What a Higher Ed CMO Deals With
Higher education marketing is unlike almost any other sector. The product is complex, the buying cycle is long, the stakeholders are numerous, and the pressure to demonstrate ROI is intense, all while working inside institutions that were not built for commercial agility. CMOs in higher ed are not just marketers. They are diplomats, translators, and occasionally, firefighters.
What follows is not a polished case study. It is an honest account of what the role actually involves, the structural tensions that make it hard, and why some of the smartest marketers I know have found it the most demanding job of their careers.
Key Takeaways
- Higher ed CMOs operate inside institutions where consensus is required but speed is demanded, a combination that breaks most marketing plans before they launch.
- Enrolment pressure has pushed universities toward short-term performance tactics at the expense of brand investment, often making the underlying problem worse.
- The most effective higher ed marketers treat audience understanding as infrastructure, not a one-time research exercise.
- Attribution in higher education is almost impossible to get right, and pretending otherwise leads to decisions that optimise the measurable at the cost of what actually works.
- The CMO role in higher ed is expanding faster than the budget and authority attached to it, which is a pattern that ends predictably.
In This Article
- The Institutional Reality Nobody Prepares You For
- The Enrolment Pressure Trap
- Who Is the Audience, Really
- The Attribution Problem in Higher Education
- The Budget and Authority Mismatch
- The Digital Transformation Expectation
- What the Role Demands That Nobody Tells You
- Where Higher Ed Marketing Actually Goes Wrong
The Institutional Reality Nobody Prepares You For
I have worked with and alongside marketing leaders in higher education for a significant portion of my career. What strikes me every time is how the structural dynamics of a university work against the kind of decisive, audience-first marketing that actually moves enrolment numbers.
In a commercial business, the CMO might need sign-off from a CEO and a CFO. In a university, you are often managing relationships with the Vice-Chancellor, the academic deans, the student recruitment team, the communications office, the international office, and a governing body that may include people who last thought seriously about marketing in a different decade. Every one of those stakeholders has a view. Many of them have veto power, formal or informal.
The result is that campaigns get softened, messages get committee-edited into blandness, and bold positioning gets replaced with something that offends nobody and persuades nobody either. I have seen this pattern play out in commercial agencies too, but in higher ed it is structural rather than occasional. It is baked into how decisions get made.
If you want to understand how marketing leadership actually functions inside complex organisations, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the dynamics that separate effective marketing leaders from those who get ground down by the institution around them.
The Enrolment Pressure Trap
Most universities are under enrolment pressure. Demographic shifts, increased competition, the growing cost of tuition, and the very public questioning of the value of a degree have all combined to make student recruitment harder than it was ten years ago. The CMO inherits this pressure and is often expected to solve it with marketing.
The problem is that enrolment is not purely a marketing problem. It is a product problem, a pricing problem, a reputation problem, and sometimes a delivery problem. Marketing can amplify what an institution is, but it cannot manufacture something that is not there. When a university is losing students to competitors with stronger outcomes, better facilities, or clearer career pathways, a new campaign is not going to close that gap.
I spent years in performance marketing, and I know how seductive the lower funnel is when you are under pressure. You can show click-through rates and cost per application and conversion data, and it looks like evidence of progress. But a lot of what performance marketing captures in higher ed is intent that already existed. The prospective student had already decided they wanted to study. They were going to apply somewhere. The question is whether they applied to your institution or a competitor’s, and that decision was shaped far upstream of the paid search ad they clicked on.
The institutions I have seen do this well treat brand investment and performance investment as connected, not competing. They understand that someone who has encountered their brand meaningfully over eighteen months is far more likely to convert than someone who sees a retargeting ad in the final week of the application window. The performance channel gets the credit. The brand work did the heavy lifting.
Who Is the Audience, Really
One of the first questions I ask when reviewing a higher ed marketing strategy is: who exactly are you trying to reach? The answer is almost always more complicated than it should be.
