And Carrie On

In the world of higher education, we saw a lot of change to our marketing work over the past couple of years.

With the advancements in generative AI, changes to Google Analytics, the changing demographic of students and the looming enrollment cliff, there are no shortage of challenges and things to keep us up at night.

Looking Ahead in 2024

As we embrace the new year, I found myself staring to think about some of the big impacts or trends that we might see in the work, specifically within higher education.

However, before getting into my own thoughts — here are a few predictions from experts in the space.

First, the American Marketing Association released these top predictions for marketing as a profession.

In the higher ed space, my friend Mallory Willsea shared her predictions as part of an Enrollify podcast.

My Personal Predictions

Generative AI – I think marketing teams will become comfortable with using this tool in more strategic ways. Right now, it’s very adhoc in nature, and I think teams will begin to build an infrastructure around how they use the tool in ways that are less segmented. Instead, I see there will be more focus on collaboration within the tools to help support the university function of enrollment, fundraising, educating students, etc.

Experience Marketing – Prospective students have lived everything in a digital first world and are used to everything being an experience. I think higher education marketing leaders must be prepared to think about the total experience of campus to fully support these students. It will no longer be enough to have a selfie wall in the back of a room. Instead, every interaction on campus must play to the complete experience, so how do we build that into our processes and into our culture.

Website Personalization – Many universities are slow to the draw when it comes to true hyper personalization, but I do think we’re quickly approaching the ability to embrace personalization on our website. The technology to hook into the CRM for prospective students and the campus sign-on system for current students offers us the chance to use the website in meaningful ways to drive an array of actions that we need both current and prospective students to take. While it’s a first step, I think this year could be a year we see universities begin embracing this step.

Gamification – Many of our current and prospective students are looking for fun. The pandemic has been hard. The world is tough. And they are looking for experiences that are fun. The more we can build gamification into our content strategy, I think we’re helping to make the college experience a fun one. This could be creating games around selecting a major, matching people to a residence hall that fits their style, or a trivia kind of game to build affinity with campus. The reality is when we make campus fun, we help bring back a little fun in a tough world. People need that escape.

More Video – Video continues to be on the rise, and I think we’re going to see that continue. There is an expectation that we incorporate video into our website, our email campaigns, and our marketing messages. We need to make sure we’re developing a video strategy for our campus and build out what that looks like, whether it’s event highlights, testimonials, fun reviews of an event, etc. I think the more video assets we have available, the better equipped we as universities will be to tell an authentic, genuine university story.

What Have I missed?

I’m curious what are the big things you and your team will be focused on in the coming year? Are there other trends that you and your teams are focused on?

I can’t wait to revisit this later in the year to see where we stand.

In the meantime, happy new year!