The goal of collegiate recruitment marketing is to build affinity and share important information with the goal of the student committing to the college. There are numerous strategies used during this process to achieve this desired outcome. One of the most powerful ways to have impactful engagements is to create experiences that make students laugh, get excited and pull at their emotions. And unexpected experiences that do this are gold. Pets in Recruitment Marketing

Through this lens, I strongly believe that integrating pets into recruitment marketing can be a powerful tactic. More and more families are adding pets to their families and emotional ties are as strong as ever. A recent Forbes article shared that 66% of households have a pet, up from 56% in 1988. The article also stated that 51% of the families considered their pet to be as much of their family as a human family member.  

Leverage this love of pets and their increased popularity to create unexpected excitement and long-lasting engagements when recruiting students. Choosing a college is an extremely stressful period for students (and their parents) as they make this huge decision. Connecting through pets to provide levity, build affinity and reach students offers unique and powerful opportunities. For example, pet integrations provide easy opportunities to create shareable social media moments (as we saw with Cornell University’s campaign). 

To fully take advantage of pet integration strategies, branded pet merch should be a main component of the roll out. There are a number of ways for pet-related merch to be integrated into the recruitment process. Two examples include incentivizing action and creating surprise and delight moments. 

Incentivizing Action – Use students’ pets in a campaign to excite and incentivize students to take an action. For example, develop a marketing campaign during yield season that asks students to fill out a form to receive a “special gift” for their pet. And of course, tie this campaign around upcoming events and other actions that you are looking for the student to do at this time. Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science successfully implemented this strategy by engaging admitted students with branded pet merch. Their campaign asked students to share details about their pets, then mailed out a branded pet bandana to encourage students to further engage with the university and to sign up for an upcoming admitted student day.   

Surprise and Delight Moments – Use the CRM (Slate or others) to collect data through the application process (type of pets and their names) to roll out a targeted campaign to these students that create unexpected and fun emotional responses. For example, create a campaign where three weeks post admittance the student’s pet receives a mailer to their attention that includes branded merch. The experience can include messaging from the college’s official or unofficial mascot. As an idea, George Washington University can use their fun official mascot  (learn why it is a hippo here) to send messaging to the student’s pet, something like “I promise not to eat your friend when they put their head in my mouth for good luck this fall. Keep your friend top of mind by using this pet bowl daily when they are here with me at GW.” To make this CRM integration easy, use a service like this to fulfill this tactic.  

While not everyone has a pet, this is ok. Use this as an opportunity to create engagement with those who will appreciate it. It is a low-cost and high-impact strategy that will resonate with the target audience.  

Pets are too popular and close to the hearts of the students to not use as part of the recruitment process. Use them to create levity, affinity and long-lasting moments!