5 Enrollment Marketing Strategies to Start This Summer
Most schools start too late. This session shows how to build your Fall 2027 funnel while your competitors are still catching
About this webinar
Enrollment teams can't afford to wait until the pipeline is already cold. In this session, Halda's Angela Brown and University of Montana's Stephanie Geyer walk through a practical three-part framework for building your Fall 2027 funnel now: starting earlier with content that reaches students and families before they have a shortlist, scaling engagement with AI and personalization, and tightening the operational handoffs that cause inquiries to go quiet. Real examples, real conversion data, and zero filler.
May 29, 2026
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In our May webinar, Angela Brown and Stephanie Geyer from the University of Montana walked through what enrollment marketing teams should be doing right now to build a stronger 2027 pipeline. The full session is above. Here are five things to take back to your team.
# 1. Get into the conversation earlier than feels natural
Research from Manaferra found that 62% of prospective students switch channels while they're searching, moving between institutional websites, social media, AI search, online forums and third-party review sites. They're looking for consistency across all of them.
If your institution only shows up late in that process, you're already competing against schools that have had months of context-building with that student. Early-stage content (blog posts, campus life pages, financial aid explainers and authentic student stories) gives you a longer runway to influence intent before a shortlist forms.
# 2. Optimize your program pages for AI search
The University of Montana ran a pilot adding AI-focused intro paragraphs with tight keyword strategy and three to five FAQs to their academic program pages, built specifically around questions students are asking AI search engines right now. They also implemented structured data schema on the back end.
About a month in, AI search tools began citing the content they wrote, in some cases verbatim. Montana plans to roll this approach out across the rest of their program catalog through the summer and fall.
If your organic traffic is down, you're in good company. Broad Google algorithm updates in February and March hit a lot of higher ed sites, and the rise of zero-click search has been compressing traffic across industries for some time. Getting your pages in front of AI systems is one of the more direct ways to recover visibility.
# 3. Personalize your follow-up by interest, not just funnel stage
A student interested in biology should get different follow-up than one asking about on-campus housing or first-gen support. That's an obvious point, but a lot of enrollment teams still run one-size nurture flows.
The University of Montana is building content snippet libraries so that when a student's interest areas are known, the right assets drop into messaging automatically. The goal is personalization that scales without requiring manual work on every send.
# 4. Use interactive content to get earlier inquiries
Montana's GrizzQuiz, a persona-based quiz that helps prospective students discover "what kind of Griz" they are, converted at 17.25%. By comparison, their broad digital landing page campaign, which drove more than 100,000 views, came in at 4.21%.
The quiz works because it leads with what the student gets, not what the institution needs from them. Asking unexpected questions, ones that feel like a real conversation rather than a data intake form, tends to outperform standard inquiry forms at the top of the funnel.
# 5. Audit your handoffs before next cycle
Strong campaigns can fail at the handoff. If there's ambiguity about who owns a lead, how fast responses go out or what happens after a first inquiry, that's where momentum can fall apart.
Montana's approach, what they call the “DIY-plus” model, brings student search in-house for name buys, prospect outreach and follow-up sequences, while still working with outside partners for landing pages and digital ad placement. The key advantage: they can see what isn’t working and pivot quickly, instead of waiting for a monthly review from a vendor to find out a month of yield season has slipped by.
Watch the full webinar recording above to hear Stephanie walk through these examples in detail, including a look at the GrizzQuiz flow and the Montana AI program page pilot.