Erin Green, director of digital marketing strategy (DMS) enablement at LOCALiQ, is an expert in marketing in the digital space and is fluent in speaking “nerd.” She is a nationally recognized speaker, award-winning marketer and sales leader, and has worked with a number of leading organizations including Nike, FedEx, and Susan G. Komen. She’s also been a featured speaker for organizations like Google and Facebook.
In this episode, Erin and Cheryl discuss influenceable moments and how colleges can leverage those moments in the digital space to form stronger connections with audiences.
Show Notes:
To view the presentation from the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations District 1 conference in Providence, click here.
Erin Green, director of digital marketing strategy (DMS) enablement at LOCALiQ, is an expert in marketing in the digital space and is fluent in speaking “nerd.” She is a nationally recognized speaker, award-winning marketer and sales leader, and has worked with a number of leading organizations including Nike, FedEx, and Susan G. Komen. She’s also been a featured speaker for organizations like Google and Facebook.
In this episode, Erin and Cheryl discuss influenceable moments and how colleges can leverage those moments in the digital space to form stronger connections with audiences.
Show Notes:
To view the presentation from the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations District 1 conference in Providence, click here.
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:Hello! Welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass. I'm super excited about today's guest, Erin Green, who takes a deep dive into the digital student journey. But before I introduce Erin and jump into the podcast, I want to make a really cool announcement. Those of you who are clients of Interact Communications came with us last year to the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. We had a packed house of community college marketers from around the country. We spent a full day with Google higher education experts and learned all about the latest and greatest in digital marketing and digital marketing trends. Well, this year, Google has invited us to come back, but this time we'll be across the country in the Google building located in downtown New York City. Now I've been told that Google's Chelsea office space in New York takes up an entire city block, so you can imagine how cool it's going to be inside. We have a really exciting day planned that includes Google's higher education experts giving education insights, showcasing the student online journey, and even looking to the future to fill us in on upcoming technology. And as a cool bonus, we have even planned an end-of-the-day happy hour right inside Google. This great event will be happening on April 20th and it's completely free of charge to any community college marketers, administrators, faculty members who wish to attend, though we do have limited space. So if you're interested in coming, you've got to reach out to us right away so that you can get on our interest list. It's easy. Just send me over an email. You can send a message through our website. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. Send me a note on Instagram or Facebook, whatever you prefer. Just make sure if this is something you want to attend that you let me know right away before all of our space is gone.. Now, today's podcast guest, Erin Green, is herself a digital marketing expert and she'll be speaking at the Google event. This podcast was taped at the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations District One conference in November 2019. Erin was a keynote speaker at that conference, where she spoke about the complex student journey, how to use YouTube and other online platforms in your marketing efforts, and when exactly is the best time to influence students during their online college search. We cover these topics and more in today's podcast. Erin is an award-winning marketer and sales leader who has 13+ years of agency experience with a focus on digital strategy and media. She's worked with a number of leading organizations including Nike, FedEx, and Susan G. Komen, and she's been a featured speaker with Google and Facebook. She now works alongside Interact Communications and plays a great role, a vital role in the digital services we provide to community colleges. I think you'll learn a lot from Erin—I know I did—and I am really excited to welcome her to the show. Well, Erin, thank you so much for joining me..
Erin Green:Y eah, thank you for having me.
Cheryl Broom:I'm really excited to have you here. So, before we get started, tell me a little bit about yourself.
Erin Green:So, I'm Aaron Green. I am the director of DMS enablement at LOCALiQ. And there's always much debate as exactly what that means, but a lot of what I do is to get to fly around and both educate people and work with businesses all over the country and help them put together their strategic marketing plans.
Cheryl Broom:And you have a really varied background in digital marketing.
