Brush Up the Marketing Plan

Mar 29

Align your data and goals team for upcoming year.

By late April, enrollment teams are buried in final yield work. But if you wait until summer to sort out next year's strategy, you won’t be planning…you’ll be untangling. Now is the time for a practical check-in on what your data says, what to stop doing, and how marketing and admissions will align before the next cycle hits.

Fix the Handoff

The biggest bottleneck on campus is often the space between marketing and admissions. If the team generating leads and the team calling them are not working from the same map, students fall into the void.

According to a Harvard Business Review study, aligning sales and marketing metrics yields shorter cycles and lower costs. Speed matters: a joint Harvard Business Review and MIT study found that organizations that contact a new lead within five minutes are 100 times more likely to connect than those that wait 30 minutes, and 78% of customers buy from the first responder. A student raising their hand creates a brief window. If your internal handoff is sloppy, that window closes.

Check the Data You Use

The more data teams collect, the easier it becomes to confuse volume with clarity. Dashboards grow, reports multiply, and soon you spend more time maintaining tracking environments than making decisions.

According toSimpsonScarborough’s 2025 State of Higher Education report, only 30% of schools have successfully integrated their CRM and CMS. Stop chasing perfect data. Focus on usable data. Identify the two or three indicators that actually drive decisions: Which sources produce enrolled students? Which campaigns create movement? Which emails are actually important?

Cut the Reports

Every campus has reports produced purely out of habit. This is the season to ask a blunt question: What decisions does this report actually change? If a metric does not help someone shift budget, adjust messaging, or prioritize follow-up, kill it. Clearing out unnecessary reporting protects your team's attention and eliminates noise.

Align on What Matters Most

A useful end-of-year alignment conversation requires three practical commitments:

Establish the plan: Pick a date in summer to finalize the media budget and core messaging.
Define ownership: Map exactly when a prospective student moves from automated marketing to human follow-up, and name who owns that step.
Audit for action: Keep only the reports that inform decisions. Retire the ones that only create meeting chatter.

Brush Up Before You Build More

Before adding another campaign, audience segment, or dashboard, refine what you already have. Clean up the handoff, kill useless reports, and agree on the essential decisions. The real advantage in enrollment is not having more information, but knowing which information deserves to shape the work.

Share Your Thoughts, Let's Connect!

Deciding what metrics to kill is often harder than deciding what to build. I know it can be a battle to get teams to let go of massive reporting dashboards. If you finally stopped tracking a vanity metric this year, I'd love to know which one.Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know.

The following pieces of research, web pages, and organizational data were used to create this article, providing transparency and allowing you to explore the findings further:

Harvard Business Review. "Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing." By Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, Suj Krishnaswamy. July 2006.
Harvard Business Review / MIT. "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads." By James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, David Elkington. March 2011.
SimpsonScarborough. "Website & Marketing Technology: The State of Higher Education (2025 Edition)." Alexandria, VA: SimpsonScarborough, 2025.

Borrow My Notes

I’ve collected observations and reflections on marketing, communications, and recruitment for more than 20 years. That archive inspired me to share these insights through this blog. Here are excerpts from my collection that helped shape this article:

“Enrollment management and current students can provide valuable feedback on student preferences and the accuracy of demand projections.”
“The institutions gaining traction structure their goals to reflect what matters most and use relevant data to inform decisions.”

Ken Cutts

Bridging the gap between high-level strategy and daily execution. Practical advice on scaling marketing operations and driving results without the industry jargon.