Ep. 91 - Mallory Willsea: Activity vs. Strategy—Why Higher Ed Marketing Measures the Wrong Things

About this episode

Mallory Willsea discusses the pitfalls of higher ed marketing, emphasizing the need for specificity and authenticity over mere activity.

After nearly 20 years watching colleges pour millions into sameness—the same viewbooks, the same home page videos, the same taglines—Mallory Willsea has a message for higher ed: stop mistaking activity for strategy. In this episode, Jeff Dillon sits down with Mallory, a strategist and consultant who has been shaping digital marketing in higher ed since the early days of social media. From her early experiments with YouTube recruitment videos at St. Michael's College to co-founding Higher Ed Icons and hosting the Higher Ed Pulse Podcast, Mallory brings a rare longitudinal view of what actually works—and what doesn't. Mallory argues that the real enemy isn't polish; it's sameness. When every institution claims to "develop the whole student" without showing what the chemistry department actually does at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, trust erodes. The fix? Specificity. Real people. Proof behind the claims. She also tackles the AI shift head-on, warning that SEO strategies from 2019 are no longer enough when students start their search in ChatGPT, Reddit, or AI overviews. She urges institutional leaders to audit where their audience is actually finding information—and to accept that they no…

People in this episode

Host: Jeff Dillon

Guest: Mallory Willsea

Topics covered

• higher education marketing
• digital marketing
• strategy vs. activity
• AI in education
• enrollment strategies
• institutional branding

Keywords

• higher education
• marketing strategy
• digital marketing
• AI impact
• enrollment
• branding
• social media
• SEO

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Higher Ed Icons, Higher Ed Pulse Podcast

Places: St. Michael's College

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