What is Enrollment Marketing?

How Higher Ed Marketing and Enrollment Used to Work

In the "old days" of recruiting new students in Higher Ed, many schools operated as though Marketing, Admissions, and Enrollment were completely separate departments with different goals.

In fact, many schools still operate this way.

When this happens, schools typically run into scenarios in which each of these teams operates in silos in terms of the way they work, how they engage with students, and the information that gets shared between departments.

For example, an institution's Marketing team might have a totally different CRM and email management platform from the college Admissions team. As a result, the emails that students receive from each of these departments don't have any consistent language or visual identity that ties their experiences together, whether you're talking about email, website pages, print collateral, and more.

Each team has different ideas and a different vision for how things should be done. Even if they are all using the same software, which is often not the case, they can present the information in a totally different way that doesn't deliver a very strong student experience.

In fact, it happens quite often in which—because there is no alignment between departments—students are receiving communications from both teams at the same time that have totally disparate messaging and sometimes even conflicting information.

Does this sound familiar?

3 Mistakes to Avoid When Talking to Prospective Students

How Does Enrollment Marketing Work?

Over the past several years, you've probably started to see the term "Enrollment Marketing" pop up more and more.

But what exactly is it? And, how is it changing the way that Higher Ed institutions engage with prospective students?

Let's take a closer look.

The Inbound Methodology

The inbound marketing methodology has revolutionized the way that schools, businesses, and other enterprises build their brands and attract their target audience.

At its core, the idea is simple: create really compelling content that's optimized for search engines so that your target audience finds it organically—in their own way and at their own time. They are searching for solutions to whatever challenge is in front of them, such as finding the right graduate program that will help them accomplish their professional goals and finding your content that's compelling, valuable, and easy to read.

Traditional Marketing = Speakerphone

Inbound Marketing = Magnet

When inbound marketing is done well, they're engaging with your content, clicking around, visiting more pages on your site, and downloading more content.

In Higher Ed, this type of approach has enabled schools like yours to reach new levels of organic traffic to their site, applications, and ultimately, enrolled students.

How have they done this? 

By unifying their Marketing, Admissions, and Enrollment teams to create a single, cohesive, and aligned strategy that maps out every step of the student lifecycle. To execute this well, you can't operate under disparate enrollment management software solutions or information silos.

Who Can Be an Enrollment Marketer?

So, what exactly is an Enrollment Marketer?

Some schools are ahead of the curve and even have people on their teams with job titles like Director of Enrollment Marketing.

However, you don't need the job title in order to think like an enrollment marketer.

Are you a program coordinator? You can be an enrollment marketer.

Are you an admissions counselor? You can be an enrollment marketer.

Are you the social media manager? You can be an enrollment marketer.

If you care about helping your school reach its enrollment goals, then you can be an enrollment marketer. And, the more people at your institution that embrace this idea, the more likely that you'll hit your enrollment numbers.

Tie it back to the inbound methodology, an enrollment marketer is invested in supporting each phase of the inbound journey: Attract, Engage, and Delight. By embracing this mindset and applying it to your Higher Ed recruiting strategies, you and your team will be able to reach new levels of applications, enrollment, and retention.