Awareness Marketing: Where the Long Game Pays Off
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.
Olivia Mann was eating dinner at a restaurant near Danville, Virginia, when an apron caught her eye. It was covered in horses. Mann leads enrollment at Averett University, home to one of the few equestrian programs within commuting distance of that dinner table. She asked her waitress about it. The waitress loved horses. She'd never heard of a school nearby that let her study them.
Mann told her about Averett. They talked for a while. Then Mann paid her check, tipped well, and went home.
She didn't collect an email address. She didn't add a follow-up campaign to a calendar. For 2 years, she had no idea if that conversation went anywhere at all.
"It took about 2 years, but now she has actually applied as a transfer student," Mann said. "So I took a risk. It felt awkward. But I played the long game."
That's the part of awareness marketing nobody can capture on a dashboard. It doesn't announce a return date. It shows up once, in a moment nobody is measuring, and it compounds long after everyone involved has stopped thinking about it, except the person on the other side of the conversation.
This is the argument enrollment leaders rarely get to make out loud: awareness isn't a line item you can prove against next quarter's numbers. It's structural, the presence a school builds well before anyone is ready to apply, and it works as a leading indicator precisely because the return shows up on a timeline no campaign was ever built to survive.
The Radar Closes by Junior Year
Mann spent 4 years working the front lines of admissions at Averett before stepping into an enrollment leadership role this past summer. She's watched plenty of students choose Averett up close, and for student athletes in particular, she's noticed the window is smaller than most schools plan for.
“For us, we see the biggest impact in junior year," Mann said. "For student athletes in particular, that's when they're probably starting varsity level at their school and they're going to be seeing scouts come around. They know that schools are interested in them, and if we can be one of those schools that they see there at a game or at a fair, then we can get on their radar."
By the time a student fills out an application, the school that got remembered was usually already in the room at least a year or more earlier. Waiting until senior year outreach season to build that visibility means competing for a decision that, for a meaningful share of students, already has a short list attached to it.
This is exactly the territory OnDeck means when we talk about reaching students before they turn 18. If the short list starts forming during junior year, a school's name has to already be sitting on it. Showing up for the first time once senior year applications open is too late to be remembered as anything more than a familiar name.
The Room Has More than One Decision-Maker
Mann's outreach doesn't stop at the student. At night fairs and community events, she's found the person asking the sharpest questions isn't always the 17-year-old.
"The parent is definitely still – and this is backed by the data – very much in the driver's seat when it comes to where the child will go to school," Mann said. "So we do tend to focus on the parent, and we make sure that we're addressing questions the parent has that the student's probably not thinking about."
Those questions come down to cost almost every time. "Financial aid. The cost. How much is it gonna cost? What scholarships is my child eligible for?" Mann said. "Those questions are coming from the parent, not so much the student."
Awareness spend built only around the student's decision journey is only reaching half the audience in the room.
Where Marketing's Job Ends
Now that Mann sits on the budget side of enrollment instead of only executing against it, she's had to get specific about what awareness spend is actually for and where its job hands off to someone else's.
"Marketing is great for exposure and generating interest," Mann said. "But the moment we receive an application, that's not marketing anymore. That's an authentic conversation, and we treat them as an individual from there."
That's a clean, defensible line for anyone who has to justify a marketing budget internally. Awareness's job is to get a name into the funnel. Everything after the application belongs to admissions. Measuring awareness spend against enrollment numbers alone blurs a boundary that Mann, now accountable for both sides of it, draws without hesitation.
Back to the Apron
Mann never ran a campaign aimed at that waitress. She had a conversation, once, because she noticed something and said something about it. 2 years later, an application showed up that no dashboard would have attributed to anything.
That's the case for treating awareness as infrastructure instead of a seasonal push. The schools that show up consistently, in rooms with no immediate payoff attached, are the ones still getting remembered when a decision finally gets made.
Olivia Mann is the Interim Director of Enrollment at Averett 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.
