Why Marketing's Job Starts 2 to 3 Years Before Applications Do
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.
This past March, Siena University made it to the first round of the NCAA tournament and came within a few points of beating Duke. Allison Turcio, Siena's Dean of Enrollment and Marketing, watched student interest more than double in the 2 weeks that followed. Her team had the website, sign-up forms, and nurture emails ready, and everything fired the moment the attention hit.
It still fell short.
"Though certainly exciting, that [inbound interest] doubling is not enough to fix an entire enrollment problem," Turcio says. "A national moment, just like a brand awareness campaign, doesn't alone translate into better enrollment. We have to contextualize all of this."
That single admission cuts against a common assumption. Many institutions treat awareness marketing as a spike to chase. Turcio treats it as a structure that takes years to build. Her 20 years running marketing and admissions under one roof at Siena back that claim.
The competition is bigger than the other school down the road
Part of why awareness takes so long, Turcio argues, is that colleges are competing for attention against opponents nobody puts on the enrollment funnel slide.
"We are not just competing with other colleges and universities for attention," she says. "We are competing with the biggest brands in the entire world for people's attention." Traditionally aged college students are a market every major brand wants, she points out, which makes buying your way into their attention an expensive strategy on its own.
"It's an expensive endeavor. What I know for sure is your return on investment of that spend is never going to be as strong as if you're pairing it all together. It has to be both institutional strategy and marketing. It cannot just be ad campaigns on its own."
Awareness takes time to compound, and awareness purchased in isolation is competing against every other brand chasing the same attention. Losing that fight costs real money.
The timeline nobody wants to hear
Turcio puts a number on it. "It takes about two to three years; you don't necessarily see the impact right away," she says. For a traditionally aged student, that's roughly the length of an entire enrollment cycle. Spend on awareness this year, and the return shows up in a class that hasn't started applying yet.
That's a hard sell to a board looking at this quarter's numbers.
Turcio's approach centers on building a campus that already understands this timeline before the conversation happens. She credits bringing in outside research partners as part of that education process.
"It helps when you have partners come in that help you with audience research and things like that, and when you have other experts outside of just yourself sharing that this is what's going to happen, we have to have patience around it," she says. "It's going to have a long tail."
She also treats staying informed as a non-negotiable part of the job. "I sit in a seat where I have an onslaught of incoming information. I don't have a choice but to be very informed about what's happening in the market," she says. "And I think it really helps for your community to be informed too. That is part of the responsibility I think we have as marketers. If you want to be understood, you need your audience to understand all of those facets of what's happening as well."
That responsibility extends down to elementary school. Siena runs outreach programs that start with children's books introducing the idea of college.
"We've been building relationships with these students since kindergarten," Turcio says. "So if nobody knows that, how can we expect them to believe a brand awareness campaign takes two to three years to work?"
This is the piece of the argument that rarely gets said out loud. Defending awareness spend internally works like an education campaign aimed at your own institution, run years before the marketing spend itself even starts.
The metrics everyone's judging you by are moving targets too
Part of what makes that internal education so hard, Turcio says, is that the numbers institutions have always used to measure progress don't mean what they used to.
She points to direct admissions, where a service auto-admits a student without them ever completing an application. "I see direct admissions as a powerful tool, but only if you consider it as inquiries and not actual admitted students to your institution," she says. "When you mix your data all together, it can get you into dangerous territory." A direct admission student, she notes, "has not put in that effort" of completing an application, and doesn't carry the same signal of intent. Blending the two into one top-line number can make an institution believe it's in a stronger position than it actually is.
The same erosion is happening with FAFSA. "They made filing for federal financial aid easier and smoother for families. However, that also means there's going to be more people that do it," Turcio says. "So a FAFSA filer doesn't mean the same thing as it once did. It doesn't signal the same level of intent as it once did. These are constantly moving targets."
Her conclusion: keep the data, but stop trusting it on autopilot. "Historical data is helpful and gives us one lens of context, but we also need to understand all of those other influences so we really know where we are," she says. "We can't just take a number and apply conversion rates that have been working traditionally and predict the outcome."
That matters for the awareness argument specifically. If the metrics an institution uses to judge whether marketing is working are shifting under its feet, a board demanding proof this quarter is often demanding proof from a ruler that's already changed length.
Awareness has to show up before it can convert
Turcio's clearest example of awareness acting as an early signal, long before it ever becomes an application, involves a program Siena didn't offer yet. For years, her team tracked what prospective students were searching for on the university's own site. Nursing kept surfacing, in high volume, well before Siena had a nursing program to offer.
"We know academic program availability is such a key decision driver," Turcio says. "All of our efforts have brought them here, and then we don’t have the program they’re looking for, and we don't even have a chance at landing them. We might have spent money on an advertising campaign that drove them to our website, and then we lost them right then and there."
That's awareness functioning as a leading indicator in the most literal sense: a signal of demand that shows up in the data long before it can turn into a student.
Instead of seeing that signal as a lost opportunity, Siena paid attention. They eventually built the program that the search data had been telling them to for years. And they’ve done it for several additional programs since.
Being nearby doesn't make you an option
Turcio's sharpest example of what awareness can't do on its own comes from a high school less than a mile from Siena's campus. Any student there who wanted to become a nurse wasn't in her market, no matter how much brand equity Siena had built nearby, because the program didn't exist.
"I could have spent thousands of dollars advertising to that one student, but they still weren't going to come," she says. "It has to be both things. Institutional strategy really needs to be linking in with marketing strategy."
That's the piece that separates structural brand presence from a campaign spike. A spike can win attention. It can't manufacture a program, a price point, or an experience that isn't there. Turcio is blunt about the fact that marketing and performance aren't separate conversations either.
"Brand marketing and performance marketing don't need to be separate," she says. "If your brand marketing isn't driving performance, what is it doing?"
Distinctiveness is what awareness is building toward
This only works if an institution already knows what it's building awareness toward, Turcio argues. "We have this sea of sameness happening," she says. "I don't think it's ever been more important for each of us to find our distinctive thing, what we're going to hang our hats on."
Without something distinct to point to, the choice often comes down to price for a family comparing similar-looking options, no matter how much awareness spend went into getting them there. "When there's not clarity on what's distinct or special about your institution, it's going to come down to cost," Turcio says.
That's the real risk sitting underneath everything else here.
What the spike proved
Back to that basketball run. The 2-week spike in interest mattered less than the years of work sitting underneath it. Siena had already aligned its programs to what students wanted, built buy-in across campus, and started relationships with students well before high school. It had also been watching signals like search data long before they ever turned into applications.
Which is why Turcio's closing argument doesn't sound like a marketer's pitch at all. "The student experience itself is the number one marketing opportunity," she says. "We should be the number one advocates for an amazing academic and social college experience, even more so than marketing investments. We need to have receipts. The student experience needs to genuinely reflect what we're putting out there."
Awareness buys attention, but attention doesn't fill a gap in the offering, override metrics that are shifting under everyone's feet, or manufacture a relationship 2 years faster than it takes to build one. Turcio's version of marketing starts long before a single ad runs. It competes against the biggest brands in the world for a teenager's attention, and its payoff arrives on a timeline most institutions aren't yet willing to fund.
Allison Turcio is the Dean of Enrollment & Marketing at Siena University. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with leaders across higher education. Got something to share? Join the conversation.
