How to Master Content Marketing for Higher Education Websites

• Why Content Marketing is Critical for Higher Education
• Effective Strategies for Higher Education Content Marketing
• Scaling Your Strategy with the Right CMS
• Real-World Examples of Higher Ed Innovation
• Measuring Success Beyond "Hits"
• Moving From Strategy to Execution

Prospective students usually decide where to apply before they ever set foot on campus. Their first tour happens on a smartphone at 11 p.m. as they scroll through your website rather than walking the quad with a guide.

While they certainly look for academic programs, they're mostly hunting for that intangible "vibe" that tells them they belong. They're trying to answer a massive, expensive question: "Is this the right choice for me?"

Too often, the answer is buried behind walls of text, outdated PDFs, or generic stock photography of students laughing under a tree.

Your website must function as an engine that builds trust, answers specific anxieties, and guides students through a decision cycle that can last years, rather than acting as a static digital brochure.

This framework outlines how to build a content strategy that does exactly that.

Why Content Marketing is Critical for Higher Education

Higher education faces a perfect storm. The "enrollment cliff" is shrinking the pool of traditional prospective students while rising tuition costs increase the scrutiny families place on the return on investment. With online programs, you’re now competing globally with institutions halfway across the world.

In this environment you have to actively build relationships, reputation alone isn't enough.

As a higher education digital agency, we see a clear pattern among the institutions that are winning. They pivot from broadcasting information to facilitating connections, shifting the conversation from talking at students to talking with them.

Content marketing is the only scalable way to do this. You can't have an admissions counselor speak personally to every high school sophomore who visits your site. But you can create content that answers their questions, validates their fears, and shows them what their life could look like on your campus.

Effective Strategies for Higher Education Content Marketing

A good strategy focuses on solving user problems rather than just filling a calendar with blog posts. Here are the core pillars of a modern higher ed content marketing strategy.

Move Beyond "Wall of Text" Marketing

Open a random program page on your university website. You'll likely see a dense block of text written by a department head, filled with phrases like "pedagogical excellence" or "interdisciplinary synergy."

This forces the user to work hard to understand what you offer. When users have to work too hard, they leave.

You need to audit your content ecosystem. Be ruthless and identify pages that are dense with academic prose and rewrite them in spoken language. If you wouldn't say a sentence to a friend over coffee, don't put it on your website.

Visuals are even more important. We're trying to engage a generation where roughly 9 in 10 teens use YouTube to consume information visually. They want to see your state-of-the-art labs, not just read about them.

Static photos are a start, but they often feel staged. To truly compete, incorporate virtual tours and interactive site features like day-in-the-life maps. Give remote students a genuine emotional connection to your campus before they apply.

Build Personas That Go Deeper Than Demographics

Marketing teams often rely on broad personas like "The High School Senior" or "The Parent," but these are too generic to be useful. A first-generation student from a rural area has completely different anxieties than a legacy student from a wealthy suburb.

Build personas based on psychographics and needs:

• The Career-Focused Pragmatist: Wants to know about co-op programs, job placement rates, and alumni salaries.
• The Community Seeker: Worries about making friends, fitting in, and finding clubs.
• The Upskiller: A mature student balancing a job and kids who needs flexibility and speed.

Once you have these personas, structure your content using a narrative framework. In our guide on storytelling 101, we talk about making the student the hero of the story. Position your institution as the guide helping them achieve their potential, rather than the hero of the story.

This approach allows you to humanize your higher ed website. When diverse applicants see stories that reflect their specific background and struggles, they feel seen. That feeling is the foundation of enrollment.

Answer the Questions Students Are Googling

Many universities stuff their content with internal jargon or generic terms like "best biology program." The problem is that the query "best biology program" is fiercely competitive and often too vague to drive high-intent traffic.

Shift your focus to the specific questions students ask when they're serious.

• Instead of "Engineering Department," write content about "job placement rates for mechanical engineers in [Your State]."
• Instead of "Student Services," write about "mental health support resources for freshmen at [University]."

This is "middle-of-funnel" content. It targets students who already know they want a degree but are weighing specific factors. Develop content that directly addresses specific anxieties, such as affordability calculators that show the real cost after aid or interviews with alumni who took non-traditional career paths.

By answering these specific questions, you position your institution as transparent and helpful.

Prioritize Accessibility as a Content Requirement

Accessibility is often treated as a technical checkbox for the development team, but the most accessible code in the world can't fix inaccessible content.

If your editors are uploading scanned PDFs of dining menus or policy documents, you're creating unnecessary barriers for your users. These files are difficult to read on mobile devices, hard for search engines to index, and often impossible for screen readers to navigate.

Treat accessibility as a content standard. Avoid PDFs whenever possible by converting those documents into responsive HTML pages.

