When it comes to marketing on a college campus, different departments can find themselves in some…let’s just say…uncomfortable alliances. They’re all doing the same thing: telling a powerful story that benefits a university and its students. But the ways they’re run, measured, evaluated, and credited can be vastly different. 

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These various marketing branches usually fall into two big buckets: brand marketing and enrollment marketing.  Today we’ll focus on some of the best practices to strengthen the alliance between brand and enrollment to build the most cohesive student experience possible.

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The differences between brand marketing and enrollment marketing

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If you’re here, you’re probably pretty well acquainted with this distinction, but, just in case, we’ll give you the Cliffs Notes.

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Brand marketing for schools is a broader, more inbound marketing motion that focuses on building an identity for a school. The brand marketing department establishes overall institutional messaging and imagery, then works with the public relations team to create and distribute story-driven content about a school’s various populations, initiatives, and successes. Brand marketing and PR go hand-in-hand to the point that sometimes they function within a single team.

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A brand marketer’s efforts are measured by awareness and engagement metrics–social impressions, interactions, share of voice, message pull-through, social proof/listening, web traffic to homepage–that signify a school’s messaging is pervasive and sticky.

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Enrollment marketing is responsible for turning that overall awareness, reach, and general brand affinity into, well, butts in seats. That means an outbound approach with granular, program-specific storytelling. Highly targeted digital ads, Google ads, direct email, even name-buys, are usually trademarks of this attempt to get in direct contact with the right students.

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Creating a seamless higher education marketing experience

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On the surface, this seems like it should be an easy win. You’re on the same campus, you want the same things. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that easy. Here are some rules of thumb to build an amicable relationship between these two teams.

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Know what other people at your university are creating

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Good marketers work hard; great marketers leverage their networks to work hard for them. As a good enrollment marketer, you’ve probably pioneered an SEO strategy, optimized your website journey (if you get to handle that piece), created some awesome program videos, and built interesting email campaigns. 

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But, if you’re anything like me when I was starting out on the job, you didn’t look past the content you were producing. 

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Here’s the great news: Lots of others–including your brand marketing and PR teams–are building great content about your school on their own. And all of those pieces get eyeballs, and all of those eyeballs could drive toward enrollment.

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For instance, brand marketers usually take care of most social channels, and with GenZ, those have never been more important. 96% of Gen Zers have a Youtube account, 61% are on Instagram daily, and many of them are extreme TikTok users. If you aren’t using their content you are missing out on the most curious traffic from those channels. That’s a big miss.

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If one of your students does something remarkable, if a faculty member produces field-altering research, or if a massive university-wide event is coming up, it’s an opportunity to interact with organically interested prospective students. 

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Leverage that content intelligently

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This isn’t just an effective marketing motion, it’s also cost-effective. We’ve all seen the statistic that schools spend $429-$623 per enrolled student, but that stat was from...wait for it…2019! That number has gone way up with the pandemic and the coming enrollment cliff. In 2023, universities are on track to spend, collectively, 3 billion dollars on advertising. That’s up 50% from 2022. 

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Yet your most curious prospects are likely interacting with you on free channels with content that someone else at your university might already be producing. Turning that content into a more effective conversion platform is an efficient use of resources in an industry where spending is getting out of hand.

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To build this motion, work with your web, social media, and PR teams to create website modules, personalized interactions, and CTAs that prompt more engagement through those content pieces. 

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These don’t have to be hard “Apply Now” buttons (in fact, they usually shouldn’t be). Instead, include complementary video and blog content that prospects might want to peruse. Then link these to other content paths that reward their curiosity. 

Specific CTAs can also show curious prospects how to participate in university events and contact current students and faculty. And If your content is on social media, drive traffic to pages where students can take action and explore more.

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There are even tools that help you easily personalize these types of experiences. Halda, for instance, creates an engagement layer that can live on specific URLs and change the interactions based on where students are coming from. That way you can segment the communication for your audience, better measure the ROI from your various campaigns, and convert your traffic more efficiently.

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The fact is, silos are for grain farmers, not marketing teams. So let others share in creating the best student experience.

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Keep messaging coherent

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Threaded through every piece of school communication, from everyone on campus, should be a consistent message about who your institution is and what it values. If your school focuses on building a great community, then that should be evident in every interaction. If it’s all about investing in the student experience, then that needs to be top-of-mind for everyone.

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Too often a school’s brand will claim to be something, only to have that message break down when students are interacting with real people. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a nurturing, helpful enrollment management team let down when they try to connect prospects with the actual programs they’re recruiting for. 

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This doesn’t mean that all the phrasing has to be the same–obviously enrollment marketers will need more pointed messaging with display ads for a specific program. But make sure that those targeted digital marketing and email campaigns reflect the same themes that your brand marketing team is doubling down on.

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Getting everyone on the same messaging page makes them feel part of the same team. It’s a huge win for school culture. It also means the student never sees any cracks in your rhetorical armor.

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Know your ROI

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I know talking numbers isn’t anyone’s favorite thing, but the only way to evaluate the union of your brand and enrollment marketing activities is to look at full-funnel results. If you can’t see where your applications and enrollments come from, you can’t make informed decisions on which of your activities paid off. 

It’s just living that old marketing adage all over again “50% of your marketing budget is working, we just don’t know which 50%.”

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That’s not a world you want to live in anymore. Fortunately, there are tools that track your interactions from the first touch all the way through to enrollment. Halda, for instance, connects your various marketing touches with down-funnel success, so you can see the full effectiveness of each campaign.

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If this is something you’d be interested in learning more about, sign up for our newsletter, book a meeting, or simply keep reading!