Portland, Maine, proved to be an excellent host city for eduWeb Summit 2025. Before the conference began, we had time to explore what makes this coastal city special. The Old Port district caught my attention with its cobblestone streets and old brick buildings. We walked down to the Eastern Promenade and were impressed by the clear views of Casco Bay and all the boat activity in the harbor. Maine was that kind of place that feels authentic rather than touristy, and you can sense it right from the moment you land at Maine’s airport.
We made sure to try The Highroller Lobster, known for their build-your-own lobster rolls with different house-made sauces. We got a good sense of why Portland has become such a popular destination for conferences and events by visiting local shops, walking the waterfront, and watching the boats come and go from the harbor.
Once we got to know the city a bit, we returned to setting up our booth and preparing for the big day: the start of the conference.
The eduWeb Summit 2025 conference brought together higher education marketing professionals, enrollment managers, and digital marketing experts from 16 countries and all 50 states. Taking place July 15–17 in Portland, Maine, the conference marked its 20th anniversary with over 60 sessions, keynotes, and networking events focused on enrollment growth, strategy, leadership,6y7 marketing, communication, and AI.
Apart from exhibiting, our Co-Founder / CEO, Faton Sopa, delivered a keynote presentation focused on groundbreaking research from our (soon-to-be-launched) nationwide study on how student college search behavior has undergone fundamental changes and how higher ed marketers can adapt.
At our booth, we welcomed conference participants with valuable insights, offering conference-exclusive, free Reddit Brand Sentiment analyses, and sharing practical strategies and tactics on how to break through in today’s highly competitive and fragmented search space. This year, as well, our popular Tony’s chocolate bars helped fuel strategy conversations throughout the event.
Session Highlights
Faton Sopa – The Way Students Find Colleges Today Is Changing – How Are You Adapting?
Our CEO delivered eye-opening insights from Manaferra’s comprehensive (soon to be launched) original research study involving over 1,500 recently enrolled students across three segments: undergraduates, graduates, and adult learners. The research revealed that 40% of students begin their college search with no schools in mind, while 87% use multiple platforms before making enrollment decisions.
The research found that students no longer rely solely on Google to search and discover college. Instead, they search across AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, discover colleges on TikTok and Reddit, validate information through YouTube, and fact-check across multiple platforms before making decisions.
The new reality of search demands that institutions optimize their content and presence across every platform where students actually search, not just traditional search engines, making the traditional SEO playbook insufficient to reach today’s students. This makes the college search process non-linear and complex, as success now depends on understanding platform-specific search algorithms, content formats, and student search behaviors across the entire college search ecosystem, where students conduct their college research.
Raffi DerSimonian – Before You Redesign: Top 10 Essentials for Your Digital Doorstep to the World
Raffi DerSimonian from ERI, challenged conventional website redesigns with a provocative assertion: visuals represent only 10% of success, while strategic foundation accounts for 90%. His “10 Essentials Framework” emphasized measurable transformation over vague improvements, moving from goals like “make it look modern” to specific objectives such as “Reduce steps to application from 7 to 3, increasing
application completion rate by 25%”.
The framework covered everything from comprehensive brand audits to AI integration planning and post-launch optimization workflows. A key insight from his session was that institutions that approach redesigns strategically, rather than reactively, see transformational results, embodying Louis Pasteur’s wisdom that “fortune favors the ready mind.”
Jarrett Smith and Grant De Roo – First Things First: How Prospective Students Rank Academic, Admissions, and Aid Information
Using “Top Tasks” methodology with over 1,000 prospective students, their research challenged higher ed assumptions about website priorities. The total cost of attending a college dominates student concerns across all segments to a degree that most institutions don’t recognize. Traditional undergraduates focus heavily on acceptance rates and concerns about debt, while graduate and non-traditional students prioritize feasibility and program fit.
Most surprisingly, their research found that generic salary data and program rankings ranked lowest, suggesting that students prioritize program-specific outcomes over industry statistics. Payment plan options emerged as a significant missed opportunity, rarely featured prominently despite their potential to address cash flow concerns.
Brian Piper – Supercharge Your Content with AI and Data
Brian’s AI integration presentation emphasized practical implementation over theoretical possibilities, with his key insight that AI adoption is fundamentally a change management project, not just technology deployment. He demonstrated concrete examples of how AI saved 20-40% in content creation and 60-80% in data analysis, including virtual focus groups using AI personas and automated video repurposing.
His implementation framework centers on forming institution-wide Marcom AI committees that address concerns about hallucinations, bias, and ethical considerations. Rather than replacing human expertise, his approach emphasizes AI as an enhancement and collaboration tool for sustainable integration across all marketing functions and beyond.
Allison Turcio and the CCA Team: The Paid Media Playbook: 10 Insights From 50+ Campaigns
The CCA team shared concrete performance data from over 700 million impressions across more than 50 campaigns, challenging conventional paid media wisdom with actual conversion numbers (which, frankly, is quite rare with higher ed institutions). Facebook and Instagram delivered 68% more conversions than search ads, with 98% of these conversions coming from parent audiences rather than students directly.
