What Enrollment Marketing Gets Wrong About the ABCs: Awareness, Brand, and Credit
Kristin Nichols has spent more than 25 years inside higher education marketing, moving across institutional leadership roles, agency partnerships, and consulting engagements. That breadth shapes how she thinks, and it shows in how she runs marketing at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where she serves as Chief Marketing Officer.
In this episode of OnDeck & OffScript, she gets into the tension between awareness spending and short-term pressure, the case for brand as a unifying institutional promise, and why the credit conversation inside enrollment shops is still getting in the way.
Awareness isn't a campaign. It's a timeline.
Enrollment marketers face a familiar internal argument: leadership wants to see results, and awareness spend is the hardest line item to defend in a meeting. The data is indirect. The connection between a social campaign and an application is difficult to draw on a spreadsheet. And when the pressure builds, the instinct is to pull the investment and redirect it somewhere that produces faster, cleaner numbers.
Nichols has watched that instinct play out enough times to know where it leads.
"If you pull too soon, you're just starting from scratch over and over again," she said. "And that's not going to get you anywhere."
Her timeline is specific: gradual growth starts showing around 6 to 9 months. It gets meaningfully better between 9 and 12, and that compounding only holds if the spend stays in place long enough to build on itself. Pull before that window closes and the institution doesn't save money; it absorbs the cost of starting over.
At MCLA, her team tracks social media engagement alongside stealth applicant growth in the CRM. The two signals aren't directly linked in the data, but they move together. When a social campaign produces a notable spike, she looks for a corresponding bump in the stealth pool. The correlation isn't proof, but it's signal, and it's enough to make the case when the pressure to cut arrives.
What makes this argument hard to win internally is the timing problem. Visibility gaps don't register as an emergency when they form. They show up 2 to 3 enrollment cycles later, in softer inquiry momentum, weaker brand recall, and students who simply never considered the institution. By that point, the gap has been growing for months without a dashboard alert. Recovering the ground costs more than maintaining presence would have, and the person who gets blamed for the drop is rarely the person who made the decision to cut.
For anyone who owns awareness execution without owning the budget, that's the case worth building now, before the evidence arrives too late to act on.
The spend decision nobody wants to defend.
Part of what makes awareness so difficult to protect is how leadership tends to frame it. The expectation, increasingly, is that every channel should produce performance-style data. Brand spend gets held to an attribution standard it was never designed to meet, and when it fails to produce clean ROI numbers, it looks like the easy cut.
Nichols addresses this directly in how she structures her agency relationships. She meets with partners every 2 weeks to review spend, temperature-check results against where things stood 4 to 6 weeks prior, and make a deliberate call: hold the course or adapt. What she's looking for isn't a campaign that delivers a spike and disappears. She's looking for gradual, sustainable growth that holds.
"Doing more to justify what you're doing is just going to make your cost per lead go up," she said. "Nobody's going to win."
The institutions getting this right aren't out-spending anyone. They're making sharper bets and holding them. At MCLA, that included a decision to spend one third of what they traditionally spent on purchased names, a move that produced significant internal anxiety and eventually validated the logic: spreading spend thin across a broad purchased list produces diminishing returns in a tightening market. Concentrating presence in the right places, and staying there, is what compounds.
Brand is the promise that outlives everyone in the room.
When Nichols describes brand, she doesn't start with logos or taglines. She starts with a scenario: every audience the institution touches, donors, prospective families, government partners, current students, sitting around a table, each describing the institution in their own words. If the brand is working, they all describe the same thing. Their version is shaped by their own relationship with the institution, and the core stays identical across all of them.
Most institutions can't pass that test. The pieces exist. Individual departments have their own messaging. Enrollment has its pitch. Academic affairs has its language. Development has its narrative. None of it contradicts the others, but none of it adds up to a single, unified promise either. What prospective students, families, and partners experience is a collection of signals rather than a coherent institution.
At MCLA, the brand work underway is organized around one statement Nichols uses deliberately and often: "Unifying MCLA's brand promise will sustain the institution's future goals." She reiterates this with intention because brand work requires buy-in from people who aren't thinking about it every day, and buy-in erodes without reinforcement. Her framing for that internal communication is direct: "Persistence overcomes resistance."
The work itself involves deciding what the institution will stop doing as much as what it will start. MCLA handed the job of describing itself to current students and left the footage unedited. No polish. No script review. If a sentence runs long or a thought doesn't land cleanly on the first try, it stays in.
"If they stumble, if there's a sentence that isn't grammatically correct, that's fine," she said. "Because it's real."
The reasoning isn't sentimental. Produced content is getting harder to trust at exactly the moment prospective students are more attuned to authenticity than any generation before them. An unpolished student talking genuinely about their experience carries more credibility than a well-lit testimonial that sounds like it was written for them. The institution that figures out how to get out of its own way in that moment earns something that no amount of media spend replicates: the sense that what they're seeing is what they'll actually find.
That same discipline extended to financial aid communication. The original model left families uncertain about what they were being offered. Award letters full of institutional language, figures that didn't clearly connect to monthly reality, a process that required families to do interpretive work before they could make a decision. The new model borrows from car dealerships: show every line item, break down the cost, give people the monthly reality up front. Families who understand their package make decisions. Families who feel confused go silent, and silence at that stage is the institution's loss.
The baton pass nobody wants to talk about.
The most pointed thing Nichols says in this conversation has nothing to do with spend or brand architecture. It's about the internal dynamic between marketing and enrollment, and why it still holds institutions back.
Marketing generates the lead. Enrollment closes it. Those are sequential steps in the same race, and the institution wins or loses based on whether both legs run well. The two functions share a goal, operate on overlapping timelines, and depend on each other's execution. And yet the question of who gets to claim the incoming class still produces friction in enrollment shops across the country.
"Somebody starts the race, somebody finishes the race, and if you win, you all win," she said.
The version of this problem Nichols experienced directly was losing CRM access. For years, she made spending decisions without being able to see whether the students she was reaching were converting. That's a structural gap, and it produced real institutional cost: money spent on channels and messages with no feedback loop to confirm whether any of it was working. The data existed. It was sitting in a system that marketing didn't have visibility into because the handoff between functions hadn't been designed with shared access in mind.
The fix, when it came, was straightforward in practice and harder to earn politically. That gap between the solution and the timeline it took to get there is where enrollment marketing loses ground it doesn't need to lose. In a market where the pool is shrinking and every cycle matters more than the last, the cost of protecting turf internally is a cost the institution absorbs directly. Awareness builds preference. Enrollment closes on it. The moment those two functions treat the handoff as a competition rather than a relay, both legs of the race get slower.
Kristin Nichols is the Chief Marketing Officer at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with marketing, communications and enrollment and marketing leaders across higher education.