Erin Green:I do have a varied background. My degree, oddly enough, is in technical writing of all things, which you would not think would apply, but it does in that there's a lot of storytelling and characterization and figuring out themes that goes into marketing. I say that I've worn almost every hat that you can in the digital marketing space. I started at a really small web development interactive marketing shop and we did, like, back-end CMS systems and I hand-managed marketing campaigns and did project management and direct sales. And later that turned into working at more full-service agencies. And I've always been the person with really strange job titles. So one time I was the search engine marketing and social media specialist 2, like level two, and anytime a new technology comes along, I'm always the first person that wants to raise her hand and go,“Oh, I'll do that.” So when SEO really became important for our organization, sure, do SEO. With social media when it was analytics and analytics installations and tag management and conversion rate optimization and website UX and design and on and on and on. And because I sort of got that technical background, I became the person who got good at translating the sort of technical marketing speak into something that was intelligible for our clients. And I really found, I guess, a sweet spot in sales and being able to put together the marketing strategy for that.
Cheryl Broom:We were talking about this at dinner last night that you can talk nerd.
Erin Green:I can talk nerd and I like talking nerd. I like getting into the details of how all of the different things work in the persuasion and science and, you know, like if you use the red button versus the green button on a page, will more people take the action that you want? I find that infinitely fascinating.
Cheryl Broom:And now that you're able, you understand that back end, but you're able to translate it into something that's meaningful for people who might not be experts in marketing, for businesses who are looking to do new things or try new products. You get both the front end and the back end of it.
Erin Green:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that that's really important, right? Like, marketing is changing so fast and there's so much cool new technology to get involved with. But if it's not relatable and understandable and connected to your business, like if it just lives out in the ether, then it's not useful for anybody.
Cheryl Broom:What kind of businesses do you work with?
Erin Green:So, my favorite verticals are the verticals that we would get most often, I guess would be education and healthcare. But I think I've done all the things, right? So, retail and auto and web commerce and just a myriad of different businesses. I've had background in both the nonprofit and for-profit space with really large organizations and small organizations, and I would not have it any other way. I think that one of the coolest things that I get to do is to be kind of like a bumblebee and I get to cross pollinate ideas, right? Find out what's happening in different parts of the country, what, find out what's happening in different verticals and different industries and sort of cross-apply those things. And you start to pick up the themes, right? So, like one of the things that we talked about today is that—and this is across industries—is that the first thing that people do is they turn to Google and they do that for major life events. So, like, we find it in the healthcare space, for example, that when somebody gets a serious diagnosis, the first thing that they do is not call their friend for support. The first thing that they do is they go to Google and they search for information. Or when we talk in the college space, right? When somebody has the“I'm so done with this” moment and“I want to change my life,” the first thing that they do, they go to Google. Like, they don't call and ask their mom for advice. They turn to Google.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. It's so funny that you bring up healthcare,‘cause I got this new fitness strap and it measures my heart rate variability and I felt like it was low. So I started Googling it and it told me that it's like a sign of mortality. So I was like,“Oh my god, am I gonna die?” So I took the strap off. You'll notice I don't have it on right now.
Erin Green:Yeah. You were wearing that last time. But you feel better now that you—?
Cheryl Broom:Well, now that I know that I might die? No, actually, my variability increased after a glass of wine last night. So I think it's telling me that I need to stress less. No, but it's funny. We do, that's where we go for our information. Yeah. Well speaking of where we are, Erin and I just wrapped up a keynote presentation for NCMPR District One on“mighty moments.” So, Erin, tell me a little bit about what did we talk about, talk about marbles. Tell me about the marbles.
Erin Green:So, yeah, the theme of the conference is“mighty moments.” And one of the things that we were talking about is that as an industry, we've been speaking about the marketing funnel forever, right? And, you know, you imagine this big funnel and you're shoveling big handfuls of marbles into top of the funnel and people are just, you know, you're very cleanly going through the awareness, consideration, and conversion phases of your marketing funnel. But that's just not what the world is like anymore, right? That marketing funnel shattered, but all of those marbles still exist and now they are scattered across the floor. There are millions of them, and each one of those is an influenceable moment, right? And so what our presentation centered on was, you know, let's figure out what are all of those moments. What are the most important moments to be involved in and how do you want to show up? How do you want to present yourself at those moments so that you can be useful and ready whenever somebody moves into your marketing program? And then, also, how are you going to measure that moment, right? So that you can know whether you were successful or not.
