Mastering Digital Strategy to Boost Enrollment

0:00:14.1 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we’re joined by Allison Peeler and Val Fox as they unpack insights from EAB’s recent survey of more than 120 marketing and enrollment leaders. We’ll explore how AI is changing the way students search for programs, why your website should function as a true growth engine, and where marketing teams can act now to stay competitive. I hope you give it a listen and enjoy.

0:00:45.2 Allison Peeler: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Allison Peeler, Associate Director of product marketing for EAB’s digital agency and today I’m joined by Val Fox, former higher ed CMO and current EAB marketing strategist. We’re going to unpack some new data we collected from a recent survey of 121 CMOs and other senior marketing leaders and discuss what the data suggests about how to keep your digital strategy competitive in the era of AI driven discovery, flat budgets and ever climbing enrollment expectations. Val, thank you so much for joining me. Can you start by introducing yourself and share a little bit about your role at EAB?

0:01:29.8 Val Fox: Sure. Thanks so much, Allison. I’ve been with EAB for three years now and I love that I get to meet with higher ed CMOs as well as vice president of enrollment management, deans and provosts. And every day in my work here as I kind of straddle a few different lines of business at EAB, I support our digital agency. I also support our adult learner recruitment division which really helps schools attract and enroll more adults into graduate programs, online and adult degree completion programs. And I love that… I bring to this work, you know, my eight years in higher ed as a practitioner. As Allison shared, I was a chief marketing officer and kind of got my foot in the door leading digital engagement on a campus up in New England. And prior to that I was in industry for oh geez, 20 something years. I’m almost, you know, I can’t even believe it was that long before higher ed, but worked in a series of roles in e-commerce companies, e-commerce digital agencies. And so you know, the work we’re going to share out today and the research we’re going to share out today is really, really, I think timely because we have always been at this intersection in higher ed of kind of how do we evolve our work to support learners that are predominantly online. But it’s rapidly evolving and I think we’re going to touch on some really great themes today. So I’m excited to be here with you.

0:02:57.5 Allison Peeler: Thank you so much, Val. So let’s dive right in. Let’s start with one of the most surprising findings from our research. Enrollment dominates marketing leaders priorities. That is not the surprise. What surprised us was that improving the website experience ranked much lower on that priority list. And that’s really striking because students consistently rank the website as their number one resource during college search, and marketing leaders say it’s their most effective enrollment driver. That gap is risky because the website is truly a foundation that connects brand visibility to conversion. And that risk is growing and putting increasing pressure on your web content. As zero click behavior grows, AI is increasingly making your institution’s first and sometimes only impression. For students, AI tools rely heavily on content that’s being pulled in from third party sites, which includes everything from college search platforms to Reddit. But you and your team are the ultimate authority on your brand. So if your content isn’t optimized, AI may not recognize your.edu as the most trusted source. Now, when you see that gap in priorities, high enrollment pressures, low prioritization of the.edu, what jumps out to you?

0:04:22.0 Val Fox: Yeah, that’s a great place to jump in, Allison. I think that that is a huge disconnect for me. You know, when I look at the top three priorities that CMOs cited, they’re all in service to what I’d say is scale. We want to one, scale enrollment and two, really scale our brand message. You know, number one, they listed undergraduate enrollment growth as their top priority. At number two, they listed brand amplification. And at number three, they listed graduate enrollment growth. And I want to clarify that brand amplification at number two is not the same as brand strategy, which fell further down the list at number eight of the top priorities. So when I look at those three top priorities in unison, leaders aren’t telling us they want to, you know, shift the brand. They’re telling us they really want to scale the brand and scale reach. Those are their utmost priorities to higher ed marketing leaders. And then, you know, you pointed out all the reasons the website is really important in terms of achieving those goals. But when you see how they’re prioritizing it and also how they’re resourcing the website in terms of staffing support, it tells a different story.

