Return on Joy

Higher education marketing is more crowded and complex than ever.

Thousands of institutions are competing for a flat - or declining - population of students. The market is increasingly discerning and price-sensitive. Access to information has never been more readily available. And employers are openly challenging the necessity of a degree.

Even on the best days, the headwinds are heavy.

Layer on top of that the shifts taking place in search - the rise of zero-click experiences, the expanded use of large language models - and the reality that the digital paid acquisition channels many of us have relied on for years are becoming harder to scale.

It’s reasonable to ask a difficult question…

What keeps me up at night isn’t the realities outlined above. Markets evolve. Channels change. Every industry faces moments like this.

What concerns me more is how I’m watching our industry react.

When performance becomes harder to come by - when scale becomes unpredictable - organizations tend to retreat to what is measurable. We prioritize what we can predict. We double down on what we can attribute.

And the problem is that often means investing more heavily in the very areas that are slowly melting underneath us.

And we’ve seen this before…

As someone who has spent more than fifteen years in the adult and online space, I watched early entrants face a difficult decision when affiliate and pay-per-lead models began to deteriorate. Inq-to-start rates declined. Lead quality eroded. Yet many institutions continued increasing spend in those channels because the metrics still felt familiar.

Some organizations made the harder pivot toward new acquisition strategies. Others measured those legacy channels all the way down, trapped inside attribution models that made it difficult for their marketing mix to evolve.

And I worry a similar dynamic may be unfolding again today.

At the traditional undergraduate level, list and name buying continues to decline in relevance. Yet many institutions are purchasing more names than ever.

On the adult and online side, teams are doubling down on direct acquisition channels when the moment may call for a more nuanced mix.

Because at the same time, we are entering a world where brand may matter more now than it ever has before.

What students think of us. What alumni think of us. What third parties and the public at large think of us. These signals are becoming increasingly important.

Large language models and AI answer boxes are making comparison easier. But when there are hundreds of options to choose from, most people still don’t conduct exhaustive comparisons.

They rely on signals.

They rely on familiarity.

They rely on referrals from people they trust.

That instinct isn’t unique to higher education. Across industries, recommendations from people we know remain the most trusted form of marketing. Nielsen research consistently finds that nearly 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and McKinsey has estimated that word-of-mouth drives between 20 and 50 percent of purchasing decisions, depending on the category.

Which means the institutions that generate real affinity will increasingly have an advantage.

Recent research shows that nearly 70 percent of students attending private Christian institutions had heard of the institution before they ever began their search.

Meaning true discovery often isn’t happening inside a paid media ecosystem. It’s happening across the broader world around us.

The answer may be simpler - and harder - than we think.

If we are truly great at what we do, we deliver on the promises we make. Students choose us for the right reasons. They leave loving the experience they had. And they realize the outcomes they desired.

When that happens, institutions win regardless of how marketing channels evolve.

Which leads to a reality that feels increasingly clear to me.

What matters now is not simply being better marketers.

It is being better at the job itself.

Who is actually preparing students for the world waiting for them after graduation? Or for the realities they are already navigating if they are working adults?

The institutions that answer that question well will have an advantage that no marketing tactic can replicate.

If brand is becoming more important in a crowded and unpredictable landscape, the challenge for marketing leaders becomes obvious:

How do we invest in something that is harder to measure?

And to be clear, I’m not immune to this pressure.

My company’s work is built around performance. Our partners expect results. If we miss start targets, no amount of philosophical reflection makes that easier.

Which is exactly why this tension feels so real.

Because the more performance pressure increases, the more tempting it becomes to focus only on the things we can measure - especially when those are the metrics our institutions expect to see.

But sometimes the most important work we do doesn’t show up neatly inside a dashboard.

Marketing leaders spend enormous time discussing ROI - Return on Investment. And rightly so. Our budgets demand accountability.

But increasingly I find myself thinking about a different question…

Are we simply serving our students, or are we celebrating them?

Are we just educating them, or are we elevating them?

Are we bringing life and energy into the work that we do?

Think about the brands people love outside higher education. The clothing companies people proudly wear. The sports teams they root for every weekend. The local coffee shop they return to every morning.

What they all understand is that how people feel about you matters tremendously.

Because before someone will refer you, they have to feel affinity toward you.

And affinity is what seems to be disappearing from many marketing conversations.

We talk about awareness, but mostly how to measure it.

We talk about activation, but primarily around the reach it will provide.

But in the middle sits the thing that actually drives advocacy.

Affinity.

Not just whether people know us.

But whether they love us.

And whether they love us enough to refer.

When I look back on the past fifteen years of my career, I’m proud of the campaigns I’ve built; the budgets I’ve managed; the inquiries, applications, and starts I’ve driven.

But the work I’m proudest of isn’t the tactical media campaigns.

It’s the brand acts we brought to life.

Driving a bus across the country to deliver diplomas to online students who couldn’t attend graduation.

Traveling to a hospital to film a student’s final chemotherapy treatment and celebrate the milestone she refused to give up on.

Riding in a truck with a military student as he transitioned out of service and moved back home.

Dropping off surprise graduation lawn signs to students’ homes on commencement morning.

Shipping care packages to students going through job loss, illness, or other difficult transitions.

None of those initiatives were easy to measure.

But it wasn’t difficult to understand how much they mattered.

Because true brand affinity rarely happens at scale.

It happens one person at a time.

One moment at a time.

Return on Joy isn’t a campaign.

It’s a pattern.

When I look back at the moments that created the most lasting impact in my career, they tend to follow the same progression.

Moments
The institution creates or elevates a meaningful moment in a student’s journey.

Stories
The moment is captured in a manner that makes the story easy to be told.

Advocates
The people involved become lifelong advocates who carry that story forward.

That’s the real marketing flywheel.

Not impressions.

Not clicks.

Moments → Stories →Advocates

The diploma bus.
The hospital celebration.
The lawn signs.
The care packages.

None of those began as media strategies.

They began as moments that mattered to a student.

But they became stories that traveled far beyond that moment.

And those stories created advocates who carry the brand forward long after the campaign ends.

That is the Return on Joy.

ROI still matters.

Your organization and mine both depend on it. Hitting start targets matters. Optimizing media spend matters. Improving conversion rates matters.

Marketing leaders still have to make the year.

But I worry about something.

If we successfully optimize our way through another cycle without creating moments that truly matter to students, we may discover that efficiency alone isn’t enough.

The reality facing most CMOs is difficult.

Budgets are fixed or shrinking. Expectations for performance continue to grow. Every dollar is scrutinized.

That pressure makes it tempting to focus exclusively on what can be measured.

But the institutions that stand out in the years ahead may be the ones that remember something simple…

Students don’t just enroll in programs. They enroll in experiences.

And the moments that shape those experiences - moments of pride, belonging, celebration, and support - are the ones people remember long after the marketing campaign is over.

Those moments are harder to quantify.

But they might just be the most valuable investment an institution can make.

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About The Author
Seth is the founder and CEO of Kanahoma, a San Diego-based performance marketing agency on a mission to build a better agency for organizations building a better world.

You can learn more about who we are and what we do at www.Kanahoma.com.

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