Cheryl Broom:One of the things, one of the pieces of advice you gave during the keynote was to map out the student journey and how important that is to understand what the journey looks like. You talk a little bit about what that is. How do you map out a journey? What are you looking for on that map?
Erin Green:Yeah. So one of the things that we all make the mistake of doing is that we sort of think through our personal lens, right? So, if you think about your marketing program, you might be thinking about your registration schedule, when enrollment happens, and, like, the sequence of your campaigns. But when we talk about student journey, we want to think about, like, as a real person. So the person we talked about is Marlin, right? And he had the“I'm so done with this” moment, right? And so you think about what is the trigger phase? What is the thing that gets somebody to start their journey to go to school or to go back to school? And what you find is you go through it, is that the marketing sort of jumps out at you, right? So, for Marlin, there was a trigger event. Maybe he saw an ad on Facebook, maybe he saw something that he thought, oh, like, I'm going to go back to school and check this out. And then what did he do first? But we just talked about that, right? Like he went to Google, he started doing searches. He did that on his phone, probably while he was walking around, was gathering information and, you know, there's time delays in between all of this, but at some point he's going to end up on YouTube, right? And it's because he's going to want to have somebody just break it down for him really simply in video format of what are the opportunities and what are the programs that are available and what is that gonna mean for his life? When we start thinking about student journey, like, you have to realize he's not gonna make that decision now. Like, this is going to be the largest, most complex decision that somebody in the early part of their life is going to make. So, you're going to procrastinate that. You're going to put that off, right? So what marketing is going to get back in front of that person? And then there's going to be all of the mini conversions that need to happen. So there's going to be applications and scholarship research and it's going to go on and on and on. One of the studies that we cited in the keynote, over just a six-week period, one woman that was studied, there were over 3,000 digital interactions that she did to get booted up into attending a program. And then the other thing that we talked about was how long the student journey ends up being. For over 50% of people, the journey takes over a year. And so when you think about your marketing program, the timeline that you've associated, these artificial timelines that you've created of, like, oh, we're doing registration and we've got a couple of months for a campaign… Over half of the people did not start then. It started a lot earlier.
Cheryl Broom:And I think that is such an important takeaway because, working with so many community colleges, I see marketing plans that start in May because classes start in August. So they might have a little budget in May, and then they'd amp it up in June, and then it gets really aggressive in July, and then it kind of tapers off when school starts, and then they shut it off.
Erin Green:Right.
Cheryl Broom:And then they do it again starting in November. But nothing's running during September and October. And what we learn today is students are searching and looking for you based on their own, like, biological clocks.
Erin Green:Right
Cheryl Broom:It's not your enrollment schedule. It's their lives.
Erin Green:Yeah, exactly. And if you're looking to sort of, if somebody's questioning on you, whenever you go back and go, hey, you know, like, let's say that you're inspired from this and you're like, I'm going to run, you know, my marketing program year round, the research points that students are only considering three or four colleges from the very beginning and the vast majority, 75% of people, they don't expand that set of colleges that they're looking at. That list stays narrow from the get-go. And if you want to be one of the ones that are considered, you have to be there at the beginning. And the beginning is not just that two-to-three-month window.
Cheryl Broom:And they're not necessarily looking for a particular college by name. Right? They're searching by program or field.
Erin Green:Yeah, exactly, right? So they're not, even if you did a really good job with marketing,‘cause it's about, like, it's about their life and what they want. So they're thinking about what is my career going to be? One of the big takeaways at the end that we said, and this is something that we got whenever we were at the YouTube space and Google, they have this art up that that stuck with me and it said people buy feelings, not products. And you can take that a bunch of different ways in terms of thinking about capitalism, but it's really important for marketing because they're not buying a college degree. They're buying a new life. They're buying a new career. They're buying the money that that's going to get them and the life that that's going to enable them to have. And that makes sense when you think about their search pattern. They're thinking about what the job is going to be. Like, people don't buy the saw, they buy the cut that the saw gives them.
