Brush Up the Marketing Plan
By late April, most higher education teams are heavily focused on final yield campaigns. However, April is when next year's plan starts becoming real. This is the time for aligning plans across admissions, marketing, finance, and academic teams before the summer planning months slip away. If your marketing and admissions teams are not entirely in sync right now, you are already behind schedule. But it’s not too late.
Breaking Down Silos
You cannot build a successful marketing plan in a vacuum. To build a true connection, students should not feel like they are hearing from five different offices.
To make this work, you have to bring admissions into the room early. You should leverage your admissions officers' expertise to better understand the audience while relieving them of communications duties. Admissions teams should focus on having meaningful conversations with students, while marketing should own and be responsible for the quality of all outgoing communications. That setup keeps messages clearer and handoffs cleaner.
Shared KPIs and Firm Timelines
Once the internal teams are aligned on roles, the focus must shift to accountability and shared metrics. You cannot build a timeline or a budget without knowing what you are measuring. If KPIs for leads and apps were not defined before a project, present historical data to help the team define those baselines today.
With baseline metrics in place, you can enforce firm timelines for the upcoming fiscal year. The goal is to eliminate overbuilt reporting and focus on actionable insights. I once inherited a tracking system built entirely around what a vendor could track rather than what actually indicated a student's interest. We were buried in dense, unreadable reports that ate up our time without giving us real answers.
Decide which numbers you truly need to make smart choices, then keep the rest of the budget focused on reaching students. Simplifying your dashboards ensures that when the fall rush hits, your team is reacting to real performance data rather than getting lost in the weeds.
You “Ken” Quote Me
I’ve been collecting observations and reflections on marketing and communications for more than 20 years. That archive inspired me to share these bits of wisdom through a blog. The quotes below, which helped shape this article, are my words and thoughts from that collection.
"Leverage the expertise of your admissions and recruitment teams to better understand the audience; they’re on the front lines."
"What are the bare minimum analytics I need that I can also make decisions and take action on?"
"Decide which numbers you truly need to make smart choices."
Let's Discuss It!
How do you align your marketing and admissions teams to agree on shared KPIs before the new fiscal year begins? I want to hear the story. Connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message with your thoughts.