0:00:07.9 BROOM: Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. The Higher Education Coffee and Conversation podcast is dedicated to exploring issues of importance to staff and faculty who work at community colleges and universities. I'm super excited to share with you a conversation I had with Erin Green, who is the director of sales enablement for Local IQ. Erin is an award-winning marketing leader with more than a decade of experience with digital strategy and media. She's worked with a number of leading organizations including Nike, FedEx, and Emerson, Susan G. Komen and has been a featured speaker with Google and Facebook. Erin and I walk through how to implement Digital Marketing Strategies and what's new in the digital marketing space. We also dive into how it is that Google knows more about us than our own friends and family, the value of search marketing, the student funnel versus the student journey, and so much more... Perhaps my biggest takeaway is the phrase that, Hey, you're not going to cut your way to more students. I can't wait to use that one in the next workshop with college presidents. Whether you're an old pro with digital marketing or you're new to the space, you will definitely learn something from Erin in our conversation.
0:01:21.1 BROOM: Let's get started. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so happy to have you back on the podcast. I am happy to be back. Thanks for having me. So, Erin, you are a digital media superstar. You are definitely what I would call an expert. So, let's start off by talking a little bit about what you do and who you are.
0:01:41.8 GREEN: Sure, so I am Erin Green, I'm the director of sales enablement at each local Local IQ, and I think I have the best job in the world. I get to work with community colleges and various brands and businesses all across the country, and I consult with them on their digital media strategy and make sure everything is rolling and effective for them.
0:02:02.9 BROOM: I feel that so many of our colleges are either in the beginning phases or have implemented digital marketing strategies just in the last two years. I think for a long time, it was something foreign to a lot of colleges, but now they're getting their hands wet and they're getting involved in the digital marketing world, and I know that you've seen a lot of the campaigns up and running, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about some of the things that you've noticed over the last year, any changes, any recommendations that you're telling colleges, it's kind of a broad, big sweeping question, but I thought you might have some good insights as we start our conversation.
0:02:44.6 GREEN: Sure, so I find that we've seen the same trend, right, where that we find people all along different areas of the curve in terms of how advanced their digital programs are still even in 2020, there are some schools that have just done traditional marketing or maybe they've been in a market where they haven't had to do a lot of marketing, right. And with everything that has happened in 2020 with the pandemic, I think there were a lot of people that expected there to be a boom in the college space. We've seen that in some areas and others we have not seen that, and for those, they need to be super effective with their marketing programs, and so I guess maybe the biggest question for people that haven't done digital at all is always, Well, where do I start? They start looking at the whole world and like, Where do I start? And we always recommend that the starting point for most programs is Search to make sure that you have a strong presence, and it's because we try to consult with people on thinking, getting your mind into the student or parent or life-long learner or whoever your particular target market is think about what is the first step that they're going to take whenever they're researching what program they're going to go to, and it's almost always to Google it.
0:03:59.4 GREEN: So, one of the takeaway tidbits is always that Google knows more about us than our friends and family. We tell Google things that we don't tell anybody else. And, so, if you're done with your job and you're getting ready to go back to school, or if you lost your job and you need more education, Google is the first place that you turn.
0:04:15.1 BROOM: Gosh, isn't that true? If people could see my search queries, especially when I'm lying in bed at night.
0:04:22.6 GREEN: I make my opening question for Zoom calls a lot of times now is, what's the most recent thing in your search history? And I get the best answers.
0:04:30.8 BROOM: Oh my gosh, I can just imagine what people say, and I think you and I spoke together last year at the NC MPR District One conference, and I remember you had... You had a slide... And if you don't remember the exact quote, that's okay, I'll forgive you, but I remember something like there was this unbelievable number of new queries that is done every single day...
0:04:56.7 GREEN: Oh right, yeah, but it's... I don't remember the exact number, but it was a huge number. It's one of the numbers that the human brain really just doesn't get its head around very well, whether it's... because it's trillions of searches of a year. There’s a billion new queries like that have never been typed before, because we sort of get our heads around the idea that a lot of search queries are happening, and whenever we visit to Google, they actually have the staircase that has the queries coming in live, and then you can like look in to have them map on to the staircase and see them, which is super interesting. Yeah, that it's... What's interesting is that 10-15% of search queries every day have never been done before. And then the immediate question is, why is that? There’s two big reasons for that. One, there's new things happening that have never happened before that people are dealing with, and voice search is the other thing, like the connected devices and the more search queries that happen, the more complex those queries become...
0:05:56.5 BROOM: Oh yeah, speaking of long and complex, I caught my 12-year-old asking Siri how to solve his math equations from his math quiz,
GREEN: Did it work?
