Brand marketing in higher education

In my role as EAB’s CMO, I often feel caught between two competing imperatives: build brand awareness, affinity, and trust…or fill the funnel now. In some marketing circles, this is referred to as the “brand vs. demand” debate. And while few marketing leaders I know think this is actually an either-or choice, the tension is real. Why? Because budgets are finite, this year’s goals are looming, and attribution is hard.   

What are signs of this tension at play? In my case, I’ve felt the pull toward what’s immediately measurable—and the pushback against anything that can’t be tied to near-term commercial results. I’ve been asked why a social campaign on LinkedIn matters. I’ve had teams doubt that blog content is valuable. I’ve had peers question if digital campaigns or PR mentions are meaningful to funnel results.  

But here’s what I’ve learned: if you can reframe brand as future demand, the either-or in this “debate” vanishes. No one doubts the importance of building future demand. Whether you oversee marketing for a company or a university, you will always (literally, always) need leads in the future. The “future demand” reframe helps convey that idea. 

Why is the brand vs. demand debate so loud right now? 

The brand vs. demand debate isn’t new, but it’s never been louder than it is today. There are three disruptions at play in today’s marketing landscape that are increasing the volume of this discussion and making me confident it is brand’s time to shine. 

• LLMs and AI are rewriting the rules of visibility. More than 60% of Google searches now end without a click, organic website traffic is down for many, and students increasingly “meet” your school in AI-generated summaries or social feeds (if you take the right steps) rather than on your homepage. Institutions that haven’t built trust, authority, and strong visibility will risk being left out of AI overviews—and ultimately, students’ search processes.
• Stealth shopping has become the norm. Roughly 80% of Gen Z and Millennial students research schools independently and anonymously until late in their journey. If students don’t encounter your brand during this “dark funnel” phase, your demand campaigns may never get an opportunity to work.
• Organic reach is collapsing. Seventy percent of students use social media to search for colleges, yet unpaid organic reach continues to decline. Organic reach on Instagram is below 4% right now, an all-time low. Paid, story-driven brand campaigns are now the cost of admission, no pun intended, to get on your prospective students’ radar (and ideally, their shortlist).

So, what can higher ed marketing leaders do? First, let’s talk about why brand marketing is misunderstood and how to build support for brand awareness marketing at your institution.

How do you define brand marketing in higher education?

Some folks in higher ed hear the word “brand” and think about logos, colors, swag, or a school mascot. Those are very important expressions of identity, but they are not the essence or definition of your brand. 

As Seth Godin (who some consider the father of brand) famously put it: 

In this case, the consumer is your prospective student, and the ‘product’ being chosen is (hopefully) your school. 

To win attention (and subsequent enrollment), you have to showcase what makes your school unique through great creative, authentic user-generated content, and powerful stories. You have to capture the essence of your school and deliver that essence to strategically selected audiences in brand campaigns built on strong emotional foundations. And you have to carry that brand experience through every touchpoint, building trust and consistency during the prospect experience across digital and direct marketing channels. 

When schools reduce brand to logos and style guides, they miss the opportunity to invest in strategies that will shape the expectations and experiences that drive student choice. 

What’s the right balance of brand vs. demand marketing?

There’s a persistent myth that there is a choice to be made between brand and demand. That’s not real. What is real is an increasingly acute need to prioritize brand marketing, which raises key questions. How much of your budget should be allocated to brand versus demand? How much should that shift given the new LLM landscape?  How do you measure the impact of brand marketing?  Where do you draw the line between the two? 

Growth-oriented institutions coordinate both demand and brand campaigns, sequencing awareness-building with conversion tactics so the impact compounds over time.  

So, how do you know how much budget to invest in brand? It’s art, not science, and will depend on many things specific to your school. 

We recently surveyed 120+ higher ed CMOs to understand how they’re thinking about investments in brand (stay tuned for our upcoming insight paper). On average, the CMOs we surveyed said they allocate only 23% of their budget to brand compared to other priorities like enrollment and advancement. But 44% said “brand amplification” is a top priority this year, second only to driving enrollment growth.

How do you measure brand awareness marketing?

Because marketers can’t always show quick ROI or tie campaigns directly to this year’s enrollment numbers, brand marketing can feel intangible. But on digital channels, brand is more measurable than ever.

The key to measuring brand is to set expectations (and KPIs) in terms of the time horizon and job(s) to be done:

• Early indicators (awareness): Leading indicators like share of voice in AI search, impressions in social feeds, and branded search queries can tell you whether students are encountering your institution in the discovery phase. 
• Mid-funnel metrics (consideration): KPIs such as engagement with content, repeat visits, and video completions show whether those encounters are resonating. 
• Pipeline health metrics (decision): Metrics like application lift in markets with brand campaigns or digitally influenced conversions demonstrate how early awareness eventually fuels enrollment.   

Because so many marketing leaders ask us how they can measure brand marketing, our team at EAB is building a full-funnel ROI reporting framework that will help schools look at these metrics easily and at scale. The framework will also help marketing leaders understand cost per inquiry and cost per enrollment for digitally influenced campaigns.  

In the meantime, even small interventions and optimizations can produce measurable results in digital marketing. For example, we worked with an Adult Learner Recruitment partner to add a short survey to a paid search landing page for their MBA program. The survey asks the student what information they are looking for on the page and about their educational goals.

The result? The landing page with the survey generated a 3% higher conversion rate than the page without the survey. And the partner institution gained valuable information about the student to help personalize future outreach.

Another example is when our Digital Agency partners placed lightweight, trackable forms on key webpages (such as program landing pages and those with cost info). Those forms generated 44% of total leads, with an 11% average application rate and an average of 60 additional leads per month. That’s brand visibility translating into concrete enrollment outcomes.

In my experience, the “brand vs. demand” debate distracts from the real challenge: ensuring your institution is both visible and conversion-ready in a world where students are stealth shoppers, search is zero-click, and organic reach is disappearing. There are lots of strategies you can employ to do strengthen your digital brand awareness marketing, some of which I’ll cover in my next blog post. 

Consider making a slide in your next deck with that phrase to help articulate the need for brand initiatives. Use this language with your peers. And trust me, when you do invest in brand future demand marketing, AI search will see you—and tomorrow’s funnels (and classes) will thank you. 

Lia Davidson

Chief Marketing Officer

Read Bio

• Lia Davidson's LinkedIn page