When every marketing channel performs but enrollment still falls short

As EAB’s CMO, I lead a team of specialists across product marketing, paid and organic strategy, design, and demand generation. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that even great marketers can struggle to deliver results when their work isn’t coordinated across channels. Strong campaigns—and meaningful results—require someone to connect the dots across teams, channels, and goals.

If you lead graduate or adult learner recruitment, your team is likely managing dozens of marketing activities, too. They may run paid search and social campaigns, send emails, buy leads, produce content, and support admissions outreach. Increasingly, your team is also trying to understand how your programs appear in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and other AI platforms.

But who ensures those efforts work together to move students toward enrollment? Who is accountable for enrollment outcomes?

For many of the graduate enrollment and marketing teams we speak with, the answer is unclear—not because they lack strong marketers, but because lean, overstretched teams struggle to coordinate so many moving pieces. That’s why I keep coming back to orchestration as both the right model and the right metaphor for adult learner recruitment.

What orchestration really means in enrollment marketing

An orchestra brings together dozens of musicians, each with deep expertise in a particular instrument. Their individual skill matters enormously. But a single musician’s skill alone does not produce a symphony. Someone has to interpret the score, set the tempo, manage the entrances and transitions, and make sure every section contributes to a cohesive performance. That someone is a conductor, and your adult learner recruitment strategy requires the same kind of central leadership.

Paid media is a specialty. So is organic search, AI visibility, email deliverability, creative development, audience targeting, website conversion, CRM integration, and enrollment attribution. You need all these capabilities, but a small marketing team cannot reasonably develop expertise in every one of them.

Outsourcing individual functions does not necessarily solve the problem either. You may end up with talented specialists or vendor partners, all working from different plans, pursuing different metrics, and reporting on different pieces of the funnel. But no one owns whether those efforts collectively produce an enrolled student. You have assembled the orchestra, but you still need a conductor.

Graduate and adult students rarely follow your campaign calendar

Orchestration matters in any complex marketing environment, but it becomes essential in adult learner recruitment because your prospective students rarely follow a linear path.

Imagine a prospective student named Dana. She is 36, manages a team at a regional health system, and has two young children. An ad for your online MBA catches her attention. She visits your program page, asks ChatGPT to compare her options, submits an inquiry form, and opens several of your emails.

Then she takes on a big project at work. One of her children breaks an arm. Business school moves to the back of her mind. During that time, her interest in your MBA program didn’t disappear, but she no longer had the time or mental bandwidth to take the next step. She may look like an inquiry that went cold.

A few months later, things slow down and work and Dana revisits her MBA program search. And Dana’s experience is common. In our new survey of 6,000 graduate and adult learners, 42% explored program options for less than six months, while 39% searched for more than a year.

When a prospect enters your funnel, you cannot know which timeline they will follow. Work, family, finances, and countless other factors can accelerate or delay a student’s decision. That’s why enrollment marketing for adult-serving programs requires more than a standard 90-day email campaign. Institutions need to respond to changes in prospects’ behavior and orchestrate messages across channels and often, over extended periods of time. Doing so for thousands of prospective students requires specialized skills and a connected strategy.

Every channel requires real expertise

The complexity in recruiting adult learners is easy to underestimate because much of the work happens behind the scenes.

At EAB, we manage more than 80 interconnected elements across the enrollment journey for our college and university partners. Some are highly visible, such as audience strategy, paid media, and personalized creative. Others are less glamorous but just as consequential, including data processing, quality assurance, CRM integration, attribution, and the domain warming that protects your institution’s email reputation.

A talented generalist on your team cannot become an expert in every channel and manage the connections between them. And while adding several boutique vendors may expand your team’s capacity, it can also create a new job for you: coordinating all the people you hired to relieve your workload.

Channel performance is not the same as enrollment performance

As a CMO, I care about how individual channels perform, but I’m ultimately responsible for what those efforts accomplish together. A paid search campaign might generate hundreds of leads, and an email campaign might achieve strong engagement. But if those prospects aren’t moving forward, we need to understand where they’re getting stuck and adjust our strategy accordingly.

That requires someone who can see the entire enrollment journey, connect the work happening across channels, and shift resources where needed. The success metrics move from impressions and clicks to a larger and more qualified prospect pool, a lower cost of acquisition, and ultimately, enrollment and revenue growth.

A different model for graduate and adult learner recruitment

At this point, you and your team generally face three imperfect choices:

1. Partnering with an online program manager (OPM): An OPM can bring substantial capacity but often requires revenue sharing and long-term commitments. Your institution may also have limited visibility into campaign performance.
2. Working with a marketing agency: A marketing agency can execute individual channels well, but its responsibility may end with the inquiry. This can create a mismatch in accountability: the agency optimizes for inquiries while your team remains accountable for enrollment.
3. A “DIY” approach: Building everything internally preserves your control but places the full weight of the expertise and execution on your already lean team.

Who owns your whole enrollment journey?

Here are three questions to bring to your next enrollment or marketing meeting:

1. When a prospect stops responding, who decides what happens next and how long you stay in touch?
2. When a prospect moves between your ads, website, AI platforms, email campaigns, and admissions team, who makes sure those experiences reinforce one another?
3. Who is accountable for turning all that activity into enrollment growth?

If the answer changes by channel or funnel stage, you may have excellent musicians but no central conductor. And in today’s market, orchestration may be the difference between creating more marketing activity and growing enrollment.

Lia Davidson

Chief Marketing Officer

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