When first-year enrollment began to decline for the first time in nearly a decade, Carol Custer, Director of Marketing for Iowa State University’s College of Engineering, partnered with Celsius Marketing & Interactive to identify the root causes and develop a student recruitment strategy that would reconnect the college with prospective engineers.
Although the College of Engineering maintained a strong national reputation, exceptional academic programs, and outstanding career placement rates, internal research revealed critical conversion gaps throughout the admissions funnel. Geographic challenges, shifting demographics, and inconsistent communications were causing prospective students to disengage before completing the enrollment process.
The College needed a strategic partner to modernize its enrollment marketing approach and create a more personalized experience for today’s prospective students.
Key objectives included:
Celsius began by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the student recruitment journey, evaluating audience behavior, admissions funnel performance, communication workflows, and enrollment trends.
The research uncovered a critical opportunity: prospective students were receiving communications that often felt too broad and disconnected from their individual interests, motivations, and stage in the decision-making process. Gen Z audiences expected content that was relevant, personalized, and delivered through the channels they used most frequently.
Using these insights, Celsius developed a persona-based enrollment marketing strategy designed to create more meaningful interactions throughout the recruitment process.
The strategy focused on:
By combining audience segmentation, personalized content, and data-driven decision-making, Celsius created a recruitment ecosystem designed to nurture prospects from initial awareness through enrollment.
Over the course of 20 plus years, we’ve done over 6,000 design and marketing projects for Iowa State University. We’ve worked on practically everything for this collegiate client, from designing the smallest temporary tattoos, to the biggest, most visible displays at the Iowa State Fair, and everything in between.
Celsius implemented a fully integrated student recruitment campaign that aligned creative storytelling, digital marketing, and enrollment communications around the needs of prospective engineering students.
The campaign utilized persona-driven messaging and audience-specific content to ensure students received relevant information at the right time and through the right channels.
The result was a highly personalized recruitment experience that connected prospective students with the opportunities, outcomes, and culture of Iowa State’s College of Engineering.
We’ve built websites, environmental displays, marketing campaigns and blogs. Oh, and every year we get to spread a little cheer with the President’s Holiday Card. We’ve been proud to have so many projects covered in cardinal and gold, and we love to outdo ourselves every year. The work we do for Iowa State University is always an adventure.
The campaign delivered measurable improvements in enrollment, engagement, and awareness, helping the College reverse a concerning enrollment trend and establish a stronger foundation for future growth.
The campaign demonstrated that enrollment challenges were not driven by a lack of interest in engineering, but by gaps in how prospective students were being engaged throughout the recruitment process.
By reducing communication barriers, personalizing the student journey, and delivering content aligned to audience needs, Celsius helped Iowa State University’s College of Engineering strengthen recruitment performance, increase enrollment, and exceed historical benchmarks.
What began as an effort to address declining enrollment evolved into a data-driven recruitment strategy that delivered measurable growth and reconnected future engineers with one of the nation’s leading engineering programs.