BROOM: Well, one of her answers was wrong because she couldn't understand the parentheses around the negative number, so I told him he’s a little cheater. But yeah, you're right, and I think that brings us back to your original comment about what's happened with COVID, I mean, just at this time last year, there probably weren't very many search queries around COVID, none around COVID 19, and now I bet that's probably one of the most common things that people are searching for. And I think you're right about what our colleges have seen in terms of enrollment, I actually remember doing a webinar immediately after most colleges closed down, which was in May, April, May here in California, here we closed early, but across the country were a little bit slower and I predicted that we would not see enrollment spikes like we did in the Great Recession, because during the Great Recession, people got laid off and they didn't know when this thing was going to end, and they were willing to go back to school and they use financial aid to supplement their income.
0:07:09.0 BROOM: But with the pandemic, right now, people are out of work, and they're hoping to get back soon, they're waiting for a vaccine, they're furloughed, they don't have the time to commit to going back full-time, they have children at home, they're doing virtual learning, like me, they're now the lunch lady on top of everything else, so we haven't seen spikes of enrollment, and because of that, I've been approached now more than ever with colleges looking to start digital marketing colleges who've never done it before, because they're down 10, 15, some 20% in enrollment.
0:07:47.1 GREEN: Yeah, I heard a university the other day that they said success looked like being flat, and that may be the first time I've heard that from any business in any sector that their growth goals was to be flat, one of the other sort of trends to think about it is what we call environmental pressure, you think about what that is like for the student, for the parent, for the person who potentially has lost their job that you might normally have went back to school and... Yeah, if they're having to stay at home and they're having to be like a teacher now and the lunch lady, like you say, or any of the other number of things, that there is this sort of hope that it's all going to be over soon, but there's not a definite timeline associated with that, so those are all really good points in terms of the effect and for the universities that sort of have waited it out, I think everybody is looking at … this is going to go on, we're going to have to have a plan that sustains us into 2021 and think about how we're going to adapt.
0:08:43.7 GREEN: I think a lot of universities thought that people would not go to, or a lot of colleges thought that people from universities might un-enroll for a year and then go to a community college because of the rates and pricing for that, but the other sort of trend to think about is, is that since so many schools are online now, that you're competing with a much broader audience, right. So it's not just a singular geographic footprint that you have to think about, like somebody can go to an online school anywhere in the country, from anywhere in the country, and it's a whole other sort of marketing done to think about...
0:09:16.8 BROOM: Yeah, that is such a key point, there was a college here in Southern California who got their marketing budget slashed, and their director of communications made that exact same point to her president that, Look, we need to market now more than ever, because we're not just competing against the local universities and colleges anymore. Students can go wherever they want.
0:09:39.2 GREEN: So, there's that, and then we see this all the time where there's this desperate fight for budget, there's the focus on only marketing, on solutions that are at the very bottom of the funnel and we... There’s no scenario where you're going to spend less money and magically get more enrollment. The inputs and outputs just don't make sense for that. And whenever you point that out, people are like, Oh, that's true. But they don't think about it when they're going through the budgeting exercise, that there's a cause and effect, right, but the amount of effort and scale and scope and size of your marketing program is going to have a direct impact on your enrollment, and you're fighting against a lot of variables, and so now isn't the time to cut and that since you know that your competition is cutting, now is the time to double down because there's market share to be grabbed.
0:10:29.2 BROOM: Exactly, and you mentioned the bottom of the funnel, and I know that you're really well-versed with the student enrollment funnel, especially as it pertains to online searches and how students find colleges and universities. Could you explain a little bit about what that student funnel looks like with the life cycle of a student is in terms of digital marketing?
0:10:51.0 GREEN: Yeah, let me get on some different points for that, because we talk about the marketing funnel, and we actually looked it up, the marketing funnel was invented in 1899, and so it's kind of become... It's still a useful rubric, but it's kind of become outdated, so we start to talk more about the student journey from your trigger event, from the moment that somebody sort of decides that they're ready to go back to school all the way through... They actually submitted an application and were accepted, and what are all of those processes? And some of the studies that we've seen, I think maybe the most, if you're looking for factoids to sort of put in your back pocket, on average, a student will consider 3 to 4 universities, so let's call that four colleges or schools or programs that they're going to do and they've come up with that list at the very beginning of that process, and 75%, 80% of those people never look at more than that, and that's a really, really important thing to like holds like in your consciousness. Right, that means that at the very beginning of the process, the most schools that most people look at for...
