You’ve likely heard of the demographic cliff higher ed institutions are facing. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) projected that 2025 would be the beginning of a 16-year decline in the number of high school graduates. With that said, institutions are going up against thousands of other global universities vying for the same thing – recruiting and retaining students – but with a new challenge of less students.

In years past, universities used scattershot marketing approaches to broadly target prospective students. Although this strategy brought in more names and emails, it also relied heavily on “throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it sticks.” To drive meaningful results, your institution needs to rethink strategy and focus on what works: precision. 

Building Your Recruitment Campaign Strategy Intentionally

With the higher ed competition leaning toward more focused and data-driven marketing strategies, broad targeting may only lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Today’s competitive landscape calls for effective student recruitment campaigns that go beyond flashy creative or generic outreach. It demands precision – an integrated strategy that speaks to the right students through the right channels and at the right time.

Your university’s unique value proposition is the secret sauce. In today’s crowded marketing space, it’s not just about getting noticed; it’s about crafting a message that speaks directly to prospective students. Standing out means blending strategy and creativity to capture the attention of busy, scrolling applicants.

Instead of relying on scattershot “spaghetti” tactics, let’s dive into how a “honed” hamburger analogy can help your institution build a more effective recruitment strategy. Whether you’re building from the ground up or refining your approach, this “ingredient” checklist can serve as your blueprint for a successful, streamlined, and results-driven recruitment campaign.

The Student Recruitment Campaign Hamburger

The Bun: Define Your Goals

Every burger starts with a bun, and a well-built one should ideally hold everything together. In student recruitment, your bun (or foundation) is your campaign’s clearly defined goals. We’re not talking about a simple “increase applications” because that’s why you’re here. We’re talking about identifying specific metrics.

For example:

• Are you focused on boosting yield in underperforming geographies? 
• Are you seeking more inquiries?
• Are you improving conversion at the admit-to-deposit stage?
• Do you plan to increase first-generation enrollment by 15%?
• Do you expect to drive a 2:1 return on marketing investment for a flagship graduate program?

When goals are not established or clear, campaigns can drift. The more specifically targeted, the better. Otherwise, you might overspend on high-cost digital ads that appear to a wide net of high school graduates who click but don’t convert. Your messaging could also be so broad that it doesn’t resonate with the prospective students you actually want to reach.

Before diving into tactics, it’s important to align stakeholders around these measurable goals. Defining the “win” upfront ensures every decision supports enrollment outcomes – not vanity metrics.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce: Don’t stop at institutional goals. Identify what success looks like for each audience segment. What’s meaningful for a first-gen student from Atlanta might not resonate with a transfer student in Texas. Schools whom define success down to the segment level get sharper recruitment efforts.

The Onion: Know Your Audience(s) Inside and Out

Peel back the layers of your audience and you’ll discover key insights. On the surface, most prospective students seem similar: they want a good education, a strong career outcome, and maybe a welcoming campus. But dig deeper – what do you really know about them? 

Effective recruitment requires deep audience intelligence (not assumptions). You already have gold in your CRM, email marketing platform, and web analytics tools. Pull it. Analyze it. Use it. You may find barriers, decision-making timelines, lack of information, or more affect potential applicants from taking action.

Use your existing data through platforms like Slate, Naviance, Google Analytics, and YouVisit to reveal who’s engaging with you, where they’re dropping off, and which messages are converting. Then, you can continue segmenting by academic interest, geography, demographics, intent signals, and more to personalize outreach, prioritize resources, and move students through the funnel with the right message.

Audience data should inform everything from media strategy to creative to timing. For instance, say your institution notices students from a specific metro area are consistently engaging with veterinary medicine content but dropping off before applying. In one cycle, a tailored digital campaign speaking to those students’ desires to make a difference in animal health could be the solution to lift conversions from that region.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce: Look beyond the basics. Use your data to identify high-yield feeder schools and zip codes. Watch for behavioral triggers like email clicks, video views, repeat page views, and virtual tour completions. And pay close attention to content gaps – where are students exiting your site or stopping short of inquiry? These drop-off points in the funnel are opportunities waiting to be fixed.

