What was the best part of #InteractGoogleDay? The crazy-amazing stuff they told us about how community college students choose a college, their decision-making process, and what their buyer’s journey looks like. But the most important reveal? Micro-moments. Don’t know what a micro-moment is? Then you better listen, because according to Google, they’re the future of digital marketing.
What was the best part of #InteractGoogleDay? The crazy-amazing stuff they told us about how community college students choose a college, their decision-making process, and what their buyer’s journey looks like. But the most important reveal? Micro-moments. Don’t know what a micro-moment is? Then you better listen, because according to Google, they’re the future of digital marketing.
Marketing for community colleges is tough, but after 20 years of working solely with two year technical and community colleges, we've learned a few things. Now we want to share them with you. Welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass Podcast. If you're looking for expert insights from industry experts, you've come to the right place. Bringing more than two decades of marketing and communications experience, please welcome your host and Interact Communications President, Cheryl Broom.
Cheryl Broom:All right, welcome to this episode of Community College Marketing MasterClass. I am Cheryl Broom,
Pam Cox-Otto:president of Interact Communications and I am joined today by the lovely doctor Pam Cox-Otto, our CEO. Oh lovely. Nice.
Cheryl Broom:And Pam and I are coming to you from Palo Alto, California. We just spent a full day on site with Google learning from Google education experts and wanted to sit down and talk a little bit about one of the concepts that we learned about yesterday and applying it to our community colleges across the nation. So there's been a lot of buzz recently about this idea of micro moments and the digital marketing world, but what are they exactly? Well, we talked to Google's education leaders yesterday on their campus. What we learned is these digital micro moments are all these little experiences that customers have every single day up to 150 different times a day. Purchase moments, research moments, discovery moments, just to name a few. And these micro moments are happening as potential students are looking to go to your colleges. So we started to think, what's that look like for the student journey? How are people finding your college online and interacting with your school? And we had some great conversations yesterday around this. Pam, what were some of the things that you took away from the conversation?
Pam Cox-Otto:I think the first thing that hit me was that none of the micro moments that anyone talks about are ever about when your bill is due or the class size or what the starting pay is for something. While those might be important at different points, a micro moment is something that will stick in your mind because of it's, to some large extent, emotionally charged content, right? So, you're never going to create a micro moment by throwing all the factoids about your college at them. You're never going to create a moment where they're going to feel connected to you by telling them how many other students are here and what they're all studying. And in other words, data isn't worth squat in this context and unfortunately, so many of us are wrapped up in data. We think that's what people are going to relate to and they don't. It's a missed opportunity every time we throw a factoid at them instead of a micro moment that has some kind of emotional context.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, I really liked, they had the, the Google crew had interviewed a student and showed us a video and the student was working at a job, wasn't happy, decided that he wanted to go back to school and they asked how he made that decision and he had picked up a smart phone while he was walking down the street and had started googling colleges near him that had the type of major and the program that he was looking at. And they showed him walking down the street looking at his phone and was just as quick like 15 second search. And then a couple days later he did the same search and then you know, after about six or seven searches, he kind of had narrowed it down to what he was interested in. And it was just this interesting way of looking at discovering a college. It wasn't sitting down at a computer and digging through research. It was like, Eh, I think I might want to go back to school. I'm going to do a quick search. And what did he find when he did that search? I think our colleges need to start asking, what does students find when they start searching for you? What are they seeing? Are they seeing administrivia one of Pam's favorite terms?
