11x the Traffic: The Data Behind an Awareness Campaign That Worked
This post is part of OnDeck & OffScript, our ongoing series that features the voices of today’s marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education. We love talking about awareness spending, budget tensions, AI in higher ed, and enrollment strategy. We're equally curious about whatever's on your mind. Got something to say? Tell us about it.
A marketing team builds an awareness campaign for months, the campaign runs, and the first question from leadership is always the same: how many applications did it drive? That's the wrong question, and it's why so many awareness campaigns get killed before they get a fair shot.
Shane Baglini, Executive Director of Marketing and Branding at William & Mary, has an answer to that problem, and it comes with a number: 11 times the normal traffic to the university's website within 10 minutes of someone seeing an ad. Before higher ed, Baglini spent years in professional and Olympic sports, making real-time calls in stadiums packed with 20,000 people. That instinct for reading a room under pressure shows up now in how he talks about proving marketing works, with data instead of a hunch.
Proof Before a Sale
William & Mary recently ran its first connected TV and streaming ad campaign, working with a partner the team hadn't used before. The goal for this one was presence: getting the university recognized in specific markets.
"We talked about awareness marketing a minute ago. It was truly an awareness campaign. We were targeting specific markets that we wanted to build presence in, enhance presence that we already had," Baglini said.
The partner's spike lift report showed the payoff: website visits jumped 11 times above normal in the 10 minutes after someone saw the ad. "To me, that was one of the most impactful metrics and reports I've ever seen in my career in terms of whether something was effective or not," Baglini said.
What Awareness Marketing Is For
That number matters because of what awareness marketing sets out to do in the first place, and Baglini is direct about it. "It is truly awareness as the key goal," he said. "This is to get people's eyeballs on us and ears on us and learn who we are." Applications and revenue live further down the funnel. Awareness lives at the top, and judging it by a bottom-of-funnel number sets it up to fail before it starts.
"Not every marketing tactic is going to drive direct action. And that's okay," Baglini said. He calls this level setting: telling leadership up front what an awareness campaign will and won't do, so a good result doesn't get mistaken for a disappointing one.
Knowing Who You're Up Against
An awareness campaign only works if it's aimed at the right audience, and Baglini's clearest lesson on this came from finding out his own team had the wrong one in mind.
"The sooner an institution can identify a set of actual peers and competitors, the better off they'll be. Not everybody's Princeton, not everybody's MIT, and that's perfectly fine," Baglini said.
At a previous institution, the marketing team assumed they competed with nearby private liberal arts schools. Market research told a different story. "We were competing with Penn State and Rutgers and Drexel and Philadelphia city universities. That never even occurred to anybody," Baglini said. "Once we had that knowledge, we got to sit back and say, okay, what do we have that they don't? It really sort of crystallized our messaging in a way that we didn't have before."
You Can't Be Everything to Everyone
That same discipline shows up in how William & Mary decides where its budget goes. The university's marketing work spans undergraduate enrollment, advancement, and institutional reputation at once, 3 groups that each make a reasonable case for more resources.
"You can't be everything, everywhere, all at once," Baglini said.
It's the same instinct behind knowing your real competitors, applied to who you're trying to be as a school in the first place. A smaller school is never going to out-muscle a bigger program on budget or size alone, and Baglini treats that fact as the whole strategy: winning in the margins. That means finding the one thing a school offers that a bigger, flashier option down the road never will, and building the entire message around it. A smaller stadium and a smaller stage become the reason a student picks one school over another, when the marketing says so plainly. That's a strategy he holds onto internally as much as externally.
"If you're selling an experience that isn't authentic to what students are going to actually live, it's going to go wrong really quickly," Baglini said. Word travels between prospective students, current students, and everyone deciding where to apply next. A message that oversells the experience costs more than an application. It costs trust.
"Being authentic to who you are, and sticking to that in all ways, is really important," he said.
Learning From Outside the Industry
Baglini's own path into higher ed marketing started outside of it entirely, in sports rather than a communications office. That's part of why his closing advice lands the way it does: pay attention beyond your own industry.
"Higher ed isn't always on the cutting edge of marketing and best practice. I'd encourage higher ed marketers to engage and listen to marketers outside of our industry if you actually want best practice," Baglini said.
Put the whole conversation together, and one thread runs through it: know what a campaign is meant to do, and know who it's up against. Get those two things right, and a number like 11x becomes evidence of a strategy that works.
Shane Baglini is the Executive Director of Marketing and Branding at William & Mary. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with leaders across higher education. Got something to share? Join the conversation.
