Why Centralized Marketing Matters for Online Programs in Higher Ed
At Archer, we’ve onboarded hundreds of institutional partners to help them grow their online programs. And while every partner is unique, there’s one pain point we encounter time and again: decentralized school-level marketing that creates more friction than momentum.
In many institutions, individual colleges or schools manage their own marketing campaigns, budgets, and creative direction. While this siloed approach offers an initial promise of agility and autonomy, it often leads to deeper problems in the market, such as:
- Fragmented messaging
- Inconsistent branding
- Internal competition
- Wasted spend as schools bid against each other
- Missed opportunities for reach and impact at the brand and portfolio level
The result? Confused students consuming competing voices from the same institution, and internal marketing teams scrambling to scale best practices and measure impact — often without apples-to-apples data and reporting for performance comparisons.
Universities need an integrated marketing strategy that balances a holistic brand and portfolio-level approach with maintaining individual school-level autonomy for certain decisions and activities. This hybrid model unlocks collaboration, reduces conflict, and lifts visibility for all programs within a portfolio.
With shared goals, aligned messaging, and coordinated tactics across all of their schools, universities can amplify their brand and stretch their budgets further — delivering clear, compelling stories across myriad channels to prospective students.
Risks of Decentralized Marketing
In some models of governance, decentralization can be a strength — empowering local leadership and ensuring responsiveness to specific community needs. But when it comes to marketing online university programs in a highly competitive environment, decentralization alone as a strategy is more often a liability than an asset.
Having different departments, schools, or programs run their own campaigns and technology stacks may seem like a way to move faster, but in practice, it creates challenges that can hinder online program growth. Let’s explore some examples.
Brand Confusion
As prospective students evaluate your institution’s online offerings, they are not concerned with the internal structures of your institution. They expect clarity and consistency in the information you provide. When each college or division presents a different tone, design style, and creative messaging approach, you’re left with a weakened institutional brand.
Mixed marketing across digital ads, program pages, email drips, and even tuition and scholarship messaging can erode the trust and credibility you’ve been building with prospective students. For example, inconsistent explanations of scholarships or conflicting tuition information (e.g., on program pages and via tuition calculators) can trigger frustration or skepticism.
In short: Your audience — the prospective student — sees one university. If your university is in conflict with its own marketing, the brand loses power.
Inefficiency and Internal Competition
Without centralized marketing oversight, different teams often end up targeting the same audiences with overlapping campaigns — sometimes even bidding against each other in paid channels. This dilutes your paid marketing efficacy by driving up your cost per lead, wasting precious budget dollars, and undermining the collective impact of your institution’s marketing investments.
Inconsistent Student Experience and Success Metrics
Perhaps the most concerning result of decentralized marketing is a fragmented and uneven student journey. One program might offer seamless inquiry-to-enrollment processes, while another loses momentum after the application process due to poor follow-up and disconnected systems.
When your programs use different customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, it becomes difficult to track leads accurately and measure outcomes with consistency. Reporting becomes murky. Success metrics vary. Problems get misdiagnosed.
Instead of addressing the root causes of problems, your teams might blame each other (e.g., the marketing team and the admissions team) for the other’s perceived performance issues, when the real problem is systemic disconnection.
The Case for Centralized Marketing
Centralization doesn’t mean turning every school or program into a cookie-cutter version of the institution’s mission statement, and it doesn’t mean taking any team’s autonomy away. It’s about aligning around a shared strategy — one that empowers individual teams to execute effectively within a cohesive, coordinated framework.
Unified Brand Messaging
A strong, centralized brand platform allows your university to speak with one clear voice about its online programs, telling the story of:
- What your programs offer
- Who your programs serve
- Why your programs matter
This shared narrative should be rooted in your institution’s values and designed to build trust with prospective students. When every program draws from the same story and messaging pillars, it strengthens your presence across every touchpoint — from digital ads and landing pages to nurture emails and program brochures. Each program’s value propositions may differ, but the institution’s story endures.
Additionally, a unified approach enables your institution to leverage the brand and portfolio-level marketing that raises visibility across all your programs. For example, some institutions have an integrated marketing program for their undergraduate experience but lack a cohesive approach for their online graduate programs. This is a missed opportunity to build a portfolio-level branded presence through channels that individual schools may not be able to afford on their own.
A robust YouTube presence that highlights the benefits of your online graduate education experience (program agnostic), showcases your alumni and graduate education outcomes, and forefronts your strategic organizational partnerships that span individual schools and programs increases the impact for the entire institution with one investment.
Integrated Campaign Planning
Centralized marketing brings together your paid media, content marketing, email strategy, and organic social media into one master plan.
Gone are the days of multiple teams across your institution launching disconnected campaigns, as central calendars and shared audience strategies help ensure each tactic contributes to every team’s strategic goals. This means reduced duplication, avoidance of internal bidding wars, and maximization of every marketing dollar.
However, your individual schools can and should have decision-making authority over the key value proposition definitions, target personas, and positioning of programs within their fields. This requires a collaborative conversation in an integrated campaign-planning scenario.
And schools should continue to develop campaigns where the impact is greatest for them — for example, hosting prospective student events and webinars, offering ambassador programs for prospective student questions, and attending events meaningful to their specific program field, such as at conferences and exhibit halls.
Shared Data and Measurement
In a world of data, perhaps the greatest and most immediate impact of centralized marketing will be felt in how your institution tracks performance holistically. With unified key performance indicators (KPIs) and shared access to insights, marketing teams at all levels — central and within academic schools — can identify what’s working for them, pivot when needed, and scale successful tactics across programs.
Teams can review where the branded portfolio-level efforts are causing the greatest lift in impressions and leads and determine together how school-level marketing activities can make the most impactful use of funds.
What Centralized Marketing Looks Like in Practice
At Archer, we’ve seen institutions achieve dramatic improvements simply by unifying their marketing strategy — even if execution remains shared and distributed. With a strong central foundation in place, teams tap into shared creative resources, coordinate campaigns across programs, and drive stronger performance through unified media buying and consistent messaging.
At its best, centralized marketing can:
- Empower programs to amplify one another rather than compete
- Allow creative strategy to be produced once then repurposed widely
- Create paid efforts that are smarter, more cost effective, and better targeted
In sum, when your institution implements an integrated marketing model that fosters collaboration among academic schools, it can result in performance that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Archer Education knows what it takes to bring siloed departments together. Our unique partnership-based approach allows us to truly understand your institution, then implement efficiencies to ignite your online programs’ potential through a centralized marketing strategy that is balanced with school autonomy and meaningful participation. Contact us today to learn more.
