How to Conquer the Biggest Higher Ed Marketing Challenges in 2025
March 17th, 2025 by
Key Insights
- Higher Education Marketing Must Adapt to Changing Student Behavior: With the demographic cliff, the rise of alternative education pathways, and AI-driven search, universities must rethink their strategies to reach prospective students.
- AI, Social Search, and Privacy Shifts Require a Smarter Digital Approach: Traditional SEO strategies and digital advertising tactics are no longer enough. Institutions must focus on creating in-depth content, leveraging engagement-driven marketing, and adopting privacy-compliant advertising.
- Tracking Key Metrics Is Critical for Optimizing Marketing Performance: Many universities track inquiry sources but fail to measure cost per inquiry (CPI) and cost per enrolled student. Understanding these metrics enables higher education marketers to allocate resources more efficiently, improve ROI, and drive better enrollment outcomes.
As traditional student populations decline and digital marketing evolves, universities must rethink their marketing strategies to attract and engage prospective students. From shifting search behaviors to the rise of alternative education pathways, academic leaders face increasing pressure to adapt — or risk falling behind.
The biggest challenges in higher ed marketing require institutions to redefine how they connect with an audience more diverse, digitally savvy, and selective than ever before.
Non-traditional students, career changers, and lifelong learners are reshaping enrollment trends, while AI Overviews and social search are transforming how students discover programs. At the same time, new privacy regulations and the loss of third-party cookies demand a smarter approach to data tracking and digital marketing.
With all these new marketing trends flooding higher education, it can be hard to figure out where to start. Our Self-Assessment White Paper provides you with clear strategies to address these trends and helps you build a full-funnel, cross-channel campaign.
In this blog, we’ll explore the most pressing marketing trends and share practical solutions to help your institution strengthen student engagement, refine its digital strategies, and maximize its marketing ROI.
Higher Ed Marketing Challenges
Changing demographic and enrollment landscape in higher education
The higher education landscape is shifting dramatically, and the long-anticipated demographic cliff is here. As the number of “college-aged” students declines, institutions historically relying on traditional undergraduate enrollments must rethink their approach.
To stay competitive, higher education institutions must expand their focus beyond recent high school graduates and embrace a broader audience — adult learners, career changers, and professionals seeking skills-based education.
Search Influence, in collaboration with UPCEA, explored these challenges in our Higher Ed Marketing Metrics Research Study: What Gets Measured Gets Managed, reinforcing the need for institutions to rethink how they attract and retain students.
The move away from traditional education pathways
The traditional four-year degree is no longer the only — or even the preferred — pathway for many modern learners.
Rising tuition costs, evolving workforce demands, and a desire for flexibility are driving students toward microcredentials, online degrees, and non-credit-to-credit pathways that allow them to tailor their education to their career goals.
The workforce is evolving too quickly for rigid, 120-credit degree programs to keep up.
As Aaron Brower highlights in From Degrees to Microcredentials: Higher Education Must Evolve to Embrace the Modern Economy, this shift isn’t just about cost — it’s about relevance.
Instead, students are adopting a “mix-and-match” approach to learning, combining traditional coursework with certifications, industry-recognized credentials, and skill-based training. This shift is forcing schools and universities to adapt their higher education marketing and university marketing strategies to ensure they reach and engage today’s learners.
Prospective students are looking for technology-driven solutions that allow them to engage with coursework without sacrificing work, family, or other commitments. Institutions must emphasize the benefits of flexible learning options to attract more students.
This means adapting marketing communications to highlight the value of alternative education pathways, including non-credit programs that can stack into degrees, online learning that fits busy schedules, and credentials that provide immediate career impact.
How to overcome this challenge
For campuses to thrive in this new landscape, institutions need to evolve their messaging to focus on lead generation and long-term student engagement. Universities that successfully communicate the advantages of non-traditional education will attract more students and position themselves as forward-thinking leaders in an era where lifelong learning is essential.
AI’s impact on behavior and the search landscape
The students of tomorrow are already using AI today.
From AI-powered tutoring to research tools, current students in secondary education are incorporating AI into their learning experiences. This shift will impact the student journey in several ways, including how they research universities and make enrollment decisions.
AI chatbots and search assistants are becoming key tools in the consideration process, influencing how prospective students compare programs and evaluate their options. As AI becomes more integrated into daily life, students will expect universities to embrace AI-driven tools within their curricula, career services, and digital experiences.
Beyond student behavior, AI is also transforming search visibility, creating new challenges for higher education marketing.
Traditional blog posts and website pages may see lower rankings as AI-generated responses take priority, pushing informational content further down search results. Universities not featured in Google’s AI Overviews may struggle to compete, even if they have strong organic rankings. The prominence of featured snippets is diminishing, reducing an important source of organic traffic for university websites.
How to overcome this challenge
As AI changes how content is surfaced, higher education marketers must refine their content marketing strategies to maintain visibility and engagement.
Universities will stand out by developing in-depth, research-backed digital content that provides more value than AI’s quick answers. Targeting long-tail keywords and specific queries related to degree programs and career pathways helps ensure their content remains relevant to searchers.
Additionally, incorporating interactive elements such as webinars, virtual tours, and downloadable guides creates direct engagement opportunities that AI-generated summaries cannot replicate.
