Do you ever feel like you’re guessing when it comes to placing your media? Or better yet, does your boss ever tell you to place ads in a channel you know isn’t working? Well, we have good news... each year since 2007, Interact has conducted a national survey on communication preferences and media consumption habits of community college students. We’ve watched how students’ preferences have evolved with the introduction of new media (and we’ve watched some media die off completely). In this discussion, Dr. Pamela Cox-Otto talks about the most recent academic year’s data results and what media you should be looking at this next year.
Do you ever feel like you’re guessing when it comes to placing your media? Or better yet, does your boss ever tell you to place ads in a channel you know isn’t working? Well, we have good news... each year since 2007, Interact has conducted a national survey on communication preferences and media consumption habits of community college students. We’ve watched how students’ preferences have evolved with the introduction of new media (and we’ve watched some media die off completely). In this discussion, Dr. Pamela Cox-Otto talks about the most recent academic year’s data results and what media you should be looking at this next year.
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 three decades of marketing and communications experience. Please welcome your host and Interact Communications Founder and CEO, Pam Cox-Otto, Phd.
Pam Cox-Otto:Hi everyone. I'm doctor Pam Cox-Otto and this is Interact's Community College Marketing MasterClass. Today we're going to talk about the results of our 2018-2019 Media Preferences Study. For those of you who don't know about media preferences along time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when I was working on my doctoral work, I wanted to do the kind of study that would be actually useful to community colleges, so I did work on what kind of messaging and media delivery is most effective to reach high school students and others to persuade them that they should attend a community college to your school. During that research, I came up with an extensive instrument that can be used to measure how people prefer to get messages about colleges and over time I turned that into our Media Preferences Study. At this point it's been going for more than 10 years and it's been probably five or six since we first instituted our online delivery system, which means all of the data that we gather is in an online format, searchable, going back through the years. The reason why we came up with media preferences was really pretty simple. I'd worked at a television station for a long time and many of you came out of media and you know that unless you subscribe to the Nielsen ratings or in some smaller areas, if you were in radio, you would subscribe to another kind of format that would give you the ratings. You have no idea what the top shows are, what the top times are, what the top channels are. You can guess. I mean if you have children, they all listened to radio station one, not radio station two, so it's not like you can't get information peripherally, but the ability to make good, smart decisions based on real data was missing. And unfortunately the only people in most small markets who provide you with any data or the stations themselves and they're clearly trying to sell you something. So what we did was we came up with the idea of taking my survey instrument and turning it into an annual survey for community colleges. And what happens is a community college subscribes to our survey and they administer the survey to their own students. It's an online survey. They simply send out the email link and the students take the survey and it's got about 200 questions, at the end they're entered into a drawing for an award, a cash reward of some kind. And at the end we take that data from the school and we aggregate it, run all of the statistics on it, and we give it back to that college so that they can see what are the most effective media preferences in their market. More importantly, we take all of the data from that school and the school next to it and all of the schools that participate in our media preferences study and we aggregate it and in aggregating it we have a sample, not a four or 500 but in many cases, thirty five thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand. So that's how we got to the Media Preferences Study that we're looking at this year and we've just recently come out of the field. We've just finished the study and what I want to talk about a little bit is what we found out. First of all, the study that we just completed had 30,000 completions. When we look at it, we had 32 colleges in 21 states participating across the country for this fall and spring. And when you look at the data, realize that our confidence interval, particularly on the national data is plus or minus 1% and the reason is quite honestly is when you have a sample size as large as 30,000 it means that we've gotten a decent sampling size and our margin of error is very small. So if I tell you that if 34% of high school students, like one thing, that number could be as high as 35% or as low as 33% but it's a very, very tiny margin of error. So we've done that survey for the last, well, 10 years as I mentioned, and we get national survey, state survey data, all of that is good stuff. But what we really care about are the trends that we see happening because those are the things that are going to affect