A university might be recruiting undergraduates, postgraduates, international students, mature students, executive education participants, and online learners, all simultaneously, all with different motivations, different decision-making timelines, and different information needs. Treating these as a single audience produces messaging that is relevant to nobody in particular.
Understanding a target audience at the level of specificity that actually informs creative and channel decisions requires more than a demographic profile. It requires understanding what prospective students are weighing when they make their choice, what their hesitations are, what signals they use to assess institutional quality, and who else is influencing their decision. Parents matter enormously in undergraduate recruitment. Employers matter in postgraduate. Peers matter in ways that are difficult to measure but impossible to ignore.
Early in my agency career, I worked on a client brief where we assumed we knew the audience because we had run campaigns for them before. We were wrong. The audience had shifted, the competitive set had changed, and our messaging was speaking to a version of the customer that no longer existed in quite the same form. We caught it in the data eventually, but not before we had spent a quarter optimising the wrong thing. In higher ed, where campaign cycles are long and budgets are finite, that kind of misalignment is expensive.
The Attribution Problem in Higher Education
Attribution is hard in every sector. In higher education, it is particularly brutal. The consideration period for a university can run to two or three years. A prospective student might first encounter an institution through a school visit, then follow them on social media, read a subject-specific blog post, watch a virtual open day, speak to a current student at a fair, and finally convert through a paid search ad. Which touchpoint gets the credit?
Most analytics setups give it to the last click. That is not because last-click attribution is accurate. It is because it is easy to implement and easy to report. The result is that budgets flow toward the channels that appear at the bottom of the funnel, because those are the ones that show up in the attribution model, and the channels that built awareness and preference over two years get cut because they are harder to measure.
I have sat in enough Effie judging rooms to know that the campaigns that produce genuine business results are almost never the ones that optimised purely for measurable short-term conversions. They are the ones that built something in the audience, a preference, a familiarity, a sense of belonging before the person even applied. That is extraordinarily difficult to attribute, but it is not difficult to believe if you understand how human decision-making actually works.
Tools like Hotjar can help surface behavioural signals on university websites that reveal where prospective students are engaging and where they are dropping off, which gives you a more honest picture of the consideration experience than last-click data alone. But no single tool solves the attribution problem. The honest answer is that you triangulate from multiple imperfect signals and resist the temptation to treat any one of them as the whole truth.
The Budget and Authority Mismatch
One of the defining frustrations of the higher ed CMO role is the gap between what the institution expects marketing to deliver and what it is willing to invest in marketing to deliver it. This is not unique to higher education, but it is particularly acute there.
Universities have historically underinvested in marketing relative to their commercial counterparts. The culture in many institutions still treats marketing as a support function rather than a strategic driver, which means budgets are set based on what was spent last year rather than what is needed to achieve the enrolment targets being set this year. The CMO is then held accountable for outcomes that the budget was never sized to produce.
I grew an agency from 20 people to over 100 during a period where we were also turning around a loss-making business. One of the clearest lessons from that experience was that you cannot cut your way to growth. You can manage costs, and you should, but sustainable growth requires investment in the things that build demand, not just the things that capture it. The universities that have navigated enrolment pressure most effectively are the ones where the senior leadership team understood that distinction and backed it with resource.
The CMOs who struggle most are often those who accept under-resourced briefs without pushing back on the assumptions behind them. That is not a criticism. The institutional dynamics make it genuinely difficult to have that conversation. But the ones who manage to reframe the budget discussion in terms of what outcomes are actually achievable at different investment levels tend to earn more credibility over time, even if it is uncomfortable in the short term.
The Digital Transformation Expectation
Every higher ed CMO I have spoken to in the last five years has had some version of digital transformation on their agenda. The expectation is that they will modernise the institution’s marketing technology stack, improve the digital experience for prospective students, build out CRM capability, and do it all while also running day-to-day recruitment campaigns.