The Pickle: Audit and Align Your Messaging

Here’s the thing about pickles: they’re not for everyone. And neither is your messaging. If your campaign copy is a list of generic benefits like “beautiful campus” and “innovative programs,” you lose attention – and applications.

If your brand promise isn’t aligned with what your prospective students value most, your campaign will underperform, no matter how much you spend. Review your current messaging for clarity, relevance, and resonance.

Instead:

• Lead with benefits that resonate with your audience’s values: career outcomes, flexibility, and affordability.
• Use voice-of-student language. What phrases do they use to describe your school?
• Customize your language and tone by channel and segment. Instagram isn’t LinkedIn and vice versa.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce: Use audience research to connect effective messaging with aspiration and outcome. Ultimately, students want to know, “What will this degree do for me – and why here, not there?”

The Cheese: Invest in Full-funnel Media Strategy

You can choose any cheese you want on your burger – even layer it up with different types. Just remember, it needs to be thoughtfully placed. In student recruitment, that “cheese” is your media strategy; it needs to show up at every stage of the enrollment journey, meet students where they are, and speak directly to what matters most to them.

An effective student recruitment campaign uses a full-funnel, cross-channel strategy to move prospects from “I’ve never heard of that university” to “I’m applying to that university.” A student first discovering your brand needs a very different message than one who’s already toured campus and applied. That’s why smart recruitment campaigns continue beyond awareness. They guide prospects through the entire funnel to build familiarity, earn trust, and reinforce value at every stage.

Targeting high school juniors with general awareness messaging won’t help your admitted senior yield. Likewise, hammering application CTAs at sophomores in the research stage will only lead to fatigue. An effective strategy layers your messaging – from top-of-funnel curiosity to bottom-of-funnel conversion – and meets prospective students on the platforms they use.

Here’s how that might look:

• Top-of-Funnel (Awareness): Story-driven video ads on Meta, YouTube, or TikTok that introduce your campus culture, student success stories, or distinctive programs. Focus on sparking interest.
• Mid-Funnel (Consideration): Retargeted content highlighting program benefits, visit opportunities, or outcomes. Use search and social media to answer the questions they’re asking right now.
• Bottom-of-Funnel (Decision): Personalized emails, admitted student landing pages, or yield-focused SMS nudges that speak to remaining objections – cost, fit, or value.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce: Map your media to intent signals. If a student watched a program-specific video, retarget them with faculty spotlights. If they’ve opened your admitted student guide three times, it’s time for a personal outreach moment. Layer your media like you’d layer your cheese – strategically and with the whole experience in mind.

The Patty: Build Conversion Infrastructure

Traffic without conversion is like a burger without a patty – ineffective. Your paid media and awareness tactics might bring students to your site, but if your infrastructure isn’t built to capture, nurture, and convert them, the opportunity stops there.

Your digital ecosystem should work as hard as your ads. That means ensuring every step from the first click to the final deposit is designed with student action in mind. Are your forms short and mobile-friendly? Are your landing pages built around what a student actually wants to know, not just what you want to say? Is there a clear next step on every page?

A student can’t convert if your infrastructure is clunky, confusing, or disconnected.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce:

• Mobile-first landing pages that load quickly
• Clear CTAs like “Request Info,” “Apply Now,” or “Register for a Visit”
• Integrated forms and tracking with tools like Slate, HubSpot, and Google Tag Manager
• Automated email/SMS flows tailored by stage and behavior
• A feedback loop between marketing and admissions teams to act on leads in real time

The Avocado (or Egg): Prioritize Creative That Performs

Some burgers have that one topping that grabs your attention – whether it’s a fried egg or creamy avocado. That’s your creative. It’s what makes someone stop mid-scroll and go, “Wait, what school is this?”

Today’s prospective students are bombarded with content. If your creative doesn’t stand out, it gets ignored. And if it doesn’t reflect their reality, it gets dismissed. Whether it’s a six-second TikTok or a landing page hero image, your creative must speak to your audience’s aspirations, values, and goals – in their language, not just your brand’s.