You also need to look at your link text. Phrases like "click here" or "read more" are useless to a user scanning a page with assistive technology. Write descriptive links that tell the user exactly where they're going.

Adhering to these standards ensures your digital campus is usable by people with diverse abilities. It's also a legal requirement in many jurisdictions and a strong signal of your institutional values.

Ensure your team is operationally ready by using our higher ed website accessibility checklist. For your day-to-day editors, share these top 10 accessibility tips to keep standards high without slowing down their workflow.

Curate, Don't Just Create

The biggest pushback we hear from higher ed marketing teams is about capacity. "We don't have enough writers" or "We can't produce that much video" are common concerns.

You don't have to produce every piece of content from scratch. Your campus is an engine of content generation, from professors giving lectures to students posting on TikTok and research centres publishing findings.

Solve the "content scale" problem by curating these existing assets.

• Embed a relevant TEDx talk given by one of your faculty members on a program page.
• Embed authentic Instagram posts from student ambassadors (with permission) to show real dorm life.
• Summarize a complex research paper from your physics department into a plain-language news update.

When you curate, add value. Always add a paragraph explaining why the content matters to your prospective students, rather than just posting a raw link. If you're struggling with resources, read our guide on smart content curation to learn how to frame external content with your institution's unique perspective.

Scaling Your Strategy with the Right CMS

You can have the most brilliant content strategy on paper, but it will fail if your infrastructure fights you.

Higher education websites are massive. You might have a central marketing team, but you also have hundreds of content editors scattered across faculties, athletics, admissions, and alumni relations.

If your CMS (Content Management System) is too rigid, departments will build their own microsites on WordPress or Squarespace to bypass your controls, fracturing your brand and creating a compliance nightmare.

Conversely, if the system is too open, well-meaning editors will break your design system and publish inaccessible content.

You need a platform that balances central brand governance with departmental freedom. This unique requirement is why Drupal is relied upon by 71% of top universities to manage their complex ecosystems.

Modern Drupal content editing features solve the "rogue department" problem. You can give departments a library of pre-approved components, such as accordions, image carousels, and video embeds. These are brand-compliant and accessible by default, allowing editors to build flexible, beautiful pages without ever touching a line of code.

This supports an Agile approach to content. Instead of waiting for a massive redesign to fix content issues, you can empower departments to improve their sections continuously, preventing the massive "content debt" that plagues legacy university sites.

Real-World Examples of Higher Ed Innovation

Let's look at how this works in practice.

Ashland University

Ashland needed to differentiate itself in a crowded Ohio market. They moved away from generic "academic excellence" messaging and launched the "We See You" campaign, a content-led strategy focused on the individual student experience.

To support this, they needed a digital platform that could deliver personalized stories and handle a complete rebrand. We helped them migrate to a new Drupal platform that prioritized storytelling. The result was a dramatic increase in engagement and a digital presence that matched their new brand promise. 

You can read the full story in our Ashland University case study.

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo faced a scale challenge. They're a massive research institution with over 1,000 departmental websites. Their content was fragmented, and maintaining accessibility compliance across that many sites was a massive risk.

They needed a comprehensive governance system rather than a simple website redesign. We worked with them to build a centralized Drupal platform that allowed them to push design and functionality updates to all 1,000+ sites simultaneously. This allowed them to scale their content operations without exploding their headcount. 

See how they did it in our University of Waterloo case study.

Measuring Success Beyond "Hits"

The old way of measuring higher ed marketing was counting pageviews and "hits." These are vanity metrics that tell you people arrived but don't reveal if they cared.

Shift your reporting to business outcomes.

• Cost per Enrollment: How much marketing spend does it take to get a seated student?
• Engagement Depth: Don't just track if they loaded the page. Did they watch the video? Did they use the tuition calculator? Did they scroll to the bottom of the curriculum guide?
• Pipeline Velocity: How fast are prospects moving from "inquiry" to "applicant"?

You also need to track the full student lifecycle. A student might read a blog post in their sophomore year of high school, follow you on Instagram for a year, attend a virtual tour, and then finally apply.

Use attribution models to understand this journey. If you only look at the "last click" before the application, you might cut the blog budget without realizing that the blog was the first handshake that started the relationship two years ago.

Moving From Strategy to Execution

Marketing for higher education is difficult. You're selling an intangible, expensive, life-changing product to a skeptical audience that's simultaneously 17 years old and 45 years old (the parents).

You can't trick people into trusting you. Usefulness, authenticity, and transparency build trust, especially when you show them that they belong here.

Effective higher education marketing requires balancing emotional storytelling with the technical precision of a scalable CMS. You need the heart to tell the story and the backbone to deliver it.

If you need to audit your current content strategy or discuss your platform needs, reach out to us to start the conversation.