your media buy. So these are my top trends that I see coming out of the data sample that we've just pulled out of the field as recently as February. So things that I think are interesting. First of all, good trends under the heading of good trends. If you're looking to reach young males, and that's actually one of the most critical audiences for community colleges because at this point the numbers have shifted. So 60% of the students at most colleges are women. So that means that you've got a smaller number of men and you're trying to figure out how to recruit them, how to pull them into your programs. So what we've found is, and this is I would say not as big as surprise as it might've been, but the number one source for where they're listening, particularly radio, is rock. Hip Hop has fallen to number two. Now, I should warn you, there may be some variation depending on where you live, but bottom line is if you've got a rock station in your town that seems to be doing fairly well, you're probably going to hit a larger audience of young men by advertising on that station. The thing that we've also found out is if you're trying to reach a younger audience, folks who are less than 25 it's time for you to go with Spotify. For a long time there have been other digital delivery systems that were more popular and there still are. But Spotify is the hot thing going on with all of the people younger than 25 and what that means for you is while the numbers may not be as large as other delivery systems, it's going to be the people that you want to reach. So younger audience, high school students, folks who graduated but have not gone to a university or a college, you're going to want to try Spotify. Nearly 60% of everyone is seeing your ads when you are streaming. And you know a lot of people are always concerned saying, I don't know if it's worth it me doing streaming ads because obviously you can stop the machine or you can keep it running and leave the room and no one knows. And I just recently saw a piece of trivia that says basically two thirds of television advertisements are playing to empty rooms. But in this case what we're seeing is it's the reverse for streaming. Meaning, when they're watching a streaming show, a video, or even audio, they're staying in the room and sitting through the ad. That doesn't mean they don't turn the speakers down. That doesn't mean they're attending to the message, but it does mean that they are there, which is more than you can say for television. So streaming, it's not a bad place to put ads. When you look at where they're streaming, bottom line is your audience is streaming video predominantly 60% of basically all community college students are streaming video. And Netflix is the clear winner. It's got 60% of the audience of folks who are streaming. Now, obviously it's a paid service. So if you look at a more egalitarian option, it's clearly going to be youtube. But when you're looking at where most people are hanging out and whether or not it's worth it to be putting advertising in windows near Netflix advertisements, well it probably is. Nine in 10 have internet accessible devices. So there was a day when there was a big debate in colleges about whether they should bother doing really nice websites or whether they should bother making their website mobile accessible. While I got to tell you, those debates are gone and most people are carrying a computer with which they access the Internet right there in their pocket. It's the phone, it's not going away and while one out of 10 may not have access to the computer at this point. They're Luddites. They're folks who are so far behind, I'm not sure if they have a car to drive to you to come take a class, so I wouldn't be worrying my little head over that too much. Now, if it's because of economic reasons, then there may be some reason for us to look at how we might go after that population. But again, you're going to have to look at your own numbers. Nationally It's just a very small group. When you look at the 16 year olds, right? The young audience who's not out of high school yet, more than 20% of 16 year olds have 10 or more internet accessible devices. What does that tell you? Well, first of all, it tells you they've got lots of different ways of accessing messages that you might be using in digital format and secondly, it means that you'd better be what I lovingly called device agnostic. Meaning don't be making commercials that look great on a television set, but don't look great when played on a phone or look great when they're being played on a large computer screen, but don't look great on an iPad or some other kind of digital device. At this point, we all have our preferences about whether we're an android or an apple user, but I have to tell you the future is going to be agnostic. Meaning it's about content and where it is being delivered is simply going to be whatever device you have handy. And I have to admit, I find myself frequently watching a show sitting in the kitchen rather than getting up and going into the living room to watch the show on the large screen television. Why? It's simply convenience. So the 16 year olds are leading the way. They've gotten many, many ways to get online and many, many ways to access the internet and your content. So one of the questions that we ask students is how they want to receive different types of information from the college, right? So sometimes you're sending out information about a fun activity. Sometimes it's about pay your