0:05:36.6 Val Fox: You know, improving the web experience was only number six on the list of strategic priorities, despite the fact that nearly 90% of prospective undergrad and grad students are guaranteed to visit your website to make an enrollment decision. And then when we look at staffing the website in terms of FTEs, that also came up short relative to other functional areas. So the picture that is emerging here is that too many marketing leaders aren’t treating the website like the growth engine that it is. Let’s be clear, it is the largest enrollment demand driver and brand amplifier a school can leverage. So maybe I should state that again for those who missed it. It is the largest enrollment demand driver and brand amplifier, period, hard stop. So all of you know, brings us to something. I think that’s quietly reshaping what’s happening here. If the website’s the growth engine, AI is also changing the definition of what it means to be digitally ready. And the bar isn’t where it was even two years ago. I think we need to talk about what that actually means. We’re seeing that for Gen Z, AI is quickly becoming the front door to college discovery.

0:06:50.5 Val Fox: Nearly half are already using AI tools to search for colleges, and that number has grown sharply in the last year for both undergraduate audiences and adult learners. You know, looking… They’re using AI as they search for grad and adult degree completion programs. And at the same time, traditional search engines are rapidly integrating AI. So, you know, we all use Google and we might think we’re just googling, but we’re in fact interacting with AI generated content if there’s an AI overview at the top of that search results page. So, you know, I get very worried because as a sector, higher ed is overly dependent on paid search. And we’re also seeing click through rates drop by significant amounts. I think the last report we’ve seen was click through rates are dropping by 68% when AI summaries are present. Yeah, so, you know, there’s less ad inventory for paid search. That’s driving cost per click rates up. This is a, you know, an ad inventory market. The more inventory that exists, prices go down, but in this climate and environment, there’s less inventory. So ad rates are going up. And so this is placing huge pressure on us as a sector because we are overly reliant and depend a lot on paid search.

0:08:21.4 Val Fox: A lot of schools put a lot of eggs in that basket. And so there’s pressure on media efficiency. And I’d say that there are a lot of challenging… A lot of new environmental challenges being driven with the adoption of AI right now. And if we’re taking our ball off of kind of the digital presence and the entire ecosystem working together like this to attract students, we’re really undercutting our ability to serve these priorities we’re citing around undergraduate and graduate enrollment.

0:09:01.7 Allison Peeler: Right, that’s a really good point. Do you think that some of that undercutting is really more of a mindset issue, a budget issue or something else?

0:09:11.8 Val Fox: Yeah, I have to say I think the mindset is a little bit of a relic here. Too many marketing leaders are treating the website like a digital filing cabinet. It, you know, maybe we’re thinking about it. It’s where we store policies. It’s where we can put PDFs up, press releases up. It’s not where we’re driving demand. It’s where we go to just, you know, put things that we need people to find and see. But… And we’re treating it like an archive. And I believe that’s a really, really outdated view. You know, today the website isn’t an archive anymore. You’ve got to think about it as your campus tour, the info session. It’s got to be an admissions counselor, it’s got to represent your brand. All of those things rolled up into one. And students are really making a decision in a matter of mere seconds on your website. So if it’s not organized for prospective students, if you’re thinking about it in terms of, oh, we have to make sure it serves internal stakeholders, you know, because we’ve got to make sure all our policies are updated. You’re not prioritizing enrollment, you know, you’re prioritizing bureaucracy.

0:10:27.9 Allison Peeler: Right.

0:10:28.1 Val Fox: In a market that’s competitive, your website isn’t a support channel. It’s the growth engine.

0:10:34.1 Allison Peeler: Is it something that has to be overhauled or redesigned in order to be… To really meet that end?

0:10:41.3 Val Fox: Yeah, I think that’s an important… Thank you for asking that. That’s another myth that exists here, is that improving your web experience means a total website overhaul. And, you know, if you frame it as focused enhancements on high value pages instead of a total overhaul, you can actually move the needle without a massive investment. You know, I shared earlier that I work with the digital agency team and support that as well. And I’ve seen, you know, the work that we’ve done there and the outcomes we’ve seen the biggest gains actually coming from isolating a small set of enrollment critical pages and optimizing those pages intentionally for enrollment related keywords. The most recent case study I saw out of that team shows that we did that very intentionally. Here’s the example. Imagine your university interested in expanding your search or AI presence for particular students. Let’s say it’s nursing students, and in this case it was a school in Denver. So, you know, they were able to really amplify their visibility just for particular pages, 2, 3, 4 pages, as opposed to overhauling their entire website and gain a lot more traction with that audience. So I’d encourage anyone listening who’s maybe frustrated by the lack of urgency in evolving their institution’s web presence to reframe this conversation from, you know, the next website redesign isn’t budgeted until 2030, which I hear all the time and frustrates many, many leaders who feel handcuffed right to an outdated site. They’ve got to shift that to how can we redistribute current fiscal year enrollment investments from, let’s say, paid media to support our very own online environment engine, which is the website.

