Higher Education Marketing and Enrollment Strategy

A "Good" Higher Ed Website is Not Enough.

As the central hub to your recruitment and marketing efforts, your website needs to be GREAT. It needs to connect your story to your higher ed audiences’ hopes, dreams, and values. Your website should be alive and persuasive. And it needs to be fully integrated into your marketing ecosystem.

We’ve curated resources to inspire you to build a GREAT website. Access our website design and development toolkit for tips, tricks, and strategies from user research to website personalization.


  • Our designers are fearlessly creative. We work as a team to develop creative feature ideas, preliminary navigation sets, and page layouts for your new .edu. We will review and collaborate with you to ensure a shared vision for the project. Your new college or university website will be beautiful, flexible, modular—and it will get results.

  • Generic content. Information that’s hard to find. Broken links. Sound familiar? Your institution serves myriad audiences—prospective and current students, faculty, staff, donors, community partners—and they all need to find relevant information quickly and easily. With our user-centric approach to content strategy and information architecture, you will have compelling content with the right message, organized for people.

  • Our approach starts with empathy—understanding the hearts and heads of the people we are trying to reach. We blend both qualitative and quantitative data through stakeholder interviews, existing research, and current site analytics. With this research, we can make well-informed decisions about content, asset planning, information architecture, and design to create a meaningful, immersive, data-driven website.

  • Our technology expertise is as developed as our creative skills. We’ve launched hundreds of sites on dozens of platforms and approach our front-end development with care and craft. We have the skills and expertise necessary to partner with on-campus IT teams—bridging gaps and making it easier to accomplish goals.

  • About 70% of students use search engines to research schools and degree programs. That's why it's critical to create the content students are looking for and to optimize your website and social media for search. We use online tools like Google Business Profile Optimization and processes like SEO. We optimize your social media posts and website design to drive traffic to your pages. With Carnegie's strategies, you'll have results for every step of the enrollment funnel.

About Carnegie

For more than 35 years, Carnegie has been a leader and innovator in higher education marketing and enrollment strategy, offering groundbreaking services in the areas of Research, Strategy, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Slate Optimization, Student Search, Website Development, and Creative that generate authentic connections.

We connect colleges with students through the power of human connection. We believe that genuine connection is the key to capturing attention and building affinity. Our core philosophy fuses the principles of human psychology with marketing and enrollment innovation; we measure and then market to a student’s unique behaviors and motivators to create deep connection and real conversation. This leads to action, enrollment, retention, and lasting affinity.