bills. Sometimes it's about grades. What we found is information about grades. They want it on the portal. So whatever kind of student information system you're using, they want to be able to log in and get access to their grades through that portal device, right? But everything else? Email. Email them about the party, email them about the bill, email them about all of those things because frankly, in many cases they're not going up to your portal until they have a specific reason and usually that specific reason is something very specific like grades. When we asked them about what they're using for social media, and of course we're all wondering because we were spending a great deal of money and time trying to get good at social media and delivering messages directly from our college community to the students. The answer is usually youtube and Instagram, and I know that's not a surprise to many of you, but the piece that you have to think about is this. For the last 10 years, Facebook has led the way they've been far above all of the other types of social media. They were first in the market and they had the leg up, but they've been losing ground in the last years. As they've been losing ground, what's been gaining ground are some of the other types of media like Instagram, which of course Facebook bought, and then snapchat. Snapchat and Instagram are both rising stars while Facebook continues to plunge. This is the year when Facebook dips below Instagram, so Instagram is one of your major sources for reaching students. However, do not ignore or ignore at your peril, youtube. Youtube is the free streaming option that's where you can advertise, et Cetera, and students when they're up and looking for all sorts of different information on the Internet, more often than not, they are redirected to youtube, so don't forget it. Go there. Streaming ads, box ads, those are all completely worth it and I've got to tell you, don't ignore it. And in fact, in many cases you should be looking at how you can enhance your youtube presence. When we look at social media prime time, I've got to tell you that there was a day when television prime time was usually six to midnight. Well, six to nine o'clock and then you had late night going into midnight. Right? And that was when people watch TV. Well, the TV numbers during that time period are abysmal. They're not watching TV during that time period. That's social media prime time. And the reason why I mentioned that to you is that many of you have social media specialists, but those social media specialists come in at eight o'clock and they leave at five o'clock and if that's what's happening, you're missing a critical part of the day when people are really online and looking for messaging, you may want to talk to your social media person about shifting their hours and running something like one to nine or, or at least getting part of that prime time period. It's not that you can't schedule messages to go out, but the whole point of social media is the dialogue and you can't do the dialogue if you're not online. So the piece that we're finding there is you may want to be looking at how you're scheduling the time for your social media expert. The other thing that we've always ask is where have you seen messages about the college? And we ask a whole variety of things. Everything from television and radio, to billboards and all the real media that you have in your community. And your, I don't know whether this is a good thing or not, but most students say they see most of your marketing messaging on campus. Now, I don't know if you're marketing on campus, if you are great, they're seeing it. If you aren't, they're taking all of those peripheral type messaging that they're seeing around campus as advertisements. So my advice to you is realize they're trapped on campus. It's a perfect time to be putting up the kinds of messaging that are undiluted by the outside world. You can control it perfectly. Why are you not buying the kinds of pull up advertising pieces that you can put in front of programs? As they walk by a program office say, this is the welding department where you'll have a job in three months of graduating. All of those kinds of opportunities where you're doing a specific messaging on campus. It's cheaper, once you develop it, you can leave it up for awhile, you can freshen it and they do see it. They pay attention to it. It's the number one place where they say they see your messages. That's about it for today. I found a lot of other things that are kind of interesting and I'll be doing more stories on media preferences. The thing I would like you to think about is if this data is interesting to you and if you find yourself struggling to make the kinds of buying decisions, strategy choices, tactical choices about where to spend your marketing money, realize media preferences research may be a great solution for you. It's about$3,500 a year. If you do it one year, it drops to$3,000 a year if you sign up for a three year contract. So it's a low cost, easy way to get your data delivered to you in real time so that you can see how best to reach your students. The best part is you can take it to the board, shine it up in front of everybody and explain why you're not buying any more newspaper ads. It's the best part in my day. That's it for today. I hope you got something useful. Join us again for another edition of Community College Marketing MasterCass. I'm doctor Pam Cox-Otto.
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