0:11:55.5 GREEN: And they're never going to look at more, which means that if you're only investing at the bottom of the funnel or at the end of the journey, you don't have a chance to be picked because you weren't at the beginning of the process. So, one of the things we're always talking to people about is how do you have a strong marketing presence at every step of that process, and just take a little bit of time for yourself to think about who is the student that you're trying to go after and what does your research process look like? You know, they're going to probably use Google at the beginning and end up their journey, but what other platforms are they going to be researching and interacting with, what is their activity on YouTube or what is their activity on social look like. And then always, what does the activity look like on the rest of the Internet, like all of the websites that we're constantly visiting to research and find things out on, and thinking about how can you be there whenever they arrive and that you can be the educating helpful voice to sort of steer them in the direction for your program?
0:12:54.0 BROOM: That’s a really great point, and I had no idea that that funnel was invented in the 1800s. That's crazy. And it must have changed. I know it's changed. And I think one of the things that I found so fascinating the last time you and I talked is this whole concept of micro-moments, something that we learned when we went to Google and talked to their higher education experts, and I think they're even more important. Now, because there's so much going on in the world, and like you mentioned, with the environmental pressures happening, these moments in our life are defining, and they sometimes can be really small. Share with me what that is, what is a micro one... What does it have to do with digital marketing, and especially with student recruitment?
0:13:42.3 GREEN: A micro moment is a singular interaction, right? So, if you think about somebody's student journey from the moment that they decide that maybe they're interested in going back to college, going back to school and they're going to change their life, there's going to be a lot of stops along the way. And so, for example, an example of a singular micro-moment might be they pull out their phone and they type in a search for best business school in the area, for example, that would be a micro-moment, and then to even sort of confuse it more, sometimes I sort of describe... Put yourself in the mind of, I guess, making the best example I have is my daughter, she's like 16 going on, 21. Right. And what does her research process look like? She texted me last night and she was looking at internships with the Smithsonian, and she texted me randomly, and to me, she's looking at scholarships and different stuff... Right, but I encourage people to think about how many simultaneous moments are happening at once, so this is my daughter, her name is Nicole, and so I just want you to picture what her college research process looks like on a given night.
0:14:48.9 GREEN: She is in her room, she's at her desk, and she has her Chromebook open that was given to her by school, she's got that pulled up and she is doing homework, right. Doing homework means that she has 30 tabs open on Chrome, she's got YouTube, she's got CSA, she's got all of the different learning platforms, but she's also got all sorts of various different websites, she is into frogs and amphibians and cute things. Right, so she's got all that going, but she's also got her iPad which serves as her text book, so she's got that sitting there, and of course she's not just on the textbook, she’s slipping back and forth between apps, and she has her phone and on her phone, she's got Snapchat, she's got Instagram, which uses both a text messaging platform and is consuming cross-stitch patterns, and she's text messaging with all of her friends, so simultaneously she is switching between all of those things and then probably has some music plan in the background, she's probably listening to Pandora, something like that, and it's constantly flipping back and forth between all of those things, so in that sort of chaotic environment, all of these simultaneous little moments happening, there's the opportunity for influence whenever she stops and she's like, Oh, well, now I'm going to research schools and I'm going to look at scholarships, so I'm going to think about programs and stuff for that chunk of time.
0:16:03.6 GREEN: Are you ready? Ready to be there. So, I just always want to paint a clear picture for that, and if that's not your ideal student, if it's somebody else, if it's the single mom who just got off work, we came home that had to cook dinner and finally sat down and is now streaming a show on TV and on her phone at the same time and has her laptop up casually research in school. It's still similar, there's a simultaneous... You're on multiple platforms, your attention is divided, and so having a really clear, compelling message that brings people in is super important.
0:16:37.1 BROOM: First of all, your daughter's media consumption sounds exhausting, but it's not different from my teenager, almost teenager. They are... They are plugged in. And it's true when you said the iPads, the textbook, that's true. Like, wow, things have changed so much. It's crazy, but I think one of the things that I take away from listening to this example is you just painted this beautiful profile of a potential college student, and we're looking at marketing from that student's perspective, this could be... Now, we're recording this in October, this could be in February. She could be at a friend's house, you know, there's so many variables, but colleges, at least those that are in the beginning phases of their digital marketing, tend to think about marketing from the perspective of the institution. They do, yeah. Oh, it's enrollment time, oh, we have a little extra budget, Oh, we have this program that's launching in a month, rather than thinking about it from with the student... Where the student is coming from.
