Virtual Conference: Marketing in Higher Education

In an Age of Doubt, Build Belief: How Higher Ed Marketing Can Strengthen Trust, Distinction, and Demand

Higher education marketing is no longer just about promotion (if it ever was!). It is about helping institutions earn belief in a skeptical, distracted, digital-first environment. At a time when many Americans question the value of a degree, marketers have a larger responsibility and opportunity: to make institutional value visible, credible, and memorable across the student lifecycle. In this keynote, Ethan Braden will explore how higher ed marketers can move beyond tactics alone to build trust, sharpen distinction, and create demand through clearer positioning, stronger storytelling, and more disciplined brand-building. Attendees will leave with practical ideas to better connect mission to market, communicate value with greater precision, and elevate the role of marketing on their campuses.

R. Ethan Braden

Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Texas A&M University

Orchestrating the Student Lifecycle: Distributed Marketing Strategies for Engagement From Prospect to Alumni

Today’s institutions must manage a continuous, data-informed relationship with students that begins long before enrollment and extends well beyond graduation. From recruiting prospective students to nurturing enrolled learners and activating alumni communities, lifecycle engagement is no longer a series of disconnected campaigns—it is a coordinated strategy.
This session explores how a distributed marketing model enables higher education institutions to strategically engage students at every stage of their journey. We’ll examine how Emma’s distributed marketing platform empowers central teams to maintain brand governance, message consistency, and compliance while equipping departments, colleges, and advancement teams with the tools to execute locally relevant communications.

Bradley Cason

Director of Product Management, Emma by Marigold

Nate Gallagher

Director of Professional Services, Emma by Marigold

Striking Content Gold: How Colorado School of Mines Unearthed a Smarter Way to Manage Digital Assets

The marketing team at the Colorado School of Mines faced growing challenges managing a rapidly expanding library of photos, videos, and brand assets. Content was scattered across multiple Cloud platforms and individual desktops, making it difficult for the central marketing and creative team to find, share, and repurpose content efficiently — let alone provide other departments and programs with up to date, brand approved content of their own. These fragmented systems led to version confusion, inconsistent branding, and time-consuming bottlenecks for staff across the university. To regain control and scale their content operations, Mines implemented a digital asset management (DAM) platform to serve as the single source of truth for all their content.

This central hub not only streamlined creative workflows, it also empowered campus partners to self-serve those approved assets on demand — reducing reliance on one-off requests and manual file transfers. In this session, learn how the university modernized its content and creative operations and martech stack to achieve measurable efficiency gains.

You’ll see how Mines:

• Centralized assets and improved collaboration by consolidating multiple storage tools into one organized, searchable, secure system.
• Enabled faster access to content through AI-powered search and facial recognition, reducing file retrieval times from hours (or days) to seconds.
• Empowered teams across campus with self-service access to approved images, videos, and graphics, minimizing bottlenecks and tedious asset requests.
• Enhanced brand consistency by ensuring everyone uses the latest, on-brand materials for marketing and communications.
• Measured real impact through significant time savings, increased content reuse, and improved creative output.

Ariana Keil

Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Canto

Keynote | Indispensable: The New Architecture of Marketing Leadership in Higher Ed

Higher education marketing has never operated in a more complex institutional environment. Rapid shifts in enrollment, funding, policy, and public trust have created a landscape where decisions made in finance, academics, enrollment, facilities, and communications are deeply interdependent — yet rarely made in concert. Marketing and communications leaders are increasingly being asked not just to execute campaigns, but to make sense of competing institutional priorities, translate complexity into coherent strategy, and connect dots across divisions that have historically operated in silos.

But for a growing number of senior leaders, that scope has expanded even further. Today’s CMO — or the leader who holds that function — is increasingly responsible for portfolios that extend well beyond marketing and communications into operations, student experience, and institutional planning. This expanded seat at the table brings both extraordinary opportunity and new demands for integrative leadership.

In this session, Bill Campbell and Jenny Petty, 2026 co-chairs for the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, will explore the evolving role of the senior marketing and communications leader as organizational sense maker and dot connector — and what true cross-functional alignment actually requires at this level of institutional complexity. Drawing on their own leadership experiences, including Bill’s oversight of both marketing communications and campus operations at Chatham University, they will examine why alignment breaks down, what it looks like when it works, and how leaders can position themselves as indispensable architects of institutional coherence.

Bill Campbell

Vice President of Operations & Communications, Chatham University

Jenny Petty

Vice President Industry Relations and Advisory Services SimpsonScarborough

More Than Merch: Using Promotional Products to Build Belonging in Higher Education

Colleges and universities must forge emotional connections as well as recruit students, using tangible touchpoints to foster loyalty. Strategic promotional products strengthen engagement and reflect institutional values throughout the student journey. This session shows how merchandise can support key milestones and offer actionable ideas for enrollment and alumni efforts.

Jessica Gibbons-Rauch, MBA, MAS

Professional Development Lead, PPAI

From Legacy to Leadership: Modernizing the Digital Campus Experience

Today’s students expect university digital experiences to work as seamlessly as the private-sector platforms they use every day. Yet many institutions are still operating on fragmented, costly legacy systems that slow down marketing teams, limit personalization, and create friction across the student lifecycle. In this 30-minute session, we’ll explore how higher education institutions can modernize their digital foundation to better support enrollment, recruitment, retention, and alumni engagement. We’ll dive into how to help institutions: Deliver intuitive, student-first digital experiences Reduce cost and complexity by consolidating legacy systems Empower marketing and admissions teams to move faster Prepare for AI-driven personalization and smarter search Modernization isn’t just a tech upgrade, it’s a strategic shift that strengthens institutional visibility, trust, and competitiveness in a digital-first enrollment landscape.

Travis Ralph

Principal Solutions Engineer (Public Sector / Financial Services Sector)