Winning Enrollment in a Zero-Click World

For years, enrollment marketing ran on clicks. Search, display, and aggregators made up 80 to 85% of most marketing mixes, and brand took a back seat. Now a prospective student can ask ChatGPT or Claude to compare schools and walk away with a shortlist without visiting a single website. In this episode of ROI University, Rustam Irani and Chris Sheppard sat down with Charlie Parker, Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Management and Chief Marketing Officer at Keiser University, to talk about what it takes to win enrollment when the click never comes.

Google is becoming the new Yellow Pages

Rustam pointed to an analogy from Gary Vaynerchuk: Google is turning into the new Yellow Pages. Before cell phones, the Yellow Pages had a monopoly on how people found businesses, products, and services. Google has held that position for two decades. As LLMs and AI search take share, that monopoly is breaking up. Google will find its place, but it's no longer the only front door, and the more discovery spreads out, the more brand awareness matters.

Share what LLMs can't

Chris argued that zero-click actually gives schools an advantage, if they use it. LLMs return data sets and content. They don't return experience, culture, or context. What does it feel like to be a student here? Whose stories am I hearing? What happens after I graduate? A student can ask ChatGPT what's next, but they can't feel a campus culture through it.

That's also how the journey plays out. Students compare and contrast schools in an LLM, then go to TikTok and Instagram to see what's really happening. Rustam saw this firsthand when his daughter toured Tulane. From the mail pieces to the campus visit, where a jazz band was playing as families walked into one of the oldest auditoriums on campus, the message was consistent: New Orleans, the French Quarter, community. It was an experience no AI summary could deliver.

Stop sounding like everyone else

Charlie's view is that the industry lost its brand uniqueness chasing clicks, and zero-click has brought that home. Every school says small class sizes. Every school says state of the art. A student can get most programs almost anywhere. The difference is what happens in the halls: the human connections, the outcomes, the partnerships. At Keiser, that means leaning into the school and the Florida lifestyle, not just the program.

It's also a better argument for affordability than being cheap. Charlie warned that schools rushing to cut tuition without changing their expenses are building a house of cards. Rustam saw the same thing on the OPM side. Operating costs don't go down when tuition does, so margins get squeezed until the model starts to bleed, and brand integrity takes a hit along the way.

Manage the narrative, not just the search engine

Charlie is tired of the alphabet soup of SEO, GEO, and AEO. What it all comes down to, he says, is narrative management: managing your external narrative so LLMs pull in an authentic, trusted story about your school. That story lands harder when it comes from faculty, students, graduates, and partners than from the institution itself.

It takes an ecosystem. PR, communications, organic social, Reddit, Quora, Substack, SEO content, and performance marketing should all feed each other, with purposeful content instead of content for content's sake. Then test it. Ask ChatGPT, "Should I go to Keiser?" or ask it to compare you to a competitor, and learn from what comes back instead of buying more banner ads.

The hardest part is buy-in. A large institution can't do this through one marketing team, and Charlie won't hand it to gig workers who don't know the culture or the vernacular. And Reddit has rules worth learning before you post. Charlie admits he's been in Reddit jail three times.

Treat reviews and sentiment as signals

Reviews matter more than ever: Google Maps, Yelp, Rate My Professors, and every forum where people talk about your school. Keiser is pulling those signals into a central hub using tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Semrush, so the team can react faster. Two years ago, that kind of visibility wouldn't have been possible.

Chris added that people who leave bad reviews usually tell you exactly what happened. One review is one review. Five or ten saying the same thing is something to fix, and fixing it gives you content to write and better experiences to share. You can't erase the old reviews, but you can overwrite them by doing better.

Charlie applies the same thinking to his student base. More than half of Keiser's students started somewhere else and didn't finish. Understanding why, and telling that story earlier, matters more than just counting the enrollments. Support services are a big part of it. Rustam remembered teams that kept lists of local daycare centers for adult students. At Keiser, Dr. Keiser still picks up every phone call.

Keep performance in the mix, and don't forget the mailbox

None of this means walking away from performance marketing. Charlie has started advertising on ChatGPT and has seen early starts, though it's still cost-prohibitive. Rustam has seen leads come through but is still waiting on down-funnel results. Both agree you'd be silly to drop performance. The goal is to learn in the mid-funnel, then take what you learn back to your paid top-of-funnel work to get more out of every dollar.

Some old-school tactics are working again, too. Rustam's daughter received a handwritten note from a current student at Michigan offering to answer questions. Another school sent an envelope with a personal message in the address window that made Rustam and his wife open it on the spot. As AI makes everything more automated, human touches stand out.

The takeaway

Zero-click doesn't make brand less important. It makes it everything. Share the experiences LLMs can't, get your faculty, students, and graduates telling the story, treat reviews as feedback, and keep performance in the mix while you test what's next. As Charlie put it, you have to go where the puck is going, and stay a student of the game.