0:17:47.3 GREEN: Yeah, I think the timeline piece that you just highlighted is what we hear the most, right. We'll hear its enrollment time, or it's a month or two months to enrollment, let's boot up our campaign and then let's boot it back down, and we're like, That's not how that student journey looks right now. So, we know that 50-60% of potential students, regardless of their generation, take a year or more doing their research. So, think about that, right? If somebody has festering on the idea of school and is trying to figure how to make the decision, if it's going to take them a year to make that decision, and we know that they're only going to look at it three or four schools tops and during that time frame, what does that tell you about the nature of your program and what it needs to be, and I think the big word is, is that consistency is key. That you need to be there, that turning on and turning off is not the strategy that you want, you need to find something that is consistent, that is sustainable.
0:18:47.6 BROOM: Exactly, and you don't have to have a huge budget to do that now.
0:18:51.4 GREEN: And it's about being realistic about your budget, so if you have, here's what comes to mind... Normally, people have constraints for the budgets, right, nobody comes to us and says, Hey, we have an unlimited budget as much as both sides of the table would want that. There's a constraint for them, and the key is to come up with a plan that works within your budget that allows you to be consistent and think about if you have to make restrictions on geography or if you have to have restrictions about what the programs you're recruiting on, it's more important to be consistent all the way through, then thinking you're going to sort of turn on and turn off.
0:19:24.3 BROOM: I think that's one thing that I see the most of, especially with some of the colleges I've been working with digital marketing, is they don't have a plan. So, it's kind of just knee-jerk like, Oh my God, enrollments down, late start classes start in a month. What can you do? There's not that much you can do in a month. I mean, we definitely can try, but let's plan for next year. Let's take a more holistic approach.
0:19:53.4 GREEN: Yeah, so we always want to jump in and meet people where they are, but you're absolutely right, so you're going to jump in, you're going to get some campaigns and maybe you get some traction, but if you want to be super effective... Yeah, you need a long-term plan, and so that's one of the things we always ask that question, right? We're like, Yeah, do you know who your target market is? And have you thought about what that student journey is? And, then do you have a media plan that mirrors that, or if you don't have a plan that perfectly mirrors that, have you at least thought about it and you know what the gaps are, and you've been intentional about that, you're like, Well, you know, we had a budget, we had to make some sacrifices. So, we're picking these strategies and intentionally not being there, but you've at least considered and thought about that piece as opposed to it being more reactive, like now it's absolutely the time to get ahead of the curve and get a plan in place on paper, not just like... in the back of your mind.
0:20:47.5 BROOM: A plan that you can share so that when you go on vacation, people know what's going on.
0:20:51.9 GREEN: Yeah, and then being able to justify why you put the different solutions to other people, that might be one of the other big things is we talk to people about for YouTube, for example. So we look at the student journey and we go, Oh man, people are on YouTube all the time, it's the second biggest search engine, it's the biggest research engine, people are 100% going to be there as part of their college and education selection process, and then we talk about the really cool in-market audiences that are available on YouTube, if you don't know what an end market audience is, Google is an ecosystem of products, it picks up targeting and activity and the flags that you send up online from everything that you do, right, from search behavior to the sites that you visit in your Gmail, and all of that stuff is pulled together. In-market audience is people that are in market to do a thing, to buy a thing, and so it has things like people that are in market for home renovations, people who are new pet owners, people that are in market for different parts, and there are in-market education audiences, so we know that these people are currently actively researching schools and education solutions for their life.
0:22:02.7 GREEN: So, it's perfect. It's an amazing thing. But then if you haven't talked through with your stakeholders in your organization why you picked something, whenever they run through the results, they're going to look at just the leads that were generated from search, and then they're going to look at the YouTube budget and be like, Oh, how much direct traffic did I get and it's not going to have the same... It has different metrics and things that come from those campaigns. If everybody is not bought in on the plan, and the reason that you pick a channel, those products then things aren't getting to leveraged... And we talked about at the beginning, you're not going to magically cut your way to getting more students. So many good reasons to have a plan on paper and to have buy-in from everyone who will be looking at your program later.
0:22:49.5 BROOM: Yeah, exactly. Excellent point. And speaking of this, I wanted to jump in into some tactics, some products, some Google products. So earlier, when we were talking earlier in this discussion, you had mentioned that if a college has never done any digital marketing before that you recommend that they start with a search campaign. Tell me what that looks like.
0:23:10.5 GREEN: Like what is a good search campaign look like?
BROOM: And how do you get started? What is the first step?
GREEN: I guess there's multiple, whether you're running something internally or whether you're running with an agency, I'm going to take the agency perspective, but I'll sort of address that head on... Some people ask me, they're like, Well, should I do something internally? Should I... Should I outsource that? I always point out that you outsource everything that is complex and high stakes in your life, like you probably don't even simple stuff like, You don't change your own oil, you don't do your own dry cleaning, you don't do your own plumbing, you certainly like... Don't get your medical advice from somebody who's not a doctor, you definitely get legal advice from a lawyer, and you should be getting marketing and marketing solutions when it makes sense for your organization from a marketing professional. And, so, having somebody that eats, sleeps and breathes all the ins and outs of a marketing campaign is really important, because when you first asked that question, I was about to be like, Oh man, there are so many layers and ways in order to asnwer that...
