Editor’s note: The following article draws on a discussion from the webinar titled “From Brand to Experience: The New Rules of Higher Education Marketing.” Rather than serving as a transcript of the session, this article synthesizes the key themes, perspectives and ideas the conversation explored. To watch the full webinar, click here.
For years, higher education marketing has had a relatively clear job description: build awareness, strengthen the institution’s brand and help bring prospective students through the door. Those responsibilities have not disappeared, but the way students experience an institution has changed the job considerably.
A student might first encounter a university through an advertisement or social media post, then visit its website, speak with an admissions counselor, apply for financial aid, register for classes and eventually interact with faculty and staff. Internally, those experiences may belong to completely different departments. To the student, they are all part of the same relationship with the institution.
That creates a challenge for marketing leaders. A strong brand is no longer simply about having the right message or visual identity. It is about whether the institution consistently delivers on the promise it makes.
Students Do Not See the Organizational Chart
Higher education tends to organize work around departments and areas of responsibility. Admissions owns one process, financial aid owns another, marketing manages communications and academic affairs manages programs. Those distinctions make sense internally, but they are largely invisible to students.
During the webinar, Elena Jackson, vice president of enrollment management, marketing and communications, described a shift in how her institution approaches this problem. Instead of asking who owns a particular issue, teams increasingly ask what the student is trying to accomplish and how the institution can help them get there.
That change in perspective can expose problems that are easy to overlook. An institution might describe itself as caring and student-centered while requiring a student to contact several offices to get a basic question answered. A process might be efficient from an administrative perspective but unnecessarily difficult for the person trying to navigate it.
Marketing has a role in identifying those gaps because every interaction contributes to the way students understand an institution. The experience with a billing office or advisor may ultimately say far more about a university than a polished advertising campaign ever could.
The Small Moments Shape the Brand
Institutions naturally focus on major decision points in the student journey. Admission decisions, financial aid packages, campus visits and registration are important, but the smaller interactions surrounding them can be just as influential. How quickly does someone respond to an email? Does the response sound like it came from a person or a system? Does a student have to provide the same information multiple times? Can they find the answer to a basic question without navigating through several layers of a website?
Sarah Jane Musk, senior director for enrollment communication at Bellarmine University, emphasized the cumulative effect of these experiences. A campus visit might be the moment when a student makes a decision, but everything that happened before and after the visit shapes that decision.
The same principle applies to digital experiences. Students have become accustomed to services that remember their preferences and make it easier to accomplish the next step. They increasingly expect institutions to do the same. If a prospective student has already identified a program of interest, for example, there is little reason to make them repeatedly search for information about that program or re-enter details they have already provided. Personalization, in this context, is less about making marketing feel clever and more about removing unnecessary work from the student.
Listen to the Conversations You Cannot Control
Institutions also have less control over their brand than they once did. Students are finding information about colleges and universities through social platforms, review sites, Reddit and increasingly through artificial intelligence tools. Those sources can influence how a student understands an institution before they ever visit its website. Marketing teams cannot control all those conversations, nor should they try to manufacture them, but they can pay attention.
Jeff Bender, executive director of university marketing at Pennsylvania Western University, described using conversations happening online to identify gaps between what the institution says and what people are experiencing. A negative review or Reddit discussion may reveal a recurring point of confusion or frustration that the institution needs to address.
That does not mean responding to every criticism or changing an institutional process because of a single post. It means treating social listening as another source of insight. Sometimes the most useful response to a complaint is not a better marketing message. It is fixing the experience that prompted the complaint in the first place.
Make Marketing Part of the Process
If marketing is responsible for communicating the institution’s value, it needs to understand how that value is being delivered. That means getting involved earlier in institutional conversations rather than being handed a finished product and asked to promote it. It also means building stronger relationships with admissions, academic leaders, financial aid, student success and other teams that influence the learner experience.
At institutions represented in the webinar, that collaboration can be as simple as bringing the right people into the same conversation. Marketing teams can share what they are hearing from prospective students, while enrollment teams can explain the questions and concerns they are encountering directly. Together, they can identify where the institution’s messaging and processes need to change. The goal is not to make every department part of marketing. It is to recognize that every department is already contributing to the institutional brand through its interactions with students.
Start With the Student
For institutions looking to make this shift, the panelists offered a practical starting point: experience the journey yourself. Choose a student population and walk through the process from beginning to end. Follow the emails. Visit the website. Complete the forms. Try to find an advisor. Look for information about cost, programs and next steps. Pay attention to the moments when the process becomes confusing or requires unnecessary effort. Then bring the people responsible for those parts of the journey together and determine what can be improved.
This process does not necessarily require a major technology initiative. Often, the first step is simply getting people from different parts of the institution to look at the same experience through the student's eyes. The strongest higher education brands will continue to need compelling stories, distinctive identities and effective marketing campaigns, but those things only work when the experience behind them is consistent.
The future of higher education marketing is not about moving away from the brand. It is about recognizing that the brand extends far beyond the marketing department—and that every interaction is an opportunity to either reinforce the promise or undermine it.
Photo caption: Having a strong brand is no longer just about visual identity and messaging. It requires that institutions of higher education deliver on the promises they make students.