Pam Cox-Otto:Well, and remember that the people that are coming to us now are Gen x, Gen y and Gen z and Gen x was falling off the map because that's basically your, you know, 30 late, 38 year olds and older, right? So Gen x is disappearing, but Y and Z are coming to you and they have, neither of them have any tolerance for things that are experiences they don't want to have, right? So these are the people that came up with a new concept of fast fail, which is give me a test now and I'll take it and if I fail it, okay, I'll take your class. But if I pass it, I don't have to take your class and I never will. Right? That idea of I'm going to see if I can get away with it. I'm looking for the hack, I'm looking for the shortcut. That's who our audience is right now. Right? So if we have a process that is long and painful and touching bases and first you must apply and then you must do orientation and then you have to do assessment, then you have to talk to a counselor and then you have to come on campus and register. If that's our process, realize none of it is a micro moment. And all of it from their perspective is simply we're torturing them to see if we'll put up with our bureaucratic process, right? This whole group will not stay. So if we are continuing to do what we do, which is assuming there'll be here because they want to come back to college, they won't stay. And more than that, if we don't infuse those touch points with something more meaningful than being processed, like you're joining the military, they will head for the door in large numbers. And I gotta tell you, I think most colleges, they think the student experience is good if there's no pain involved. Right? The absence of pain is not a micro moment. The absence of pain is just the absence of pain, which means, okay, that didn't entirely suck technical term for those of you who've never heard it, suck is a technical term. They're looking at that and they're saying this is something that didn't hurt, but I certainly don't feel like I should come here and we've missed that opportunity and we continue to miss it almost every single time we bring students together. And the worst part is if your leadership doesn't understand that that's the critical element. You want them to come to you? Micro moments. You want them to stay? Micro moments. You want them to graduate? Micro moments. You want them to come back when they're successful and write you a cheque that allows you to do new things for new students? Micro moments.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, and that was one of my big takeaways is this concept of micro moments is so ingrained in the digital sphere, but there's so many moments that our students experience outside of their computers and smartphones. So you have the student who's, you know, you've been marketing and you've been courting and you've spent all this money to get them to your front door and then they pull onto your campus and the trashcan is overflowing or they get a parking ticket or the map is labeled wrong and they don't know where they're going. And those are all moments too. And they're are a big barrier to some students.
Pam Cox-Otto:I was working with the college at one point and the campus was actually modest but very well maintained. They, they did a very good job of keeping it clean and all that stuff. But when you pulled on campus and you parked, first of all, there was no parking up close for people who just wanted to run in and see somebody. You're out in the hinterlands, right? And secondly, when you want it to go to admissions, it was on the second floor of the administration building. So all the presidents and folks that really have no importance to a student's life, were in the front door where you could go see a president, but you want to go do real business. Something that will get you in the college. You had to go find the elevator or walk up the stairs and then it was a labyrinth to get to where it was. Right. That whole experience is part of, you don't want me here. It's like this is running the gauntlet and why in the world would you not put people up front where they can find you easily. We had that conversation with the campus and within a year they had reconfigured their entire opening area, so there was a front door to the college and right behind that front door were all of the people that could help a student be successful and they moved the president and all the leadership to the second floor on the, on the back 40 of the entire campus because truthfully, nobody needs to see the college president unless they're there to do business with the college president and in which case they will walk to the back 40
Cheryl Broom:Right. We saw that yesterday at the Google campus. There were so many cool little touch points that made you feel welcome. All throughout the campus they have little stands that had people working on them and they had big badges that said, need help, ask me a question. And they just stood there all day under umbrellas and you could go up and ask them anything, anything about Google, you could ask them anything about the campus. And I thought, Gosh, this is what we need to be doing on our campuses. How are we welcoming people onto campus? How are we making them feel part of something really exciting and special?
Pam Cox-Otto:Well, and sometimes we'll do that during the first week of campus, right? First Week of class. But the truth is we need to be doing that the minute we open up registration and applications, because that's when they're coming on campus and they're not committed, right? By the time you've gone through registration and done all of the run the gauntlet to get there, you're kind of committed, right? And you've paid money. Once you've paid money, you're you, you are committed. So you still need help. And we should still be doing it. But it's the moment where they get out of their car and they start walking and they have no idea where to go and our signage is not particularly good and they don't know what to look for because they don't speak our jargon. Right. And then we don't have anybody standing there because, well, it's not opening day of class yet. Well, so the whole idea is what you're doing is you're saying, and you're a student, we don't really care about you. Up until that point, you're just a, you're just a dream. You're just somebody that may or may not come and you're on your own. I wish you luck.