0:12:30.5 Allison Peeler: Love that. Let’s switch gears a little bit to another really important issue you touched on a little bit. One of the most consistent patterns in the data wasn’t about strategy, it was about capacity. Nearly 7 in 10 leaders reported flat or decreasing budgets over the past year. And 65% said they’re being asked to do more with fewer resources. Against that backdrop, the average marketing team size is just 22 FTEs. And I know you mentioned that gap, that percentage was so much smaller. You know, when you think about the group that supports web, this is really where I want your perspective though, Val, with leaders here, do more with less right now, what does that translate to day to day and is that really effective framing?

0:13:17.9 Val Fox: Oh, it’s so tough. And I really empathize because I remember those days that I feel like doing more with less translates to day to day triage mode. You know, teams aren’t strategically prioritizing, they’re just surviving these days and it bears out, it looks like deferred website updates, maybe campaigns launched without being fully optimized, digital channels managed by generalists instead of specialists. And you know, I don’t want to point fingers. This isn’t people being, you know, not working hard enough. It’s the bandwidth issue and skill issue. But here’s the thing. Doing more with less is a broken framing device that it assumes productivity is just about effort. Okay. And what we’re seeing instead is that the teams that are rethinking that mindset… Shifting that mindset, are able to go from just being productive and doing more to evolving execution. And you know, the stats you shared, if budgets are flat or shrinking and your team sizes are holding, you know, often with very thin digital depth, you can’t hustle your way to transformation. You know, at some point the math stops mapping there and I think with emerging incentives, operational creativity, the most effective leaders aren’t squeezing harder on the lemon.

0:14:44.6 Val Fox: And they’re redesigning how the work gets done. And some of the data bore out that, you know, some of these leaders are building very elastic teams. They’re getting clear about, hey, these are things that should remain in house. And here are things that we can outsource. And the things that are remaining in house, they reported back that those are things like brand stewardship, institutional voice, enrollment strategy. And you know, that’s very important. I believe that those things remain in house. But strategic partnerships and outsourcing things can actually also increase capacity instead of signaling weakness. And so there was some data on that as well. But the truth is if your in house team is spending, you know, its best talent on production work that could be outsourced, you’re not just being scrappy, you’re probably misallocating some brain power there. And I do think we’re on the cusp of a shift as, especially as leaders start doubling down on owned channels and digital infrastructure. It’s going to require different muscles and it’s less about doing more and maybe just being more radically intentional about what you choose to do and not to do.

0:16:00.0 Allison Peeler: That’s a really good point and an appropriate shift to my next question, one of the most compelling findings in the data, which I alluded to a little bit earlier, was which channels leaders believe are most effective at driving enrollment. The.edu ranked number one higher than paid media, email and all other digital channels, and perceived effectiveness. But we’re seeing leaders reallocating or planning to reallocate in the near term dollars toward things they can control and know to be successful in this really competitive, wildly shifting environment. Things like website search, visibility and brand. Val, why do you think owned channels are having this moment right now?

0:16:45.9 Val Fox: I’m not surprised owned channels are having a moment. I think what we’re seeing isn’t a trend, it’s a maturation. You know, leaders are realizing that sustainable enrollment growth is built on assets you own, not tactics you rent, right? So paid media buys attention. Owned channels really build advantage over time. And so when ad costs keep rising, I talked about this earlier. The algorithms in paid search and paid media are changing. You know, owned channels become the hedge against that. So your website, your brand equity, your search presence, those are owned assets. You control them and they compound value over time if you invest in them. And I’m often asked by CMOs as well as deans and vice presidents of enrollment management that care deeply about enrollment. You know, what they should fund first if more budget automatically materializes, right, in support of enrollment. And I think the answer depends on time horizon. In the short term, I’d invest in digital media optimization, starting with pages that drive enrollment decisions. These are your program pages. Make sure that they highlight outcomes, tuition modality, tighten the experience, you know, where demand already exists, that’s kind of the fastest lift.