Universities that proactively adapt their strategies now will be better positioned to connect with future prospects and remain competitive in the digital landscape.
Social search
Social search is redefining how prospective students discover and engage with universities, presenting new challenges for higher education marketing.
As more and more prospective students treat social media as a search engine, marketers should take note and optimize it as such. Higher ed marketers need to prioritize their social media strategy for engagement, sharability, and social search.
Unlike traditional search engines, where users type in queries and receive ranked web pages in return, social search enables users to find content through in-app searches on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Prospective students no longer rely solely on Google to explore their higher education options; they turn to social media channels to watch campus tour videos, read student testimonials, and engage in real-time discussions about universities.
Adding to the complexity, social media posts now appear in Google search results, further blurring the lines between traditional and social search. This means universities cannot afford to neglect their social media presence, as their content may surface in multiple search environments.
However, unlike Google’s algorithm, which relies heavily on keyword optimization, social search prioritizes highly engaging, interactive content. Most institutions find it difficult to control rankings on these platforms because visibility is driven by likes, shares, comments, and overall engagement rather than structured SEO strategies.
Higher ed marketers must transform their existing content into social-friendly formats to remain competitive in a digital world where social sharing and engagement drive discovery.
Simply having a website is no longer enough — creating videos, infographics, and interactive posts ensures content is engaging and discoverable.
Since platforms like TikTok and Instagram favor multimedia, investing in digital storytelling will help institutions connect with prospective students where they are already searching.
Universities should prioritize social sharing by encouraging engagement through live Q&A sessions, discussion-based posts, and polls that prompt audience interaction.
How to overcome this challenge
By embracing innovation in social search strategies, universities can strengthen their online presence, generate lead inquiries, and adapt to the way students are now exploring their higher ed options.
Third-party cookie deprecation
With Google phasing out third-party cookies, digital marketing strategies that once relied on behavioral tracking must shift toward privacy-first solutions. Advertisers will have reduced targeting capabilities, making it harder to reach prospective students based on browsing history.
Traditional conversion tracking methods will become less effective, requiring new ways to measure campaign success and ensure marketing dollars are spent efficiently. Stricter privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, further emphasize the need for compliance, pushing institutions to be more transparent about how they collect and use student data.
To overcome these challenges, institutions should focus on lead generation through first-party data, collecting valuable insights directly from their websites. Inquiry forms, application submissions, and newsletter sign-ups provide direct access to student audiences and enable universities to build personalized marketing campaigns while maintaining privacy compliance.
Contextual advertising is another effective approach. It allows schools to target students based on the content they engage with rather than their past browsing behavior.
Addressable geofencing offers an innovative way to reach potential students. It targets specific locations where ideal candidates are likely to be found and uses first-party CRM data to refine outreach efforts.
H4 – How to overcome this challenge
Beyond technical solutions, building trust and strengthening relationships with prospective students is crucial. By emphasizing transparency and communicating the value of data collection, universities can create personalized yet privacy-conscious experiences that enhance engagement.
Tracking key metrics for performance
Tracking key metrics is essential for ensuring the success of higher education marketing efforts, yet many colleges and universities still struggle to measure the true impact of their campaigns.
UPCEA and Search Influence collaborated on the Higher Ed Marketing Metrics Research Study: What Gets Measured Gets Managed to address this challenge.
This study highlights a critical issue: While most marketing teams can identify the source of inquiries, far fewer track the actual cost per inquiry (CPI) or cost per enrolled student — two essential metrics for assessing marketing efficiency.
In fact, while nearly 73% of marketing units track the source of inquiries for online and professional education programs, only 46% track CPI, and just 43% monitor the cost per enrolled student. Even more concerning, 17% do not track any of these key performance indicators at all.
Understanding CPI and cost per enrolled student provides significant benefits for colleges and universities looking to optimize their campus recruitment efforts.
Tracking these metrics allows marketing teams to assess whether they are generating an appropriate volume of prospects and determine if those inquiries are converting into actual enrollments. More importantly, it enables data-driven decision-making by showing where budget optimizations can improve efficiency.
For example, if one marketing channel consistently delivers high CPI but low conversion rates, adjustments can be made to targeting, messaging, or spend allocation to maximize future results. Tracking these metrics provides a foundation for deeper analysis, helping universities evaluate lead quality, conversion ratios, and the overall effectiveness of different marketing channels.
How to overcome this challenge
By prioritizing CPI and cost per enrolled student, higher education marketing teams can make informed adjustments to their strategies, ensuring that resources are directed toward the highest-performing channels. This approach improves campaign performance and allows institutions to better understand how their marketing investments drive student engagement.
Contact Our Award-Winning Higher Ed Marketing Agency
From AI Overviews and social search to the loss of third-party cookies and the need for better performance tracking, higher education marketers must adapt to stay ahead.
Today’s institutions need a digital marketing strategy that maximizes resources, engages prospects, and drives real results.
At Search Influence, we help colleges and universities overcome these challenges with data-driven strategies that enhance visibility, optimize advertising, and improve lead generation.
Our Higher Ed Marketing Self-Assessment White Paper provides a roadmap to building a full-funnel, student-centered marketing approach. Discover how rethinking your SEO strategy, advertising efforts, and engagement tactics can help your institution attract more students.
Download the Self-Assessment White Paper today and start optimizing your marketing strategy for success.
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