Dear College President,

Your 15-17 year-old prospects are much smarter about what they read. To them, platitudes and “we’re the best” just don’t cut it any longer, and marketing-speak is simply so much noise to be skipped over. Content is more important than ever, and more than ever institutions need to segment by age and income demographics.

For an older group of adult students, such as parents of students, clever ads with a lot of repetition may still work. Yet while it’s true that parents have enormous influence in the selection of colleges and universities, students don’t ask their parents about colleges that they don’t feel good about.

Your youngest prospects, who cut their teeth on Internet searches and learned early how to separate wheat from chaff, have learned to filter traditional marketing messages and regard most advertising with a degree of skepticism. Authentic facts sell to this group, and an examination of how you present your institution and its programs is needed, and needed now.

You can’t write to 15-17 year-olds as if they are adults, but you shouldn’t try to use their buzzwords and talk either. Colleges have often tried to write as they imagine 15-17 year-olds talk, with mixed results. As one Boston teenager told me recently, “It looks like an old white guy trying to be hip.”

Your institution is the place where these teenagers will transition from child to adult. Your marketing materials to them should match this aspiration: they should be written just a little ahead of them, showing glimpses of the maturity these students hope to achieve at your institution. Many colleges have begun working with students at earlier and earlier ages, and the key to doing this effectively is to engage those students in academic planning for their future. Help the student create a vision of an interesting (and fun) future at your college and you are much closer to both enrolling and one day graduating that student.

The key to success is consistent communication, both written and verbal. Colleges are constantly communicating with teenage prospects, through website content, publications, letters, email and reviews. Every time one of your faculty, or staff, or a current student, talks with a prospect, this becomes part of that prospect’s perception of your institution. Too often, these various communications bear little resemblance to one another, making a murky soup of conflicting facts and opinions about your college or university.

When considering the effectiveness of your marketing, don’t forget your on-campus communications. Effective communications begin from the bottom up. Work with your faculty to gain buy-in for your mission and basic marketing messages, keep staff and students up to date on marketing efforts.

Make sure that your internal messages about your campus match the theme of your external marketing messages, or it is only a matter of time before savvy teen-aged prospects will discover disconnects between on-campus and off-campus communications. It’s simply too easy to surf through your website and notice that the admissions pages and the department pages say very different things. A quick search engine query can uncover writing by your students and faculty.

Think of your marketing communications as the cover of a book. If the cover reads “100 Fun Trips to Spain” in bright colors with snappy graphics, but the contents are an engaging Spanish language textbook, your message loses its authenticity. No matter how good the cover or the contents, you have lost the opportunity to effectively communicate about either topic.

That’s how college marketing gets a bad name.

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