13 Ways to Grow Enrollment

How to Strengthen Your FY26 Marketing Plan

Let’s be real.

Last week we mapped out how to build your FY26 Marketing Plan.
But for a lot of teams, building the plan is the easy part.

The hard part? Believing it’ll work.
Flat budgets. Big targets. A growing list of constraints.

If your plan feels shaky and you’re wondering how you’re going to pull it off - this one’s for you.

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🛠️ How to Close the Gap: The Levers You Can Pull

There are two types of levers in higher ed marketing:
➡️ The big strategic shifts
➡️ The fast, high-impact optimizations

Here’s a running list of both - designed to help you find margin, momentum, and measurable lift as you finalize your FY26 Marketing Plan.

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1️⃣ Change the Players on the Field

One of the biggest moves you can make: reevaluate who owns what.
Agency not delivering? Internal capacity tapped out? It might be time to consolidate or make a change.

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2️⃣ Increase Your Marketing Spend (Without Raising Your Budget)

What % of your budget is actually going to media?
Audit your "working dollars" and reallocate from lower-impact areas to put more behind the money in market that’s driving your upper funnel.

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3️⃣ Pull Spend Forward

Got something new that worked this year? Paid search? SEO?
Front-load your investment into high-performing channels, especially during peak season (August/September), to get ahead of the curve.

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4️⃣ Increase Velocity

If your average inquiry-to-start timeline is 90 days and you shrink it to 60, you could see a significant one-time lift in performance.
That means more starts this fiscal year instead of next. Chase this metric aggressively.

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5️⃣ Fix Your Storefront

.EDU homepage. Program landing pages.
Audit and optimize them now. Even a small bump in conversion rate can unlock massive downstream performance, especially if you can implement early in your fiscal year.

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6️⃣ Change Your Media Mix

Ask your team two questions:
👉 “If our budget was cut by 90%, what would you fight to keep?”
👉 “If it was cut by 10%, what’s the first thing you’d cut?”
Somewhere in between those answers is your ideal media mix. Find it.

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7️⃣ Increase Contact Rate

Typically, 75%+ of enrollments come from students contacted in the first 7 days.
Don’t boil the ocean when it comes to improving your comm plan. Focus on optimizing the first 5–7 days. Small changes here = big results.

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8️⃣ Shrink Your Application

More app completes = more enrollments.
Cut every field you can. Partner with academics. Get lean. It works.

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9️⃣ Focus on Funnel-Driving Events

Fall might already be largely baked. But what events are still coming this spring that can have impact? Admit days? Yield events? Welcome weekends?
Double down on the few big needle-moving events you’ve got coming up.

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🔟 Seek Scholarships

Scholarships are some of the highest-performing CTAs in paid channels.
If you can’t grow your budget, can you grow your offer?
Partner with institutional leadership to unlock existing or new funds to market.

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1️⃣1️⃣ Refresh Your Creative

Take what you have - photos, video, b-roll—and repackage it.
Run a fast-turn creative sprint with a clearer CTA, stronger value props, and higher urgency.
Even old assets can drive big new results.

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1️⃣2️⃣ Roll Up Your Spend

Still over-investing in program-specific non-branded paid search?
Shift as much of that investment as you can to area-of-study or brand-level campaigns.
Broader targeting = better efficiency. You’ll get more for every dollar you spend.

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1️⃣3️⃣ Get Ruthless with Prioritization

Not all levers are equal. Use a T-shirt sizing matrix (Small → XL) to rank ideas by:

• Effort required

• Impact potential

Then work top-down, starting with the biggest, easiest wins.

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✅ What Did I Miss?

These 13 aren’t exhaustive - but they’re a solid start.

If your FY26 plan still feels shaky, try one (or three) of these levers.
Because it is possible to deliver more with less.

- Seth

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About The Author
Seth is the founder and CEO of Kanahoma, a San Diego-based performance marketing agency on a mission to build a better agency for organizations building a better world.

You can learn more about who we are and what we do at www.Kanahoma.com.