0:18:01.8 Val Fox: And then longer term, I fund deeper optimization of program pages for SEO and AI visibility. You know, we’re moving into an environment where discovery is increasingly mediated by machines, by large language models, right, the LLMs. If your programs aren’t structured and positioned to surface in that kind of… In this new ecosystem, you’re really invisible in the moments that matter, okay. So I think what we’re seeing isn’t a trend, it’s a maturation that you’ve got to build on the assets you own to really see the sustainable enrollment growth.

0:18:45.7 Allison Peeler: And just really quickly, how should leaders be thinking about paid media differently as a result?

0:18:53.1 Val Fox: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that we should be abandoning paid media. It’s just about making it work harder. You know, a strong website doesn’t make paid media obsolete. It makes it more efficient, actually. So, you know, let’s think about that. If you’re driving traffic to enrollment critical landing pages that are clear, that are optimized, conversion focused, structured for search and AI visibility, then your paid media works harder, your cost per inquiry drops. If you’re sending traffic to pages that function like internal directories that I talked about earlier, then you’re pouring limited budget down the drain. I think the other thing to remember here in terms of thinking about paid media differently is that we’ve got to stop being overly reliant on paid search as the one and only channel, right? Got to have a more diversified approach to driving traffic to your site and lead generation for your programs.

0:19:53.8 Allison Peeler: Right. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Okay, let’s shift. Let’s go ahead and shift our focus to our final and everyone’s favorite topic of the moment, AI. Most teams we know are using AI, yet the most common use cases are primarily still pretty shallow. Think simple chatbots, content creation, ideation, etcetera. Surprisingly, one in four leaders told us they’re not using AI at all to support their enrollment marketing efforts. And that made me… That gave me pause. I said, wow, my hat is off to you for holding out. It’s really hard to do these days. But we’re seeing also that on the flip side, far fewer are applying AI to deeper funnel strategies and tactics, think personalization, analytics, lead scoring, AKA where ROI lives. And so there’s still clearly a lot of room for growth here. Val, what surprised you the most about current AI adoption and what does the next wave of use look like?

0:21:10.8 Val Fox: Yeah. All right. Well, I really liked how leaders were thinking and really evolving the AI maturation thinking here on campus. And so first, let’s just say that it’s clear based on responses that using chatbots, using AI for chatbots, agents, conversational tools, I’m not surprised adoption was high there because that’s where value is immediate and really easy to measure. You’re saving hours, you’re… We’ve already heard that staff and FTEs and headcount is really flat, so you’re able to free up staff capacity in a lean environment. Efficiency is the fastest ROI story AI can tell, right. But I am surprised when I hear that 6 in 10 marketing leaders have researched AI powered search visibility audit tools, but only a third have conducted a visibility audit. Okay. Let me say that again. So 60% are researching AI visibility, but only 33% had gone beyond researching to actually conducting a visibility audit. So there’s a big gap there. And I’m thinking that gap between interest and implementation is where this risk starts to show up if AI is becoming the new front door to college discovery. Shared some stats earlier on the adoption among both undergraduate and graduate students.

0:22:45.9 Val Fox: Right. It’s rapidly scaling, you know, institutions that aren’t doing the work to ensure they’re visible. Whether it’s AI overview panels or large language models like Claude, Perplexity and ChatGPT, they’re going to get left behind. Think of, you know, the new visibility playbook has to evolve from just rank my page in search results to make AI quote me, right. So that’s how you get cited in those large language models, is to get indexed and quoted by AI. So, you know, I think that that’s really a big gap and that gap will extend beyond visibility to next gen enrollment practices. Leaders cited, they want to explore AI powered website personalization and predictive lead scoring. I love that you shared that, right. That’s excellent. That’s what I explore next. That’s a signal that teams are starting to think less about AI as a task doer and more as a decision shaper. Helping prioritize who my best prospects are, helping tailor my digital experiences, helping focus effort where it’s most likely to convert. So I really like what I’m seeing. I just hope that we don’t see a gap in next year when we ask this question. All right.

