Reclaiming the Digital Campus

Introduction: Who really owns the student experience?

In many UK universities today, we have established that the digital ecosystem – from the institutional website to CRM journeys and offer-holder portals – is still largely the preserve of IT departments. This might have made sense back in 2005. But in 2025, it’s a dangerous anachronism.

Digital platforms are not just utilities. They are now, undoubtedly, your most powerful tools for key elements like recruitment, reputation, and revenue. And yet seemingly they remain locked behind legacy governance structures, CMS (content management system) gatekeeping, and IT-driven workflows that can throttle all-important speed and creativity.

To us, this is no longer a minor operational inefficiency. It is a strategic liability.

How we got here: The legacy of IT ownership

In the early days of the web, digital was infrastructure. Aspects like hosting, uptime, and data protection were paramount and IT teams were rightfully tasked with governance and control – protecting universities from reputational risk, data leaks and cyber threats, especially when CMS tools required technical knowledge.

But arguably, that legacy now shackles the potential of universities to respond to the needs and expectations of modern students. Marketing teams, who understand brand, user behaviour, content strategy and campaign velocity, are routinely left requesting access rather than actively shaping direction.

The digital expectation gap

91% of students believe their university should offer digital services that are as robust as face-to-face interactions.

Your key audiences – Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have grown up with Netflix-level personalisation and Amazon-grade usability. They expect everything to be intuitive, fast, and frictionless. Increasingly, platforms like TikTok and Snapchat are shaping how they consume information, discover brands, and make decisions – rewarding authenticity, speed, and strong visual storytelling. Applicants to your university now expect similarly dynamic, mobile-first experiences from institutions – and they don’t care which internal team runs which platform. For them, it’s all one brand experience.

Alas, what we’re seeing is that most universities routinely fail to meet this standard. Rigid CMS or DXP systems, poor UX, fragmented user journeys, and weeks-long waits to update a homepage CTA are not just inefficient – they’re lethal conversion-killers.

The jeopardy: What’s at stake if we don’t change?

To us this is not a theoretical debate, as we’ve heard it raised in enough councils now to know. So, here’s what happens when marketing doesn’t control digital:

• Missed recruitment targets: If your website and digital content aren’t optimised for search, conversion, and emotional connection, you lose students to competitors who are.
• Brand decay: Static, templated digital experiences flatten your distinctiveness –especially in a pressurised global sector where others are investing heavily in digital storytelling and experience design.
• Fragmented voice: At the other end of the spectrum, having 600+ editors across your digital estate – as one client recently revealed – creates a different problem: incoherent messaging, diluted storytelling, and little control over brand tone of voice. The result? A chaotic and inconsistent experience that erodes trust rather than building it.
• Slow response to market shifts: When a new course is launched or a visa rule changes or Trump announces a new executive order, how fast can your digital ecosystem adapt? If it’s measured in days or weeks, you’re too slow.
• Wasted marketing spend: A PPC campaign driving to a page you can’t change? CRM emails sending students to a clunky portal? That’s your ROI bleeding out.
• Unmanaged legacy content: A very common issue, many university websites contain hundreds of thousands of outdated or redundant “zombie” pages – often single-use, built on inconsistent platforms, and offering no current strategic value. They dilute your SEO (and now your GEO – generative engine optimisation) performance, confuse users, and bury high-impact content beneath irrelevant clutter.

If your marketing team needs to raise a ticket to update your homepage, you don’t have a digital strategy. You have a bottleneck.

The case for marketing leadership

Smart universities don’t resist ideas from beyond the sector – they actively learn from them. In most other industries, CMOs now lead digital strategy. Why? Because they understand audience behaviour, operate with agility, and are directly accountable for revenue.

As we can attest, across sectors marketing-led digital teams consistently deliver on impact, by:

• Optimising for outcomes: Enquiry, application, conversion – not just uptime.
• Designing for users: Personalised journeys, UX-led thinking, mobile-first interfaces.
• Testing and learning: Agile campaigns, rapid iteration, A/B testing.
• Connecting the dots: CRM, CMS, social and analytics all aligned to brand and funnel performance.

Meanwhile, IT remains critical – but as enabler, not gatekeeper.

Exemplars of change: Who’s leading the way?

Pictured: University of Cambridge (Judge Business School)

The penny is dropping however, and some UK universities are already moving in this direction:

• University of Leeds: Its award-winning Digital Education Service has brought together pedagogical and marketing thinking to design better student experiences.
  University of Bristol: Through its Digital Experience Framework, Bristol has articulated a student-centric approach that cuts across departments and silos.
• University of Cambridge (Judge Business School): Cambridge’s executive programmes embrace digital disruption and transformation, modelling what they teach.
• University of Warwick: We’re helping our client fulfil their ambition of achieving a full alignment of the brand and digital experience. Part of that journey is a reimagining of their identity and story, alongside a complete re-platforming of the website. Crucially this involves a total overhaul of governance – which will see them rationalising the number of content admins from an eye watering 700+ to under 50.

Internationally, universities like University of Sydney, Brigham Young University (BYU) and Arizona State University have restructured digital governance to give marketing a seat at the table – or even at the head of it.

From ownership to orchestration: A new digital operating model

Just to reassure you, this is not a hostile takeover. Simply see it more as a necessary yet pragmatic rebalancing of the roles:

Working together these roles should operate symbiotically, but to be truly effective, University leaders must enable this shift by:

• Appointing marketing-led digital transformation leads
• Investing in digital talent inside marketing teams
• Moving to modern, flexible CMS platforms – although a full-service (and mega-expensive) DXP isn’t always necessary!
• Setting KPIs around digital engagement and conversion, not just uptime

Final word: This is about leadership, not technology

Vice-Chancellors, Provosts, Registrars: this really isn’t a CMS debate. It’s a fundamentally strategic one.

Digital is now the front door to your institution. If marketing isn’t holding the keys, you’re locking out your most valuable audiences. Riskier still, you’re handing them over to more agile, digitally fluent competitors.

And let’s be clear: your digital experience is your brand experience. To a prospective student, a clunky application form, a generic landing page, or an unresponsive mobile site isn’t just a tech problem – it’s a broken promise. It signals that you’re outdated, disjointed, and possibly irrelevant.

But this extends far beyond students.

• Corporate partners evaluating your institution for clues as to future talent pipelines, joint research ventures, or funding will judge your credibility based on how your brand shows up online.
• Research collaborators and academic peers looking to assess your expertise and thought leadership will want to scan your research portals and faculty profiles. If these are buried, poorly structured, or visually uninspiring, they may not dig any deeper.
• Donors, policy-makers, and media will engage through digital first. A poor experience creates friction, saps trust and risks reputational damage before a conversation can even begin.

As brand and digital experts, we know only too well that in 2025, a reputation is shaped in milliseconds. And when your digital experience underwhelms, it doesn’t just lose you applicants – it quietly erodes confidence across every external audience that matters.

This is no longer a peripheral issue. It’s increasingly an existential challenge.

But the issue isn’t whether change is coming – because it’s already here, and our sector is scrambling to catch up. The real choice is this: will your institution lead the shift, or be left behind?

References

1. 91% of students expect digital services to match in-person experiences – FE News, 2022
2. University of Leeds – Digital Education Service Strategy – University of Leeds
3. University of Bristol – Understanding digital in HE – Bristol Digital Experience Blog
4. Cambridge Judge Business School – Digital Disruption – University of Cambridge
5. Arizona State University and RMIT cited as digital leaders in HE – Times Higher Education
6. Higher ed marketers’ frustration with performance and agility – UPCEA & EducationDynamics Survey, 2023