Attracting international student applications to a university website: The role of story-based content and gender in improving stickiness
Mario Cassar and
Albert Caruana
Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 2023, vol. 33, issue 1, 79-96
Abstract:
Universities websites have become a recruitment tool that is popular with students. Recruitment pages often seek to demonstrate the benefits of studying at the institution by adopting an objective approach that makes use of textual content that emphasises facts and data. Story-based text consisting of alumni experiences of a programme of studies represent an alternative textual approach to argument based content that can put across a personal view of experiences. The research proposes hypotheses about the impact of these two types of content on website stickiness and the role of gender, using an experimental methodology. We use Facebook ads over 24 days to recruit participants and to collect gender and stickiness metrics using Google Analytics. Analyses show stronger stickiness results for story-based content and differences between the two types of content by gender. The results support narrative paradigm theory that suggests that story basedcommunication is more effective than argument-based communication. The results suggest the usefulness of story-based content supported by online ads to attract international student applications. The findings provide a solution to student recruiters at tertiary institutions who often struggle to identify the themes and type of content that prospective students find engaging.
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08841241.2021.1892898 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jmkthe:v:33:y:2023:i:1:p:79-96
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/WMHE20
DOI: 10.1080/08841241.2021.1892898
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Marketing for Higher Education is currently edited by Dr Jane Hemsley-Brown, Anthony Lowrie and Dr. Thomas Hayes
More articles in Journal of Marketing for Higher Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().