Marketing for universities and higher education providers
Faculty load targets and intake deadlines set the budget, so the work is planned around the weeks when a student is actually deciding.
Where the money moves.
Enrolment is not one funnel. Domestic undergraduate demand runs through the tertiary admission centres and peaks in the fortnight after results when preferences move. International demand runs through agents offshore, a portal, a fact sheet and a commission conversation, governed by confirmation of enrolment, genuine student assessment and visa processing rather than by advertising. Postgraduate coursework behaves like a considered purchase made by a working adult. One budget, three buying cycles, and faculty targets sitting across all of them.
The course page is the money page. A prospective student searching a qualification and a city lands on one page and decides there: entry requirements and pathway options, fees and whether a place is Commonwealth supported, professional accreditation, intake dates, duration, and what graduates actually go on to do. Most institutions maintain hundreds of these pages across faculties, quietly out of date. Fixing that layer moves more enrolments than a brand campaign, and it is the least glamorous project in the plan.
The seasonality is unforgiving. Open Day, results release, the change of preference window, census date, then a mid-year intake that most providers underwork. Money spread evenly across a year is money spent mostly outside the windows where a decision is being made. Across the Ignis portfolio, paid media returns an average of twenty times its spend, and that average is built by concentrating budget where the decision sits rather than running everything always-on at a constant weight.
Claims are governed and the proof formats are already set for you. The regulatory framework shapes what can be said to international students, and the credible evidence is published: graduate outcome and student experience results, accreditation by the relevant professional body, and entry and completion data a careers adviser can verify. We write from those sources, keep agent collateral consistent with the course page, and structure the data behind each course cleanly enough that an AI assistant answering a course question quotes you correctly.
What we run.
Course page system
One template, every course, populated from a single source so entry requirements, fees, accreditation and intake dates cannot drift between the faculty page, the agent fact sheet and the handbook. This is where search demand lands and where it currently leaks.
Change of preference
The fortnight that decides the domestic intake. Search and social weighted into it, call lists and messaging ready, offer and pathway content written before results land, and faculty-level budget so a shortfall in one school can be attacked directly.
Agent enablement
Course fact sheets, entry and English requirements, scholarship detail and intake calendars kept current in the languages your agent network works in, so the offshore conversation matches the page a student reads afterwards.
Mid-year intake
The underworked semester. Career changers, postgraduate coursework applicants and deferred domestic students are all live in it, and that demand can be captured at a fraction of what the summer window costs.
AI search visibility
Course data structured so an assistant answering a question about who teaches a qualification in a city returns yours with the right entry requirement and intake, because a growing share of shortlisting now happens before anyone reaches a website.
Questions we get asked.
Budget follows the load target and the gap, not internal volume. Each faculty gets a visible share, a forecast and a weekly number through the recruitment window, which settles the argument faster than a committee does. Where a school is already tracking to target, we say so and move the money to the one that is not.
Whatever the published national surveys and your professional accreditation support, cited so a careers adviser or an agent can verify it. That constraint helps. Verifiable outcome data at course level outperforms general employability messaging, and it survives regulatory scrutiny without a rewrite six weeks before an intake.
You do, from day one. Ad accounts, analytics, domains, tag containers and agent-facing assets are created in the institution's name with your staff as owners, and we work inside them. When a procurement cycle turns over, nothing has to be rebuilt and no access has to be negotiated back.
Also in education and training
Talk to us.
9 services under one team, run against the numbers your business already reports on.
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