How to reach more students with awareness marketing and retargeting

Today’s students don’t wait for colleges to find them—they start their search early, explore widely, and keep their options open until the moment they make their final decision. With digital tools at their fingertips, they browse dozens of schools, compare programs, and evaluate their options directly against one another. In this crowded, fast-moving environment, simply hoping they’ll land on your website or respond to your email isn’t enough.

To compete, you need to ensure your marketing strategy is attuned to:

• Build awareness early so you’re part of a student’s consideration set from the start
• Retarget once interest is shown to keep your institution top of mind and guide them toward concrete next steps

In this post, I’ll break down how digital awareness marketing and retargeting work together—and why both are essential for your enrollment strategy.

How Awareness Marketing and Retargeting Work Together

Awareness marketing is about showing up where students are (digitally) before they know to look for you. This is especially critical for:

• Expanding into new geographic markets
• Reaching students from underrepresented or out-of-state regions
• Promoting events, scholarships, or campus visit incentives

Without early brand exposure, many high-intent students simply won’t add your school to their consideration set. In fact, as competition for attention grows, missing this window can mean missing the class entirely.

While awareness campaigns bring students into your orbit, retargeting ensures you stay top of mind and drive them toward conversion. This requires running personalized ads to students who have already interacted with you on the web, guiding them directly to your institution’s website to take concrete actions.

This one-two punch of awareness + retargeting moves students seamlessly down the enrollment funnel, faster and more effectively than traditional outreach alone. We have found that digital ads (embedded in sites students already use) are an effective way to get in front of students who are not aware of you (for awareness marketing) and who have already interacted with you (for retargeting). Our recent research found that 66% of students are open to receiving ads, which is higher than you might expect.

In this post, I’d like to share four things you should have in mind while working on digital awareness marketing initiatives, and I’ll discuss what we’ve done to produce strong results for our Appily partners.

4 Key Considerations for Awareness Marketing and Retargeting

1. Identify and Prioritize Your Markets

The strongest enrollment marketing campaigns start with a clear understanding of where you need to grow and where you need to hold your ground. That often means:

• Segmenting your current inquiry and applicant data to find underperforming but high-potential regions
• Considering demographic trends, such as declining high school graduation rates in core states to inform expansion into new markets
• Layering in competitive analysis to spot regions where your peer institutions already have a presence (but you do not)

Match Your School with One of Nine Institutional Personas to Differentiate Your Offerings

The key is to pinpoint markets with the highest opportunity for impact, whether that’s deepening reach in your own backyard or planting a flag in new territories.

2. Tailor Creative and Messaging to the Audience

Students in different stages of the funnel respond to different creative messaging in their college search. An offer that resonates in one market or funnel stage may fall flat in another. The key is to:

• Test creative to see what draws clicks and engagement
• Use culturally and regionally relevant imagery and language
• Highlight differentiators that matter most in that market (e.g., career outcomes, affordability, campus life)

We use only market-specific creative in our awareness marketing ads for Appily partners, and we have observed that aligning messaging to market-specific audiences get stronger clickthrough rates (CTRs). The 90-Day average CTR for our display campaigns is 1.4%, while the industry standard for display campaigns is 0.5-0.75%.

3. Time Campaigns for Maximum Impact

Digital ad performance is most effective when it aligns with moments of peak student attention, like application deadlines, decision release dates, or major visit events. To make the most of your budget:

• Time awareness campaigns to build brand familiarity ahead of these key dates
• Layer retargeting during the high-intent windows when students are actively comparing options
• Schedule creative refreshes to prevent “banner fatigue” and keep engagement high

Our teams map campaign timelines directly to the academic and admissions calendar, ensuring ads hit when students are most likely to act.

4. Tune Retargeting Ads to Turn Interest into Action

Once a student has interacted with your brand, they should never have to “rediscover” you. Retargeting keeps your institution visible in the days and weeks after initial engagement. To maximize retargeting results:

• Inform students of scholarships or benefits they qualify for
• Remind them of offers or deadlines they’ve already shown interest in
• Adjust creative to reflect their stage in the funnel (more urgency for late-stage prospects, more value propositions for early-stage)

Why Partnering with Appily Amplifies These Efforts

Executing digital awareness marketing and retargeting effectively requires precise audience targeting, campaign management expertise, and real-time optimization. All of this is built into Appily’s awareness marketing and retargeting services. With Appily, you get:

• Proprietary audience targeting focused on students actively researching colleges
• Expertise in campaign design, creative testing, and performance optimization
• A proven track record of enrollment success

I hope these tips were helpful as you consider how to expand your marketing efforts to make students more aware and interested in enrolling at your school.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive into what our work with Appily partners looks like, read the complete case study from Johns Hopkins University.