Service Line: Digital Marketing

Today’s graduate enrollment management landscape is incredibly challenging. The industry is facing a wide variety of intersecting issues—budget shortfalls, more competition than ever, changing market dynamics, a decline in test takers, and increased consumer privacy and data protection. All these challenges mean it’s essential to reconsider and weigh the pros and cons of how things are done on your campus. One of the biggest decisions is whether or not to centralize or decentralize your graduate marketing efforts.

In this blog, we review trends observed in 2023 in both the broader world of marketing and specifically in higher education. Not all of these are new trends, but all were relevant in 2023 and will likely stay relevant in 2024. 

As another year wraps up, we’re looking back at the higher education events that shook the industry, made us think, and that we’ll be watching in 2024. 

LinkedIn’s Predictive Audiences are the platform’s entry into probabilistic audience targeting. We’ve seen this tactic have a dramatic positive effect on campaign efficiency. Keep reading to find out how your team can use them to increase the efficiency of your LinkedIn campaigns!

TikTok Spark Ads are kind of the new kid on the block. According to TikTok Business Help Center, they’re “a native ad format that enables you to leverage organic TikTok posts and their features in your advertising.”

Academic program pages are vital to the success of a college or university website, and on a larger scale, integrated marketing and enrollment efforts. A higher education website is a living, breathing tool to attract prospective students to the institution, connecting them with the information and resources they need.

At Carnegie, we often get asked about the advantages of working with a single agency partner as opposed to multiple. Is it more beneficial to work with one agency for your marketing efforts? 

Working with multiple agencies can offer a variety of perspectives and can be appealing if you have multiple projects you need to accomplish at once. But, there are numerous benefits to working with a single partner that will save you time, money, and frustration.

In the wake of the SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action in higher ed, the conversation around molding a class—a diverse class in particular—has been more active than ever. Institutions are not all impacted equally by this ruling, but for those institutions with commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion this topic is front and center. In this blog, we will tackle one specific piece of the much larger—enrolling a diverse class—puzzle: How can an institution use marketing to recruit a diverse inquiry pool?

Experiencing AI fatigue? You’re not alone. The topic of AI has been on heavy hype rotation for several months without any sign of relenting. Every day brings a steady stream of announcements. AI+Microsoft. AI+Google. AI+everything. The question is, what does this mean for AI+you? With so many new AI-supercharged products and services rushing to market—as well as all of the worries and concerns expressed about the technology practically and philosophically—how do you make sense of it all?

Understanding sentiment may be the most underrated step in developing marketing materials. Or, more accurately, understanding the sentiment of the target audience.