Their key finding: Meta’s Advantage+ targeting improved performance 20-30% with lower costs, while TikTok generated the most landing page traffic despite not driving the highest conversions. The overarching message of the session was that data-driven optimization consistently outperforms increased spending.
Emerging Trends & Strategic Insights
Between sessions, over coffee, and during those valuable hallway conversations, we kept hearing the same themes coming up again and again. These weren’t just isolated insights from individual presentations; they were patterns that became impossible to ignore as the conference unfolded.
SEO goes beyond Google: Welcome, Omnichannel SEO
Higher education marketing is witnessing a fundamental shift from traditional SEO to Omnichannel SEO. Students no longer rely solely on Google to discover colleges and programs. Their college search journey today is complex and non-linear, where students use multiple platforms to search, discover, trust, and validate before making decisions.
Emerging search platforms, such as AI, are shaping new search behaviors, particularly among adult learners, with a focus on speed, personalization, trust, and convenience. These search behaviors are likely to create expectations about how other search platforms work, so higher education institutions would need to adapt in order to reach their students wherever they search.
AI is Going from an Experimental Tool to Essential Infrastructure
AI has moved from experimental novelty to essential marketing infrastructure across higher education. Institutions are discovering that successful AI adoption is not just about deploying the latest tools, but also about restructuring workflows, implementing effective change management, enhancing communication, and fundamentally rethinking how processes work within the organization.
Forward-thinking institutions are utilizing AI for a range of applications, including content optimization, data analysis, automation, and admissions, all while maintaining strategic human oversight.
Data-Driven Decisions Beat Every Assumption
A clear trend emerged toward evidence-based marketing strategies that challenge long-held institutional assumptions about student search behavior, preferences, and marketing efficiency. Concrete performance data consistently reveals gaps between how higher education professionals think students behave and what actually drives enrollment decisions. This shift represents a maturation of higher ed digital marketing, moving beyond vanity metrics toward performance-focused measurement that directly correlates with enrollment outcomes and yield, not just impressions, traffic, and leads.
The trend reflects growing accountability pressures, with declining enrollment and increased competition, marketing departments must demonstrate clear ROI through sophisticated analytics and systematic campaign optimization rather than relying on intuition or traditional best practices.
Students Prefer Authenticity Over Polished Marketing
Student-generated authentic content is decisively outperforming polished marketing content across all channels and audience segments. The preference for genuine student experiences, unfiltered peer perspectives, and raw campus life documentation over polished promotional content reflects broader generational shifts in information consumption and trust.
Numerous sessions highlighted that Gen Z students, in particular, are highly skeptical of traditional advertising and marketing messages, gravitating toward authentic vlogs, honest social media posts, and peer recommendations. This trend is forcing marketing departments to shift from controlling institutional messaging and sponsored ads to facilitating and amplifying genuine student storytelling, thereby improving organic performance and building deeper trust with prospective students.
College Websites are (Finally) going Student-Centric
Website design philosophy in higher education is shifting dramatically toward genuinely student-centric information architecture that prioritizes actual student tasks over institutional organizational convenience.
The most successful institutions are reorganizing their digital presence around what students actually need to accomplish, prioritizing cost information, program outcomes, admission information, and college experience over institutional hierarchy or administrative structure. This reflects a changing expectation, as students accustomed to speed and convenience across other channels demand similar experiences from college websites.
The trend extends beyond responsive design to truly mobile-optimized experiences that anticipate and facilitate the specific tasks students most commonly perform on their devices.
Sustainable Strategies Over Quick-Win Tactics
Higher education institutions are increasingly prioritizing sustainable, long-term digital marketing strategies over quick-win tactics or trendy platform experiments. This includes hiring external expertise when internal expertise is lacking, or building internal capabilities rather than outsourcing; developing owned media assets rather than relying entirely on paid advertising; and creating systematic processes that persist beyond the tenure of individual employees.
This trend reflects both budget pressures and platform dependency concerns, because (finally) institutions are recognizing the risks of over-reliance on paid search advertising, where algorithm changes can immediately impact results, and a competitor with more budget can beat you instantly. The most strategic institutions are building diverse digital marketing portfolios that balance organic optimization, content marketing, and owned media properties with a clear ROI tracking system in place.
Closing Thoughts
eduWeb Summit 2025 reinforced why this conference remains the premier gathering for higher education digital professionals and is one of the higher ed conferences you don’t want to miss. The combination of cutting-edge research (such as Manaferra’s study on student search behavior) with practical sessions and genuine community connections creates an environment where real learning and relationship-building flourish.
The conference’s emphasis on authentic engagement, data-driven decision making, and sustainable digital strategies reflects where the industry is heading. As traditional enrollment marketing models continue to evolve, events like eduWeb Summit provide essential forums for sharing what’s working, what’s not, and what’s coming next.
We’re already looking forward to eduWeb Summit 2026 in Orlando, Florida, where we’ll continue these crucial conversations about the future of higher education marketing and digital strategy. The higher ed community that gathers at eduWeb represents the best of collaborative professional development, and we can’t wait to see how the insights shared this year translate into real enrollment success stories by next summer.
Ready to adapt your institution’s search marketing strategy for tomorrow’s students? Contact Manaferra to learn how our research-backed Omnichannel SEO™ approach can help your institution meet students where they search today.