0:24:09.3 GREEN: You can get into really technical terms for people, you can start talking about the difference between exact match and broad match, and the different ways that you can bid on things and the strategy for that, but I would come back to working with a marketing partner and being clear about what your goals are, right? So, can you tell us who are you trying to reach and what programs are you trying to recruit for, so is it... For example, you're trying to get mechanic certifications for example, Hey, we know that this program isn't recruited as well as it was, we have specific enrollment goals, we need to get 200 students for the spring semester, and we want a search and we can build really strong keyword strategies and ad testing strategy, and make sure that the landing pages and all of the associated campaign elements around that, because you clearly define who they're trying to reach and what success looks like. So, I would say that your first step is having clear goals as you start your search campaign, because if not, you'll end up with really broad things, you have just general queries and you want to be able to evangelize for specific parts of your program, if that's what you mean.
0:25:22.5 BROOM: Yeah, I love that you say that you outsource things that are technical or that you don't time to do changing your oil and dry cleaning. That's a perfect example. And I think that a lot of people think that they have to do this all themselves and it's super overwhelming, and so they might build a campaign and then they never look at it, or it doesn't perform well because they're not monitoring it, and it's not that expensive to have somebody else come in and help you do it. Plus, they offer a level of expertise that, this is their job, this is your job, this is what you do all the time.
0:25:57.8 GREEN: All the time where people initially are super excited about like, Yeah, I'm going to get into it, I'm going to learn Google ads, I'm going to run my own search campaign, it's going to be great, and some people do that, some people don't, but the percentage of people that really stick with it and that are in there, making the modifications that need to happen every single day that are on top of all of the changes. No, and it's because maybe you're the marketing director, but you're having to wear a lot of different pants.
0:26:27.0 BROOM: Oh my gosh, I know, and as I tell colleges all the time, give me a call if you need help with your marketing, don't do it yourself, you have crisis communication, student communication, executive communication, you've got to take care of the board, your superintendent/ president, there's always some crisis happening, like why are you booking your own media, building your own pay-per-click campaigns?
0:26:53.7 GREEN: Another difference is people will look at the difference between building a team internally versus having an agency to partner with, and we of course, like the agency model, but there are certainly distinct economic advantages to choosing that model, and the biggest thing is, is that you're able to scale the team up and down. Generally, the costs are built into the media versus thinking that you need to hire another person to help you. So, if you're super overwhelming, you can't get everything done in the day that you need to, which is most of us and go, Oh, I'm going to hire somebody, so you're going to hire somebody at what? 45 to 70 grand a year, who's going to come in plus benefits, and then you're going to take three to six months to train that person and get them booted up, and then they're still going to have only the specific skill set that you hired them for, either you have a generalist who's thin in a bunch of different things, or you have somebody who's an expert on one platform versus an agency, you can have the depth of a complete team of people who just live and breed search.
0:27:48.4 GREEN: And then suddenly you're like, Oh, we need SEO also. Okay, the person you have hired doesn’t know anything about it, but we have a whole SEO team, and you can boot that up and then you're like, Oh, now when you do web development, web design, do you have people for that... Well, you can just turn those capabilities on and off, and it's all built into the budget as opposed to having to have internal staff and all of the things that come along with the independent. More of your time to have to manage them.
0:28:13.9 BROOM: Yeah, and when you have a good trusting relationship with your vendor, it just pays off dividends because you know that you're getting a good price and excellent service, and it ends up making you look good and makes your life better.
0:28:26.4 GREEN: And they do, and we do the reporting, right, which so that you can communicate that value to other areas of the organization, which is one of the biggest gaps, right, like do you know your current marketing, what does your reporting look like, do you have a 24/7 real-time platform that you can see how everything is performing, where the leads are coming from, the form submissions, the calls are all about being tracked in a clear way, so if you don't have that, like that's game changing, just to be able to have visibility into your marketing.
0:28:55.6 BROOM: Exactly. Okay, so we got our Pay Per Click, we kind of got sidelines by tooting the agency horn, but I think it's a really, really good point. I think it's an excellent point. Especially now, I actually spoke to a marketing director yesterday on the phone, and she told me she's never... She's never worked harder than she is right now, it's a 80-hour work week, and she does not have time to think about enrollment, and so yeah, get it off your plate so that you can deal with the millions of other things going on, especially in today's environment. So, it’s an important point to discuss. But back to our tactics, so we've got our Pay Per Click, which as you said, should be the first thing that you focus on, and I agree with you 100%, that's where people who are searching for terms around your college or are searching for programs or financial aid, they're actively invested in the next step, they're thinking about it, they're not passive. They're out there looking for you and you should be there. When they're doing that, so let's say somebody's got a great campaign up and running, what is the next step? What have you been seeing people have success with...
