Enrollment and marketing tend to have a rather strained relationship in academe. Often housed in separate offices, they have competing visions and vie for attention and resources. After more than 25 years on the enrollment side of the house, I have just started a new position that unites these oft-estranged partners.
Typically, the marketing office is part of advancement or academic affairs. Yet at most institutions, enrollment is the marketing office’s largest client. If tuition is your institution’s most important source of revenue, it’s smart to focus your promotional resources on student recruitment. As in the business world, marketing and enrollment in higher ed are steps in the same journey for students — not different experiences. Strong marketing makes the work of recruiting students much easier.
So it makes a lot of sense to house marketing and communications with enrollment in the same division. And such mergers seem to be growing in popularity, based on what I’m hearing and seeing from people in both fields. While I am eager to take on this new role and integrate these two areas into one strong team, I know it will not be easy to bring people together across a historical divide.
Step 1: Immerse myself in campus marketing. I’ve started taking inventory of the assets and skill sets of our communications staff. Already I have a few observations — from an outsider’s view of the profession — of the challenges that face marketing teams in this highly competitive era of higher education.
Everyone comes from somewhere else. As is true of careers in enrollment, no one grows up thinking, “I’m going to work in a college marketing office.” People almost always stumble into a communications position from somewhere else. Marketing offices are filled with former journalists, news photographers, nonprofit writers, and IT staff members. The mix of backgrounds can really shape how a marketing team carries out its work. With lopsided skill sets, you may have gaps in your college’s ability to provide communication services and end up with people doing work for which they were never trained.
Disparate backgrounds can also lead to a lack of agreement about what the marketing team’s role really is:
- Are we a service office focused on internal constituencies?
- Are we a design agency that just produces creative products?
- Is it our job to lead the way in molding the college’s brand and focus on building external markets?
Strangely, I think the answer to all three questions is yes. We are all of those things. The challenge is not to select one identity over the other, but to align the different communications functions and organize the team to meet them.
Marketing is a rapidly evolving field, and staff members need to stretch to keep up and be open to ongoing professional development. And the administration needs to be committed to creating a well-rounded team. If you can recognize the varied backgrounds of your staff members and help them identify their strengths and gaps in experience, you can build a team that can tackle anything.
Everyone thinks they can do your job. This is one of the biggest challenges that communications teams face on the campus: Everyone’s a marketing “expert.” We are all exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages every day, which means we all develop a comfort level with basic marketing practices and ideas.
That can easily translate into a sense that we understand more about marketing than we actually do. Professors, recruiters, or fund raisers might think: I am the subject-matter expert over my area. Who can tell this story better than me? And there is a grain of truth to that. But communication in marketing is a two-way conversation, in which you not only need to know the product but also the relevant audience and the best way to reach it. And that second element is something that those of us outside of marketing don’t fully understand.
In some cases, you end up in a vicious cycle in which the marketing team feels disrespected and underappreciated in their work, while the subject-matter experts feel they are being blocked by a marketing team that is trying to run the show.
Not long ago, I spoke to a colleague, Eric Maguire, vice president for enrollment at Wake Forest University who united the enrollment and marketing teams when he was at Ithaca College. “One of the most important things that we did when I inherited the marketing office was to do a traveling tour around campus to meet with other offices,” he said. “We tried to stress that while we were willing to help on all kinds of projects, we would really prefer that areas not bring us their fully formed solutions that we would then have to adjust or troubleshoot. Instead, we hoped they would bring us their problems and allow us to work together, with them, to find the best possible solution.”
Art versus business. Marketing offices often attract artists — people with a creative eye and high standards but who need a paycheck and benefits that art fields rarely provide. Craving more financial security, they frequently find their way to marketing offices. This can be amazing, as it leads to high-quality visual products.
It can also be a source of friction. Most campus clients want the marketing team to function more like a business and less like an art studio. When subject-matter experts want their latest project promoted, they are more concerned with it being done quickly than in a clever or creative way (they think their work is the star, not the promotion materials). That can be a real challenge for staff members who are artists at heart. They put themselves into the marketing work and hope that others will truly appreciate the effort and thought that went into it.