Cheryl Broom:I love those little booths too because here we are and like the center of the Internet universe, right? Where you can literally Google anything you need at Google, but yet they have people stationed all around the campus because we are people at the end of the day and we want to talk to people. We don't want to just be on our phone the whole time. So we need those connections, those personal connections. I think we get so wrapped up, especially as marketers on how to reach people digitally and it's so important and you have to do it, but we need to remember that students are people and they need a human touch.
Pam Cox-Otto:Well, and here's a couple of things to think about. I have pictures of this. We should post them. Once you listened to this, there'll be a link and you can see some of the photos we took, but you walk into Google, beautiful back wall and the Google colors. Okay. Yeah. People took pictures, but more importantly, the whole floor was a tactile colored kind of a crossword puzzle kind of thing. And when you stood on it, it lit up in a color. Right. And the colors were so literally as you're walking, you're creating your own little color map for the first 20 minutes that we got there, you couldn't get near it because everybody was dancing on it, interacting with it, taking pictures with it, having fun. Right. We have logos, we have big walls that need something. Why in the earth would we not create something that is just whimsical enough that people would interact with it. They had that, they had stairs that lit up all in Google colors showing you what's being searched at any given moment. Right. And people took pictures on that. They had large life size cutouts of the Android logo where you could put your head inside and be the Android logo. They had bikes in the Google colors, they had Adirondack chairs in the Google colors. The list went on. And as I look at that, I say every one of those things tells you where you are, tells you there's something magical that's about to happen. Tells you that they're living the brand, their brand, right? And it feels good to be within that. Ask Yourself, what are you doing to make your brand come to life? What are you doing more than our colors are yellow and green and there those are packer colors. I suddenly realized I did packer colors, sorry for all of you from non packer territories. Our colors are yellow and green. And what do we do that we put it on our letterhead and it's on our website and other than that, no, we don't put it on our campus. Maybe a sign here or there. My God, there are a million opportunities that we could do something cool and we don't because somebody got all oh well that would cost money. You're going to paint the darn thing anyway. Paint it school colors. Why aren't the trash cans school colors, right? Why aren't the door rim school colors? If it's your school color, live it and that's part of it. We say we are this and then we don't live it and we don't create the micro moment because of it.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, I loved it when we're walking around the campus, they had sand volleyball courts and they had gathering spaces. Just all these things that made you feel welcome that you were part of a campus. Right. And I know that our community college campuses are always looking for ways to get students to stay on campus because if you stay on campus and you engage on campus, you're more likely to be successful in school. Hopefully we'll be able to come back to Google and bring more people there because it was really inspirational to see how they took every opportunity to create a moment to interact with their brand and who they were. There were no missed opportunities on that campus. Not a single one now. It was fantastic, so it was a lot of fun. Pam has a lot of fun to be there. For those of you listening, we just had a fantastic time. We had about 60 people join us. We learned everything from micro moments to SCO to pay per click. Somebody scheduled our pay per click session after lunch, which was a little painful.
Pam Cox-Otto:Never do math after lunch. Seriously.
Cheryl Broom:A lot of information and for any of those listening to the podcast who weren't able to come but want to learn more about what we learned at Google, please reach out. We have a slide deck that we can go over with you. We'd love to talk more about some of the big takeaways that we had.
Pam Cox-Otto:Well, and the thing to remember is when you're doing your media buying, when you're doing the kinds of work that you need to do to pull students in and interacting with large media buyers and traditional media, the thing to remember is you don't have to do it all. And the more you try, the more you're going to end up doing being very, very wide and your knowledge and not very deep. So that's why I reach out and work with folks who do this all the time. It'll put a few hours back in your day and you'll also find that the results are just so much better.
Cheryl Broom:Okay. Well I think that about wraps it up for this episode of Community College MasterClass and it's been so fantastic to be here with Pam. Such a treat.
Pam Cox-Otto:Wow. It's like she never sees me.
Cheryl Broom:I know we work together, but how often do we get to sit down in the same room together?
Pam Cox-Otto:That's true.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. Wonderful. So thanks so much and we'll catch all of you next time.
Pam Cox-Otto:Ciao everyone.
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