails that offer value, such as tips for writing a college essay, build much more brand affinity than generic recruitment emails.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The most reliable way to track brand awareness is to run a consistent, repeatable survey program that gives you a true baseline and trend line over time.
Brand awareness surveys are designed to measure awareness, perception, and brand equity, so you can tie marketing activity back to real movement in the market.
When we run higher ed brand trackers, we start by defining the target audience (prospective students, parents, counselors, or a mix), the geographic footprint you care about, and the competitor set you want to benchmark against. From there, we build a “core” set of questions that stays the same each wave so results are comparable year over year.
To capture true top-of-mind awareness, we ask for unaided awareness first, before showing any lists (for example, “When you think of colleges in [region/field], which come to mind first?”).
Then we measure aided awareness by presenting a list of institutions and asking which names respondents recognize. This gives you a clear view of both spontaneous recall and recognition.
Awareness alone tells you “how known” you are. We pair it with brand perception questions to understand what your institution is known for, and whether those associations are helping or hurting consideration.
Brand awareness surveys are often used to assess perception and brand equity alongside awareness, so you can see how the story behind the name is changing over time.
If leadership is pushing for ROI proof, we add questions that connect awareness movement to marketing activity, such as where respondents recall seeing your institution (social, search, streaming, out-of-home, email, events) and what messages they remember.
This is also where you can check whether a campaign is building awareness in a new region or segment.
To keep the data clean, we use a two-stage fieldwork approach (a soft launch followed by a full launch) and continue running quality checks throughout fielding. Our clients can also monitor responses in real time through a live reporting portal while fieldwork is underway.
We typically recommend an annual or bi-annual tracker for most institutions, then add extra waves around major marketing pushes when needed.
Many organizations run one wave as a benchmark, then repeat the survey post-campaign (and sometimes mid-campaign) to quantify lift in awareness and perception.
This creates the “facts” leadership needs to make confident decisions about where to keep investing, what to change, and what to stop.ach.
Drive Research is a global market research firm that helps higher education institutions across the country turn data into growth. We specialize in brand equity, competitor analysis, and student journey mapping to help you win the recruitment race.
Interested in learning more about our market research services? Reach out today.
