Turning Enrollment Data Into Creative That Connects
How Wyoming turned real student behavior into creative, personas, and remarketing that connects.
About this webinar
Knowing your audience by heart and turning that knowledge into creative that resonates are two different jobs. In this session, Halda's Angela Brown sits down with the University of Wyoming's Mindy Peep and Hannah Downey to walk through how their in-house team used Halda data to build student personas and journey maps, then turned them into creative direction and a remarketing program that picks its topics from real student behavior. Real journeys, real student data, zero filler.
Jun 22, 2026
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In our June webinar, Angela Brown and the University of Wyoming team walked through how they turned Halda data into creative that connects with students. The full session is above. Here are five things to take back to your team.
1. Build personas from real behavior
Hannah used to guess which topics students cared about, or lean on recent interns to tell her. The team replaced that with personas built from real Halda data: website activity, form responses and the questions students ask through Halda's AI.
Grounding creative in what students do, instead of what the team assumes about them, gave every campaign a clearer starting point. It also got the digital, creative and enrollment marketing teams into one room with one shared understanding, which Mindy named as the biggest surprise of the whole project.
2. Study admitted students to see the whole journey
Top-of-funnel prospects show thin behavioral signals. Admitted students show the full arc: everything before they applied and everything after. They're also still deciding, sometimes for 12 or 13 months before they enroll, so the creative you serve them still changes outcomes.
University of Wyoming pulled admitted students from Halda and read their journeys end to end. One had visited the financial aid pages more than 50 times. The team did that filtering by hand the first time around, though Halda's engagement scoring now surfaces those students for you.
3. Find each student's "emotional proof"
The team built their work around a concept they call emotional proof: the running sense a student forms about whether a school is worth it, shaped by every visit, page view and ad.
Their clearest example is a persona they call Alaina, drawn from a real student with the name and hometown changed. Alaina is from a small Wyoming town, set on nursing and submitting extra ACT scores to chase the best aid package she could get. Her emotional proof came down to one question: show me this is worth it and manageable. When a video producer heard that line, the creative direction clicked.
4. Plan for journeys that don't run in a straight line
Students jump around, and the data proves it. One arrived through an online ad for an online sociology program, then visited a wildlife and fisheries biology page eight or nine times, a degree offered only on campus.
The lesson Hannah drew: students are resourceful, and if the information is there, they'll find it when it's right for them. Your job is to make sure it's there.
5. Let the data choose your remarketing topics
University of Wyoming refreshes its remarketing creative every couple of weeks, which means 13 to 15 new topics every cycle. This year it's 14. That's a lot of ground to cover on instinct alone.
Hannah now pulls those topics straight from Halda: the most common form answers about student motivators and worries, and the questions students ask the AI most. The result reaches students as something closer to an authentic student post than an ad, on the subjects they already care about.
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Watch the full webinar recording above to hear Mindy and Hannah walk through the personas in detail, including Alaina's full journey and how the team is extending this work into organic social, print and admissions outreach.