0:30:08.0 GREEN: So, I guess I go in two directions. The next absolute lowest hanging fruit are re-targeting campaigns, and so just to level set with everybody, if you're not familiar with retargeting as a term, you've absolutely experience that if you go to Zappos for shoes and you don't buy them, and then later you start seeing those shoes following you around the internet, you start seeing those on different places, that's retargeting, and the reason that you see that happen to you for so many different products is because it's so effective, and here's sort of a good model for that. Right, one of the things we talk to people about is the failure rate of your website, so let's say that you have a fresh only good website, and you convert 10% of the people, like 10 out of 100 people fill out a form and ultimately applied to your university, which is a pretty high number. It means that you have a 90% failure rate, and so you put all that money and all that time and energy to get people to the site that you develop, and then most people don't immediately take action because the student journey is so long.
0:31:05.7 GREEN: So how are you going to get back in front of those people re-targeting is the really low-hanging fruits, one of the solutions that I define, you just have to do retargeting and have a certain budget for that, so that's one. And then the other... the first one is, of course, Google and search and then retargeting, right. And you alluded to this, that's behavioral targeting, people are in there, they're obviously typing in the keywords that are specific to that, the next one though is going to be Social and Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. But I start with Facebook and Instagram, and the reason for that is, is that it takes up so much of our time. So pre-COVID, the stat was that Facebook and Instagram are bigger in terms of time spent in the next eight major platforms combined. It's like one in five internet minutes, and we saw that skyrocket as people got locked down. So, it's the next place to be, and it's because, for sure, the people that are listening to this podcast, some of you have already been on Facebook and Instagram while we were talking, and it fills in all of the gaps of our lives.
0:32:18.7 GREEN: And it gives you the ability to do... If Google is demographic targeting, Facebook is behavioral targeting. Facebook does really, really good demographic targeting, and it's getting better and better about behavioral... And I'll give you an example of how good that targeting is getting, and this is on the consumer side, but my girlfriend, she’s into gaming and she bought a gaming a laptop, and then that meant that she was now in the market for all sorts of other peripherals and accessories, including a really fancy keyboard, and she searched for it, I saw her posts, like, Oh, I need to get this, it's called a cell membrane keyboard that she went in and there's two big brands for that, there's razor and steel, and she searched for it on her machine, but because we're linked in all in the same household, within five minutes, I started getting re-targeting ads on my phone trying to influence me about that keyboard, and that's how powerful that is. If you haven't pretended to be a student and started researching the education space, I would implore you to do that because it is going to be eye-opening in terms of how much marketing you will start seeing on your Facebook feed, it'll become overwhelming, so just go on and visit a few MBA programs or a few colleges like just a handful and your Facebook feed will be transformed, and that's going to be important for you to see what the competition looks like and why that's such an important space to be in.
0:33:47.5 BROOM: Your re-marketing story, I was thinking it'd be even more effective if they somehow knew it was your girlfriend, and I could be like, Erin, buy your girlfriend this keyboard.
0:33:59.4 GREEN: Because I've had that happen for DND dice also, and like I have nothing on my feed about DND. So, all sorts of people will come back to me and report all sorts of creepy targeting, they ask about, is it recording our voices or is it just that predictive, and there's some... There's just definitely questions about that, but as marketers, it's profound and how good that technology is getting, so if you're looking for your stack of products to look at, and certainly Google search ads, certainly retargeting is one of the options and then social is absolutely a space that you have to be thinking about.
0:34:47.6 BROOM: This is also really interesting because you are on your own device, but you're getting ads because she is searching what... From the house or from the same IP address. How does that work?
0:35:00.9 GREEN: Yeah, I think it's from the same IP address. I always want to be clear about what I know versus what I'm hedging on, and I'm not super sure like how that targeting happens, what I find more fascinating than whether it was by IP or relationship connection or anything like that, was how fast that audience was adapted, like that happened within minutes, it didn't take the system like a day to like to update that information and then ultimately pull me online for that, it did it within minutes.
0:35:28.2 BROOM: That happened to me the other day, too. I was looking at electric bikes, I'm obsessed with them, and they are expensive and I'm like, When am I actually going to buy the electric bike? I cannot tell you, it must have been two minutes, I looked at their website and then I went to Facebook to check something. And boom, there it was there, it was immediate and now every day I'm like, Maybe I do need an electric bike.
