The Signal Your Enrollment Data Can't Show You
Jeff Holeman has spent his career inside some of higher education's most recognizable institutions. Today he leads marketing and brand for Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. When he talks about what's actually broken in enrollment marketing, it's worth listening.
We sat down with Jeff for OnDeck & OffScript, our series of real conversations with marketing and enrollment leaders about the awareness and demand challenges shaping higher ed right now. This one got into behavioral targeting, the awareness gap, and why the way most institutions measure enrollment success is already too late.
Most institutions are solving the wrong problem.
Demographic shifts are real. The pool of traditional-age students is shrinking. But Jeff made a point early in our conversation that reframes all of it.
"The enrollment cliff isn't the problem," he said. "It's exposed the problem."
For years, institutions got away with generic messaging, fragmented systems, and slow internal decision-making. There were enough students in the market to absorb those inefficiencies. That margin is gone now, and it's forcing a reckoning that should have happened a decade ago.
The institutions that will hold their enrollment through this period are the ones building presence before a student ever fills out a form, building familiarity before a prospect ever raises their hand.
Signals show you where someone is in their decision. Demographics show you who they are.
One of the sharpest distinctions Jeff drew was between demographic targeting and signal-based targeting. Age, geography, income, job title — those things still matter. They tell you who someone is. Signals tell you where that person is in their decision and what they're likely to do next.
Students don't wake up one morning and decide to enroll. There's a longer period of exploration before that. They're following thought leaders, researching career trends, consuming content, comparing programs, and asking AI tools questions that didn't exist a few years ago. By the time someone fills out an inquiry form, they've already spent weeks or months deciding what's worth considering.
The institutions that win are the ones showing up during that period.
Jeff described signals as things like curiosity about programs, career mobility indicators, professional transitions, and leadership aspirations. Behavioral patterns that tell you a person is in motion, even before they've identified themselves as a prospect. That's what his team at Warrington now pays closest attention to.
"Our job," he said, "is to identify those signals and become part of the conversation before someone enters a traditional enrollment funnel. Which I would argue doesn't really exist anymore."
Signals show you what's building. Applications confirm what already happened.
This is where the conversation got most relevant to the work enrollment marketers do every day, specifically the internal arguments they have to win.
Jeff's team launched a new MBA campus in Miami. There was strong awareness of the University of Florida brand, but almost none for the Warrington College of Business specifically. He couldn't wait for applications to come in to know whether awareness was working. By then it's too late.
So he watched signals: branded search activity, direct traffic, social engagement, how the college was surfacing in AI-driven discovery environments. Those indicators told him whether future demand was building, and they gave him the data to make the case internally for continuing to invest in awareness.
"The application tells you what happened," he said. "The signals tell you what's coming next."
That framing matters. Enrollment teams that wait for application numbers to confirm a problem have already lost 2 or 3 cycles of influence in the market. The gap showed up long before the data did.
Awareness is what makes performance marketing work.
Jeff pushed back on something a lot of enrollment marketers still believe: that awareness and performance marketing are separate priorities competing for the same budget.
"Awareness isn't the opposite of performance," he said. "Awareness is what makes performance possible."
When brand presence erodes, lead generation campaigns get more expensive and conversion rates fall. Enrollment goals get harder to hit. The performance marketing is running fine; it just has an awareness gap upstream that's limiting what it can do.
In Jeff's framing, awareness and enrollment marketing are different stages of the same system. The schools that understand that stop asking whether to invest in one or the other and start asking how to run both in a way that feeds each other.
He also addressed one of the biggest internal barriers enrollment marketers face: the belief that awareness is unmeasurable. His response was direct. Accepting that assumption is a significant strategic mistake.
"We can measure it," he said. "Stop thinking it's not something that matters and doesn't count."
The measurement looks different from campaign metrics. It's branded search, content engagement, social signals, and share of voice in the discovery environment. Those are the leading indicators. Applications confirm what already happened. Everything upstream is what you actually manage.
This is what it looks like in practice.
Jeff shared a specific example of a program at Warrington that had been around for years but had never been actively marketed. Enrollment was self-sustaining until the market shifted, and then it needed help.
The budget was limited. Rather than spreading thin across broad channels, his team used first-party data, behavioral signals, and predictive audiences to find the right people. Application volume grew.
Here's the part that doesn't make it into the headline. The growth came faster than the program's operations could handle. Staff weren't set up to respond at that volume. The pipeline turned on and the team said: turn it off, we can't get to everyone.
"What I learned," Jeff said, "is to have that conversation carefully with your client before you do this. Make sure they're prepared. Find out when they want to throttle up, when they want to throttle back."
Performance and awareness have to be matched by operational readiness. Niche program campaigns don't need big budgets to work, especially when they're running under the umbrella of a larger awareness strategy.
What this means for enrollment marketers right now.
Demographic shifts are structural. The institutions that hold their enrollment through this period will be the ones that built consistent presence in the markets that matter and made the internal case for awareness before the application numbers told a bad story.
That presence compounds over time. The markets your institution shows up in consistently are the ones where students already know your name when it matters. The ones you leave go quiet, and quiet is not neutral territory.
Jeff Holeman is doing that at one of the most visible business colleges in the country. The frameworks he described apply at every institution, regardless of size or budget.
Awareness is the engine. The institutions treating it that way are the ones protecting their enrollment right now.
Jeff Holeman is the Chief Marketing and Brand Officer at Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series where we talk with marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education.