0:24:09.5 Val Fox: Yeah, I’m still researching all these things, but I haven’t implemented because, you know, you’ve got to get in the game in the arena to start understanding this. It’s not going to be perfect to start, you know, for all of the visibility tools to line up. You’ve got to start practicing and playing and breaking a few things. And believe me, you can’t undermine your website if you just take the first step. You’re really going to… If you partner with somebody, you decide to use one of the platforms to do it yourself, you’re going to learn a lot by just taking that first step. And in isolating for these are the 3, 4, 5 programs I really want to make sure are visible in LLMs and in the AI overview panel because we’re really dependent on the enrollment that comes from those programs. So starting with kind of a small set and going from there, I think is really critical.

0:25:14.5 Allison Peeler: I agree. And you know, the digital agency team has been doing a ton of work in the search visibility audit space and helping teams really understand and unpack how they are showing up and where they’re not, where their gaps are, where their gaps are against competitors and things like that and really helping bring those things to life. In the school you mentioned earlier, in a quick matter of months, saw a 909% increase in search visibility. That’s just mind blowing. And it seems like a really critical place for folks to lean in and start as they start looking to the future and what to actually take action on now. All right, Val. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

0:26:01.1 Val Fox: Yeah, I love that you mentioned indexing against competitors. I’ve never been on a campus that doesn’t want to take out their competitors. When it comes to, it’s a point of pride for a lot of schools, like, why are they showing up above us, right. So if you’re looking to build a case, I’d say start there. If you want to get some leaders fired up about investing in this, just say…

0:26:28.4 Allison Peeler: Right, it’s time, it’s time for that audit. All right, Val, I love hearing your takes on all of these things. So let’s close out with a quick lightning round. So I’m going to give you three questions, one minute on the clock. One thing heads of marketing should stop doing this year. One thing they should double down on and one thing to test in the next 90 days.

0:26:55.3 Val Fox: Oh, okay, one thing to stop doing this year. All right, I mentioned this earlier. How about stop treating the website like shared infrastructure? If enrollment’s the priority, I’d argue the website has to be governed and funded like an enrollment growth driver, not a committee project. And I think that’s why it’s become this third rail. Everybody sighs and groans when they hear about our website. We can all agree we’re not happy with our websites, but if we treat it like a committee project that everyone’s assigned to, sure, that’s the reaction on most campuses.

0:27:39.5 Allison Peeler: Yes.

0:27:40.2 Val Fox: Not another committee. But if you actually treat it like infrastructure, enrollment infrastructure, then you should be making the case. So that’s one thing I’d stop. And then I think your next one was double down. One thing to double down on. Okay, well, you just shared 909% growth in AI visibility.

0:27:59.5 Allison Peeler: Yes.

0:28:00.4 Val Fox: You gotta shift from researching to implementing. Just test the waters on AI visibility audits. Find a trusted partner. We do that work. Or you know, if you’ve got a scrappy team, maybe you want to try it on your own. There are some platforms out there that can help you do this, but you know, don’t boil the ocean. Don’t think about, you know, you don’t have to do this across your entire portfolio of programs. Pick three programs where you really want to grow visibility because they are significant enrollment drivers. Focus there. And then the last question was one thing to test in the next 90 days. Okay, back going… Doubling down on AI visibility. How about a 90 day AI visibility audit on just your high demand…

0:28:51.4 Allison Peeler: Love that.

0:28:53.1 Val Fox: You can do this. Here’s the scrappiest way to do this. Maybe having your team, a couple folks on your team, try ChatGPT or use Google’s AI overview and see if your program would show up. And if not, then you’ve got to restructure and optimize those pages for clarity and all of the kind of hooks that… I know we’ve got lots of blog content on this, maybe we can link out to it. But there are lots of ways to think about some quick wins on program pages so that you are sending the right signals to the LLMs and be visible in the AI overview panel in ChatGPT or other LLMs. So discovery is changing fast. Don’t sit it out.

0:29:47.6 Allison Peeler: Love it. Val, if there’s one thing you hope our marketing friends take away from this conversation, what is it?

0:29:56.1 Val Fox: Is that your website, your brand strategy and your enrollment strategy aren’t separate work streams. They’re really inseparable. The schools that treat their website like a growth asset and continue to optimize it are going to win future enrollment cycles.

0:30:14.7 Allison Peeler: Val, thank you so much for helping us break down this year’s findings. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us on Office Hours with EAB. If you want to dig deeper into the research, we’ll link the full survey report in show notes. Have a great day.