0:35:57.5 GREEN: And I think it's easiest to see whatever... It's like you visited a site and then it's the direct correlation, but Facebook is building really complicated interest groups, right. So even if you had referential behavior and you were exploring maybe something that was sort of a bike it put you in that group, it can just as easily pull in and start to develop audiences that way, so pulling it back down for community colleges... Right, the reason that you want to be on social is because the targeting is really powerful, right, people to find people that are interested in education, to be able to get back in front of people that have already visited your site, it's on the list of core solutions that you need to provide...
0:36:38.6 BROOM: No, I got an interesting question other day from one of my clients, and I answered it, but I want to hear how you would answer it, so... Yeah, so we were doing a late start campaign and it was email, which by the way, I'm a big proponent of email to your current students, especially for things like late start classes, those are classes that start usually six to eight weeks into the semester, and you don't get traditionally a lot of new students taking those classes, most of that student population that takes those short-term quick classes are current students. So I recommended we do an email campaign with a landing page, with remarketing, we did some pay-per click in addition to that, as well, and then did some re-marketing off of behavioral search, so if they're searching for the college or late start or short term classes or online classes, they got shown an ad as well, so it actually was an amazing campaign. It only costs them 7000 dollars, almost all of their late-start classes filled. And this is during COVID. So, the strategy worked really well, and we're going to try it again for spring semester, but almost all of the people on their marketing committee were re-targeted and they wanted to know if that was a bad thing, if we were wasting budget because they were seeing the ads everywhere.
0:38:00.5 BROOM: And so I'm curious, can you exclude faculty staff should do... Should they be part of the campaign? What are your thoughts on that?
0:38:12.3 GREEN: You mentioned a number of different retargeting solutions. I'll tell you that. The cleanest one, right? So, like I say that you were going to do CRM, we’re targeting on Facebook, so you were going to upload a student list on Facebook and then you were going to show ads to just those people, you could absolutely exclude faculty for that, 'cause you would just be putting the people that you wanted to match to, and then there would be no waste from that as far as re-targeting to the website specifically. Generally, you would target all of the visitors that are there, and it gets really finicky in terms of trying to exclude specific audiences, and that has to do... And I guess this would be my in-service that has to do with personal privacy. Whenever somebody shows up to the website, you don't necessarily know who that person is, but we absolutely know that they're interested somehow, right... What you have to do, what I've seen some people do, right, is that they're doing re-targeting maybe for four specific areas of their site, so maybe it's like you're doing re-targeting off pages that you're only driving people to do from SSM, if the waste was that big, right? But generally, like I list, with a massive university and the faculty is huge, I don't think that you're eating up a ton of budget from those retargeting campaigns, but that would be your strategy, right? You would have to corral the website traffic into a specific area and then only took people from that area if that was the concern.
0:39:33.7 BROOM: Yeah, and I think it's a really technical question, but I thought, Let's inoculate someone reviewers in case this happens to them... And you're right, that's exactly what I told the college. As I said, anybody who is on the website is going to get re-marketed and the cost to see the ad is like a hundredth of a penny, it's not like we're wasting any budget because you're serving so many ads, right. And then on the plus side, like, don't you want people on campus to see your advertisements? It's the other side of normally, the question we get is on the other side where people didn't see the marketing right, and it's one of the things that we sort of joke around on the digital set, it must be easy to sell billboards... Right, because the person gets to drive by that billboard every day and be like.
0:40:16.0 GREEN: Yep, it's right there. I love it and I see it versus if you're not in your own target market, you might not have ever see any of your own digital ads, and then that can be really frustrating for people, they want to know that it's working and know that it's there, so I see the other side of the coin too, where it's almost like you do want to re-target certain populations that they can see the ads and have the digital hub of seeing their own marketing.
0:40:47.2 GREEN: Yeah, it feels real good to see it, right, you're about the ways they don't care about the effectiveness or there's no reporting on that or anything... Right, but it's just the comparisons that we see in different kinds of work...
0:40:58.8 BROOM: Yeah, but because people saw it, they think that it works. Yeah, so I tell them with re-marketing, it's like buying hundreds of millions of billboards for a quarter of the price. Right, so interesting. Well, yeah, and I found... I think I like your strategy of setting up the Pay-Per-Click, doing remarketing for people who visit your site, hitting social, I think that those...obviously, there's so much technicality in each one of those products, but in a broad level, that is a fantastic campaign where you're really meeting people where they are and targeting them based on their behavior and their interest, so I hope people are taking notes. It's good stuff. Good, I'm glad. Yeah.
