Marketing Is Mission Work: How Colleges Can Build Trust, Remove Barriers, and Better Serve Students.
Marketing isn’t what happens after the work is done. It is the work.
College marketers are being asked to solve bigger enrollment and student-experience problems than ever—often without the authority to fix the systems creating them. The reality is that enrollment, trust, and student experience are shaped across the entire institution, not within a single department.
Marketing Is Mission Work challenges higher education leaders to think differently about marketing—not simply as promotion, but as an essential part of the student experience.
Drawing on Cheryl Broom’s experience working both inside colleges and alongside them, Marketing Is Mission Work explores how colleges can build trust, reduce uncertainty, remove barriers, and make it easier for students to move forward.
Listen To The Audiobook
Every Interaction Matters.
Students experience your college when they search for a program, visit your website, read an email, call with a question, fill out a form, or try to figure out what comes next.
Colleges may see these as separate interactions. Students don’t. To them, it’s all part of the college.
That means marketing does more than attract attention. It creates clarity, builds confidence, reduces friction, and helps students move forward.
That makes the marketing mission work.
Key Themes
- Building student trust before asking students to act
- Removing hidden barriers that make college harder to navigate
- Reducing uncertainty throughout the student journey
- Communicating more clearly in language students understand
- Connecting marketing to student success and the broader institutional mission
- Rethinking the student experience across marketing, enrollment, communications, and service
- Using research and student voices to make better decisions
- Protecting strong ideas from the small compromises that can weaken them
Practical Tools
- Hands-on exercises for college teams
- Practical tools and resources
- Real-world stories and examples
- Conversations with higher education leaders
Best For
- College Leaders
- Higher Education Marketers
- Enrollment and Student Services Teams
- Anyone Who Wants College to Be Easier to Navigate
