Fostering Interdepartmental Collaboration to Drive a More Effective and Engaging Student Journey
Achieving success in your higher education marketing strategy requires seamless collaboration between your admissions and marketing teams to create a connected, consistent student journey experience. When these teams align, they move beyond their isolated efforts and build a unified strategy that not only captures students’ attention but also drives meaningful engagement and enrollments.
Admissions teams gain critical, real-time insights from their conversations with prospective students, and marketing teams transform those insights into strategies and assets that resonate with the right audiences. By sharing their insights, both teams can better inform campaigns, conversations, and touchpoints, ensuring every interaction feels intentional, relevant, and student-centered.
However, this alignment doesn’t happen by chance. It requires deliberate collaboration, thoughtful planning, and the strategic use of data at every stage. From discovery interviews and customer relationship management (CRM) data analysis to shared campaign development, each step in the process plays a vital role in delivering a cohesive, engaging experience that guides prospective students from curiosity to commitment.
The Importance and Benefits of Collaboration Between Admissions and Marketing Teams
In an increasingly competitive higher ed landscape, having admissions and marketing teams that collaborate and communicate with each other regularly can make a meaningful difference in the experience that an institution delivers to prospective students, while optimizing its marketing efforts for maximum impact.
When admissions and marketing operate in silos, the cohesion breaks down. Collaboration prevents these gaps, ensuring every message, from the first ad to the final admissions call, feels aligned and purposeful.
Creating a Unified Message
Students don’t distinguish between “admissions” and “marketing” — they only see the institution. That’s why a unified message is so crucial to every higher education marketing strategy. A consistent and unified message — whether it’s delivered through ads, emails, website visits, or conversations with admissions personnel — builds trust, strengthens the brand, and guides prospective students smoothly through their decision-making journey.
Building a Powerful Feedback Loop
When admissions and marketing teams stay in consistent communication, they create a powerful feedback loop that strengthens the institution’s messaging and better serves its prospective students.
Admissions teams are on the front lines, having daily conversations with students and hearing their motivations, hesitations, and questions firsthand. These interactions provide invaluable qualitative insights that can flow back into marketing assets and strategies.
For example, if students frequently ask about program outcomes — such as what they can do with a certain degree — marketing can develop targeted blog content, alumni video spotlights, or landing page updates showcasing career opportunities, industry connections, and success stories related to the degree. Additionally, if there are common points of confusion that come up in students’ conversations with admissions staff, marketing materials can be created that clearly and directly address these issues.
By tapping into this feedback loop, both teams can make meaningful, real-time adjustments that align the institution’s messaging with students’ priorities, enhance engagement, and drive better outcomes.
Empowering Teams With Critical Insights and Knowledge
Both admissions and marketing teams bring something unique and valuable to the table when it comes to understanding the institution’s brand, its offerings, and its students. While there are areas of overlap, each team also has its own distinct focal points that allow it to provide useful details the other team can benefit from, creating a richer and more comprehensive appreciation of how each team can best serve the institution’s students.
Practical Ways to Collaborate
Now that we’ve established the importance of collaboration, let’s take a look at some practical ways to bring this strategy to life.
Coordinate and Share Learnings During a Discovery Process
The first step is discovery, the phase where both admissions and marketing teams collaborate to analyze and uncover insights that will make their work more accurate, impactful, and aligned. The discovery process includes in-depth conversations with key university stakeholders; audits of existing school resources, marketing collateral, and program materials; and market research and competitive analysis to understand the institution’s positioning and audience needs.
Each team adds unique value to the process. Admissions teams gather information about program-specific details, students’ motivations, and nuances that resonate during enrollment conversations, while marketing teams analyze the institution’s competitive positioning, audience behaviors, and key differentiators. By sharing and coordinating these efforts upfront, teams can reduce redundancies, ensure alignment, and create a more cohesive strategy that delivers consistent, tailored messaging.
Here are some tactics that can help in coordinating and consolidating discovery efforts:
- Shared discovery templates
- Create standardized templates for interviews, audits, and insight summaries to ensure consistency in how findings are gathered and shared across teams.
- Discovery check-ins
- Ensure there are opportunities to check in and share progressive findings or learnings with the other team. This not only helps ensure that what is being communicated or uncovered by each team is consistent and in alignment. It also provides each team with valuable information that will help guide deeper conversations or elicit important questions that can be addressed sooner.
- Centralized insight repository
- Use a shared platform (e.g., Asana, Google Docs, or Notion) to compile key findings, data points, and interview notes in one place.
- Joint stakeholder interviews and meetings
- Conduct some discovery interviews with stakeholders (e.g., marketing, program directors, faculty, students) jointly. This ensures both teams hear the same information and gain aligned insights.
- For separate interviews, share questions between teams beforehand to ensure all interviews are exploring complementary areas.
Schedule Ongoing Check-Ins With Teams
Consistent communication is critical for collaboration. Regular monthly or quarterly meetings that include both admissions and marketing staff create space for sharing insights, identifying trends, and closing messaging gaps.
Admissions teams can spotlight common motivations, pain points, and areas of confusion among students, so marketing teams can update campaigns to address these themes in real time. These sessions ensure all higher education marketing strategies stay aligned and adaptive, making the student experience feel more cohesive.
Leverage CRM Data
Every interaction with a student leaves a breadcrumb trail of data. By tapping into call notes and CRM system data, admissions and marketing teams can track students’ questions, motivations, and hesitations.
Analyzing this data can reveal trends that marketing can address through website updates, FAQs, and ad campaigns. Sharing actionable summaries allows admissions teams to prepare for upcoming conversations and marketing teams to preemptively answer students’ concerns, creating a more seamless experience for prospects.
Share and Understand Key Resources
Developing key marketing resources, such as a Strategic Marketing Guide (SMG), and sharing them across teams can help keep admissions and marketing teams’ collaboration efforts on track.
An SMG isn’t just a document — it’s the framework that ensures every team is aligned in understanding the key components of the institution’s brand, story, and students. Personas, unique value propositions (UVPs), brand stories and positioning, and messaging frameworks outlined in an SMG help admissions and marketing teams speak the same language and tell a shared story.
Connect Your Admissions and Marketing Teams Through Collaboration With Archer
At Archer Education, we don’t just build marketing strategies — we build lasting capabilities. Our approach goes beyond campaign launches and lead generation to focus on sustainable online infrastructure that empowers universities to thrive long after our work is done. From aligning admissions and marketing teams to developing data-driven messaging frameworks, we act as a true partner in developing custom higher education marketing strategies that work.
Our collaboration is designed to transfer knowledge, not just deliver results. We equip your teams with the tools, training, and insights they need to operate with confidence, ensuring your institution isn’t reliant on outside support to maintain momentum. The result is a marketing engine that runs smoothly long after Archer’s involvement has ended, empowering your teams to lead with agility in an ever-changing higher education landscape.
Contact us today to learn more.