Don’t just guess what works. Build a creative engine that tests, learns, and evolves based on performance rather than opinion.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce:

• Video that showcases real student experiences and outcomes
• Bold, punchy headlines with program-level relevance
• Visuals that reflect your audience’s diversity and your brand’s authenticity
• A/B testing regularly of copy, imagery, and format – then scaling what performs

The Tomato: Monitor, Optimize, and Iterate

You can’t forget a classic tomato on a burger, just like you shouldn’t set your recruitment campaign and forget about it. In your strategy, the “tomato” is performance optimization. Without it, your whole effort risks going stale.

From weekly performance check-ins to real-time refinements, your campaign needs continual attention. That includes watching for message fatigue, shifting budget where it’s working, and adjusting creative based on actual engagement.

It also means respecting the student journey. A message that works for a first-time visitor likely won’t work for someone considering financial aid after being admitted. The more you can map messaging to funnel stages and signals, the more efficient your spend – and the stronger your ROI.

Add Frankel’s Secret Sauce: 

• Weekly performance dashboards
• Campaign heatmaps, click-through rate tracking, and yield analysis
• Message testing across key segments – demographic, geographic, and academic interest
• Agile adjustments to budget, creative, or targeting based on real-time results

Plan your media and messaging around the academic calendar. Align campaigns to key milestones such as first looks in fall, visits and applications in winter, yield in spring. Then, tailor your message to where students are in the funnel. If your budget is tight, focus your energy on lower cost, high-impact opportunities such as SMS or one-on-one calls.

The Lettuce: Align Your Internal Teams

Think of the lettuce as the alignment and structure of your student recruitment burger – specifically, how your internal teams work together. From your marketing agency to campus leadership to frontline admissions teams, everyone needs to be on the same page.

Clarity is key because a lot can get lost in translation between partners. Present the strategy with equal transparency across stakeholders, explain the rationale behind your goals, and establish clear roles from the start. Once the campaign is live, take ownership. Internal teams shouldn’t view the campaign as an outside effort – they should feel empowered to run with it as their own.

Marketing and admissions can operate as a unified front through consistent check-ins, messaging coordination, event timing, territory strategy, and lead management to help reduce friction and maximize impact.

Without strong collaboration, even the best strategy can unravel. Misaligned messaging, missed follow-ups, and disconnected efforts weaken ROI and confuse your audience. Use lettuce as your reminder that internal alignment isn’t just nice to have, it’s a strong structural component to campaign success.

Frankel’s Secret Sauce: Activate your brand from the inside out. Launch it with your internal team first before your external audience. Make sure faculty, campus tour leaders, and call center representatives are all familiar with – and can speak to – the campaign’s core messages before launch time. Every touchpoint matters.

Be Precise. Serve Results.

Every element of your recruitment strategy matters, just like every layer of the perfect burger. Stack it right, and you achieve something memorable. If you finished this blog hungry for more strategy in your student recruitment campaign – or just hungry – let’s grab a bite and talk.

At Frankel, we’ve worked with colleges and universities of all sizes to navigate enrollment challenges, differentiate their brands, and meet ambitious yield goals. We help institutions build customized (and full-flavor) campaigns that convert. Our higher ed marketing portfolio speaks for itself. From various enrollment campaigns for flagship public universities and specialized two-year colleges, one thing is consistent: success comes from precision, not volume. When strategy, messaging, media, and measurement work in concert, results follow.

Here’s how that looks in action.

The University of Florida College of Pharmacy needed to boost student yield and out-of-state enrollment. We developed a targeted communication plan that helped increase out-of-state tuition revenue by $2.7 million and move their national ranking from #9 to #5. For UF’s IFAS Plant Breeding Ph.D. program, we drove a 25% increase in applications with the implementation of original messaging and design as well as a full digital ad campaign. Take a look at more of our work in higher ed.

 

Instead of throwing spaghetti at a wall, start building burgers with a college marketing agency on your team.