0:41:38.8 GREEN: I hope that this is helpful for everybody, and hopefully it engages you when you have... You have questions and... Absolutely. Real to share with those questions, if you listen to this...
0:41:48.9 BROOM: Yeah, please do. And just as we're wrapping up our conversation, we're moving... We're recording this in October, but I'm going to edit it and put it out on next month on our podcast platform, so we're going to be close to 2021, anything on the horizon that you've seen or anything new you think that people should be aware of?
0:42:12.2 GREEN: Oh man. That is a big question. So…
0:42:16.3 BROOM: No pressure.
0:42:17.6 GREEN: Yeah, no, totally. So, I think that maybe we just run through different platforms that people haven't played in that they should... They should start to think about it. And it's all going to go back to who is it that you're trying to target? So, for example, if you had really specific certifications that were related to the business world, maybe LinkedIn as a platform that you wanted to look for, but you'd have a reason for that, so I always start with like, who are you trying to target? And then what is your goal? And then when you think about budget and what solutions are you currently doing, and then think, do you want to add as opposed to picking something new and shiny... because what I've heard a lot of people say is they're like, I'm interested in Tik Tok, that's like the new hot platform that a lot of people are talking about, and honestly, I've sort of pushed people away from that, and they're like, I want to do Tik Tok, and I'm like, Okay, but do you have search and how effective is that, and do you already have a strong cost per lead, and then are you supporting that with a stronger marketing campaign and you're crushing it on Facebook and Instagram that we know already has great pricing and tracking for that, and then have you already thought about Snapchat, which is a more mature platform, have you done all of that stuff and as your Analytics all squared away and...
0:43:30.3 GREEN: The answer is always no. Right, but they hear TikTok, you know that younger people are on that platform and they want to get involved, and I never want to tell somebody now, but I always start with like, Are you absolutely crushing it with your current marketing or is it just a new thing that you've heard, because TikTok is sweet and it has its place within your marketing things, and for Snapchat, it's also an awesome platform, but it needs to be supported by the backbone of some of the other solutions that we've talked about, so I guess that's probably my first thing.
0:44:34.4 BROOM: I call it the shiny object syndrome.
GREEN: And, I'm the same way, I love all the platforms that I want to be on all the things, and we geek out on the... There's new stuff coming in, the new audiences and everything, but getting all of the fundamentals of your marketing, right, I think it's like if you play a sport, if you play golf, you play and play anything right, like the coach always tells you like, Hey, think about getting all of your fundamentals in line before you buy the brand new driver.
BROOM: You... I know that I've been learning golf.
0:44:37.3 GREEN: Because you're right, you're like, Well, maybe if I had this club and this club and this club in this club, and it's like no, you need the fundamentals all squared away. It's going to be better for you and the... You do have those down, that you're going to be ready to add all of those other platforms and really capitalize and maximize that, and you're going to have it... You're going to have a plan. So, to recap from where we started, it's... Do you know who you're targeting? Do you have clear goals, right? In terms of enrollment and have you thought about what that student journey is, what are the trigger events that people... What are the different platforms that they're on, and then do you have an on-paper media plan that you have shared and gotten buy-in from all of the people in your organization? So, then whenever you go, Hey, we want to add Snapchat. And they go, well, why you're going to go, Oh, well, we're trying to hit this really sweet demographic, there’s ton of people that are on this platform, it is a great supporting product to our other media strategies. Here's where it fits within the student journey, and here's our goals and expectations of this platform, that feels so much more rooted and strong whenever you have to sell that internally and report on it later than the shiny objects and...done.
0:45:47.1 BROOM: Brilliant. I'm listening to you and I'm like, I'm sold. Let's do it that. Let's do it. Well, thanks. It's always such a pleasure. I always learn something talking to you and I really, really, really appreciate you taking the time to join me.
GREEN: Yeah, anytime.
BROOM: I would love to have you on in 2021, maybe one year from now. We'll reflect and see how far we've come, or what colleges are doing differently, and hopefully fingers crossed a post-COVID world.
0:46:18.8 GREEN: Yes. Fingers crossed, I think we all would love that very, very much.
0:46:23.0 BROOM: Yes, yes. Well, with that, I’m going to say thank you. And if anybody wants to get in touch with Erin, she's an actually a phenomenal keynote speaker, let me know and I'd be happy to connect you and Erin, I really appreciate your time.
GREEN: Absolutely, thanks everybody for listening. We appreciate you tuning in.
BROOM: Thank you for listening to Higher Education Coffee and Conversation. If you like the podcast, please leave me a five-star rating and discover more great higher education-related content, make sure to visit us at graduatecommunications.com. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening, thank you for the hard work you do for students, each and every day.