This is a significant undertaking in any organisation. In a university, it is compounded by legacy systems, procurement processes that were not designed for the pace of technology change, and the need to build internal capability in teams that may have been doing things the same way for a long time.
The rise of AI tools is adding another layer to this. Institutions are being asked to develop positions on AI-generated content, AI in admissions, and AI in student services, often before they have the internal expertise to make those decisions well. The shift toward AI-assisted workflows is real and accelerating, but the CMOs who are handling it best are the ones treating it as a capability question rather than a technology question. What can your team actually do better with these tools, and what does that require in terms of training, process, and governance?
Early in my career, when I was told there was no budget for a new website, I taught myself to code and built it anyway. That was not about the technology. It was about understanding enough of the problem to make something work with the resources available. The best higher ed marketers I know have that same disposition. They do not wait for the perfect stack. They build what they can with what they have, and they learn as they go.
What the Role Demands That Nobody Tells You
The higher ed CMO role requires a very specific combination of skills that is not always obvious from the outside. You need genuine marketing expertise, of course. But you also need the political intelligence to work effectively inside a consensus-driven institution, the commercial rigour to make a case for investment in language that resonates with a finance-minded leadership team, and the patience to build trust with academic stakeholders who may be sceptical of marketing as a discipline.
You also need to be comfortable with ambiguity. The measurement environment is imperfect. The decision-making processes are slow. The competitive landscape is shifting in ways that are difficult to predict. The CMOs who thrive in this environment are not the ones who need clean data and fast decisions. They are the ones who can make confident, well-reasoned calls with incomplete information, and who can explain those calls clearly to people who are not marketers.
Content strategy matters enormously in this environment. Understanding how search behaviour reflects genuine audience intent is foundational to building a content programme that actually reaches prospective students at the right moment in their consideration. Too many university content strategies are built around what the institution wants to say rather than what the prospective student is actually trying to find out.
Social channels play a specific role in higher ed that is different from most commercial sectors. Prospective students use social not just to discover institutions but to assess them, to see what current students are saying, to get a feel for the culture and community. LinkedIn in particular has become increasingly relevant for postgraduate and executive education recruitment, where professional credibility and alumni networks are part of the value proposition.
Where Higher Ed Marketing Actually Goes Wrong
The most common failure mode I see in higher ed marketing is not incompetence. It is misalignment. The marketing team is working hard, producing content, running campaigns, generating applications. But the strategy was built on assumptions about the audience that were never properly tested, the messaging was shaped by internal preferences rather than external insight, and the budget allocation reflects what is measurable rather than what is effective.
The second most common failure is short-termism. When enrolment numbers are under pressure, the instinct is to push harder on performance channels because the results are visible and immediate. Brand investment gets cut. Content programmes get paused. The institution trades long-term preference-building for short-term lead generation, and finds that the cost per application rises while the quality of applications falls, because you are reaching people who were already considering you rather than expanding the pool of people who would consider you.
I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across thirty industries, and the pattern is consistent regardless of sector: the organisations that protect brand investment through difficult periods tend to come out of those periods in a stronger competitive position than those that cut it. The measurement is harder. The board conversations are harder. But the commercial logic is sound.
Behavioural tools like Hotjar’s session recording and heatmap features can surface the friction points in the prospective student experience that campaign data alone will not reveal. Where are people dropping off the application form? Which course pages are generating the most engagement? What content is actually being read versus scrolled past? These are questions that inform better decisions, but only if someone is asking them and acting on the answers.
The broader challenge for higher ed CMOs is making the case that marketing effectiveness requires a long view, and doing that inside institutions where the pressure is almost entirely short-term. That is a leadership challenge as much as a marketing one, and it is why the role sits squarely within the wider conversation about what it takes to lead marketing effectively in complex organisations. The marketing leadership content on this site covers that territory in depth, including the structural dynamics that shape how much impact a CMO can actually have.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
