At Vovia, we have been working in the post-secondary education sector for over 10 years, collaborating with our long-standing partner, the University of Calgary, across practically all its faculties and business units. We have planned media campaigns to support undergrad, graduate, continuing education, and brand, along with research programs.
The Education vertical in Canada has shifted immensely during this time; competition is fiercer, program options are broader, and student decision journeys are more complex. While our strategic media approach to the post-secondary landscape has evolved to meet the challenge, a few key pillars stand the test of time. This blog shares our learnings, and we hope that if you are a post-secondary marketer, it will aid in supporting your own evolution.
Key Takeaway
If you only take one thing away from this blog, it is that enrollment management and marketing need to work cohesively as a single system – not siloed or parallel functions. From a media and marketing planning perspective, the most effective student recruitment strategies start with the institution’s strategic roadmap, out of which flows the marketing approach rooted in objectives, measured through KPI’s. This way, recruitment efforts don’t just fill seats; they support long-term institutional goals.
Audience: Understand How Students Really Research Institutions
The University of Calgary understands the importance of the prospective student audience journey. That encompasses how students make decisions about what post-secondary is right for them. Research consistently shows that both domestic and international students begin narrowing their post-secondary institution selection choices early – and they do it primarily online.
The UCalgary website is one of the most influential decision resources. Students are actively looking for key markers like: reputation and credibility, program outcomes and career pathways, student experience and campus life, program specifics and requirements, to name a few.
But audiences don’t stop at official sources. Prospective learners validate information and decisions through online search, AI tools, video platforms like YouTube, social media, digital communities, peers, guidance counsellors, student advisors, and ultimately, family. This means institutional content needs to do more than attract attention – it needs to answer real questions clearly and reliably. From a post-secondary marketing standpoint, this reinforces practical requirements; content must be easy to find, easy to digest, feel authentic and be credible.
Creative: Conversion Through Consistency
Students are highly attuned to message consistency. If the media campaign creative promises one experience and the landing page shows another, confidence drops quickly. This isn’t just a brand principle – it’s a conversion principle.
Real experiences, outcomes, and student voices in creative work have a great impact when they reflect reality. Consistency across ads, landing pages, program content, and follow-up communications reduces friction in the decision journey. AI demands credible content for an institution to show up in long-tail queries.
Authenticity isn’t just a creative choice – it’s a performance lever.
Measurement: Connecting Media Performance to Enrolment Outcomes
Once campaigns are in-market, enrollment management and performance marketing alignment becomes most visible in measurement. Marketing teams like Haskayne’s School of Business work closely with our Vovia team to understand how downstream outcomes like inquiries, applications, offers, acceptance and enrolments connect to marketing efforts. Enrolment results are analyzed against campaign outputs such as quality of conversions, creative performance, channel mix, program support, budget weighting, seasonality, and competition to optimize and make proactive data-driven marketing decisions.
Over time, we have developed faculty and program-specific benchmark data. This longitudinal view is far more valuable than single-cycle wins. It allows our client-media agency team to identify trends over time and stay ahead of platform shifts through ongoing testing and innovation.
Part of this effort is analyzing search trend data to understand how demand and audience search behaviour through AI is shifting over time – by program, by credential type, and by topic interest. A post-secondary landscape perspective adds valuable external context to internal performance data.
Key Takeaway: Unify Marketing with Enrolment
Let’s circle back to our key takeaway with a couple of practical considerations. Connecting enrolment management with marketing for effective outcomes depends on a few critical inputs:
- Clear institutional goals and defined enrolment targets
- An understanding of audience needs with a simplified student journey
- Authentic and credible content
- Measurement tied to real outcomes.
Students have more choices than ever, and marketers have more data than ever. The advantage comes from simplifying; focus on inputs, metrics, and experiences that matter to shift post-secondary marketing from a campaign to a growth strategy.