Strong project management becomes critical in these instances. The best project managers help staff members differentiate which projects need a true artist’s touch and which ones just need to get done as quickly as possible. Your marketing leadership should be able to recognize the work and design strengths of different staff members and try to align them with a campus client who will most appreciate and benefit from their skills. Even highly capable, experienced, and independent staff members can benefit from clear project-management structures and systems that capitalize on their strengths.
Proactive versus reactive. Based on past and present conversations, my sense is that staff members in many marketing offices feel as if they are constantly reacting rather than progressing in any particular direction. Videographers have a long list of requests they may never get to. Designers juggle a set of projects that are not well prioritized and have nebulous deadlines. When crises happen on a campus, social-media managers are constantly reacting to developments and the marketing team is hurrying to keep up.
Clearly some reacting is inevitable in a fast-paced, fluid environment, but I’m convinced that a portion of this codified panic stems from a lack of a proactive direction. One of the most difficult things to accomplish in our hyper-competitive higher-ed market is to discover an institutional narrative that is authentic and truly resonates with students. Yes, Professor A is doing amazing work in a particular specialty, Professor B has organized an incredible academic experience for students, and the college has received national recognition for C — but what ties them all together? What is the common theme that feeds the institution’s story?
This missing narrative is the biggest opportunity for marketing offices. Of course, discovering and shaping it takes significant time and effort, but the marketing team is the most natural group to generate this message. Marketing staff members see all of the stories and have the best vantage point to identify the common thread that is authentic in the student experience.
As Maguire, the Wake Forest vice president, explained, “At my former institution, we saw initial enrollment success, but things did not really pop until we figured out a concept that encapsulated who we were and what we wanted to convey to the market. The minute we heard the idea, we knew it was going to change the way we did business. By marketing to that concept, our applicant pool really took off.”
Identifying the narrative allows a marketing office to prioritize and plan in a coherent way. What videos do we need? What publications should we create? The ones that best support the narrative. Being narrative-focused also allows the team to say no to projects on the margins. Without the narrative, you are just rejecting someone’s idea. With it, you are asking constituents to figure out how something they want fits into the institution’s overall story before it can be moved forward.
How can we integrate marketing and enrollment? It’s not enough to just share office space or an organizational chart. Whether you are considering a merger or already have marketing and enrollment under the same umbrella, the goal is to derive maximum benefit from a real integration. Rather than just working in parallel, these two teams can learn to work in tandem. Here are some of our initial steps toward that end:
- One tactic we are trying is to break the enrollment and marketing teams into small working groups around themes, such as finding the narrative, the customer experience, and communication flow. The teams have members from marketing, admissions, and financial aid and have begun meeting to improve communication and share ideas.
- We are also exploring whether we can physically shift staff members to have them work more fluidly in teams around different audiences that we serve. So, for example, our student ambassadors provide weekly video content to our social-media manager. Does it make sense to have them working near each other so that they can more organically generate content?
- We are talking about ways to help people from these previously separate realms to connect socially as well, sharing workplace traditions and celebrations.
- A critical piece is to ensure that each team’s goals are everyone’s goals. Everyone should share the credit and the responsibility of achieving the objectives, whether that is enrollment targets, successful financial-aid audits and net revenue goals, or social-media campaigns that gain widespread attention. It is time to change the mindset of competing for resources and attention to one of celebrating the achievement of common goals.
We have a ways to go, but we are off to a good start. Even after the first month, I see the two teams communicating more openly with one another, and forging relationships “across the aisle.” We have already made some structural changes, which I know can make people nervous, but I also see new leadership skills emerging, and staff members finding more of a voice. I see both groups more energized about certain big projects we have coming up, like the design of a new viewbook. It feels like momentum and the start of something new.
These offices can be each other’s best allies on the campus. By working together, we can capture the enormous creativity and passion of these two professions and use that spark to move the institution forward and tell its story in compelling ways.