Cheryl Broom:Right. When you're setting up a search program or you’re expanding on a current one, what are some tips to best use your money? How do you apply this student journey to paid search?
Erin Green:That's a really big question.
Cheryl Broom:I know. Take your time.
Erin Green:So one of the interesting things that we do for our search technology, right, is that we try to start with a very broad set of keywords. A very broad set of keywords, and we let them all have a fair go at it in the sort of free-market system and we come up with, you know, what are all of the different conversions that we want those keywords to create. And it's not just filling out a form fill, right? Like we're going to have a different weight associated with each one. So website visits matter, form fills matter more. Calls maybe matter more, right? The different mechanisms that you can acquire an email address, all of those different ones. And we're going to track all of those. And we're going to weight those across a very broad set of terms. And then we're going to hone in and make sure that we're adjusting bids for all of those different terms. What are the kinds of searches that somebody is going to do on mobile and is that valuable? How valuable are those searches versus what are they doing on desktop? So if they're trying to get questions answered, like quick-hit pieces of information, that's likely going to happen on mobile. More of the search is going to happen on mobile. But if you're looking for“what scholarship programs apply to me?” and then you're planning on digging into that— Because if you're going to start applying for scholarships, that's your whole evening, right? You're going to be at least, like—
Cheryl Broom:Even filling out the application at community colleges, your whole evening.
Erin Green:Yeah, that’s your whole evening, right? So that's absolutely happening on a desktop for the most part, and so, thinking through.
Cheryl Broom:That's really great advice. You had brought up a statistic about how many new queries are being made each day and it was staggering.
Erin Green:Yeah. So there are, so just to sort of set the stage for the universe, there are now trillions of searches happening every year and that number is so big that our brain doesn't actually, like, you can't visualize what a trillion searches is, right? It breaks your brain. But 15% of those are new every single day. And that's staggering. And then the immediate question is, well, why? Or how is that possible, right? And one of the big drivers of that has been voice search. So I know that I've gotten big into doing voice searches in my car while I'm driving, not just for maps but to answer all sorts of questions, right? And so those queries have gotten a lot longer and so that's been part of it. But another part of it is is that the world is changing so fast that there are just new things. All of the new things that have occurred, those searches weren't relevant until the thing happened. And now people are interested and curious about that. So as fields are evolving and changing, new queries are always being developed.
Cheryl Broom:And that's why you've got to pay attention to your keywords, right?
Erin Green:Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:Because you might be missing searches that you didn't even think about six months ago.
Erin Green:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. Really interesting. Another statistic that you had shared is that we have 8 billion connected devices.
Erin Green:Right. And I had to go look this up‘cause I keep thinking that the world population is larger, but current estimates for world population is 7.7 billion people. So already for connected devices we have more devices than people. And the question that we pose the audience was, right, is that in 2020 how many connected devices will there be? Also, we had to pause, because remember when 2020 was the future? Like, 2020 was going to be the future. Like, 2000 was the future, but 2020 was really the future. And that's, at the time of this recording, is like six weeks away.
Cheryl Broom:It’s so weird.
Erin Green:Yeah. But to come back to, like, the question on the table is how many connected devices are there going to be in 2020? 20 billion.
Cheryl Broom:I feel like 1 billion of them are in my house.
Erin Green:Yeah, definitely. We've had that question, like, how many connected devices do you have? I counted in my living room, right? And so I just have one phone. But Angela who was just in here, she has two phones. She has a work and personal phone. I've got, me personally, I have two laptops. We have one, two, three, four. I think we have four active laptops, but then there's, like, some old laptops that are in the closet you don't want to get rid of. And then I've got, we've got three desktop computers, four laptops, three cell phones, and at least two iPads that are active in addition to just miscellaneous devices that aren't being used.
Cheryl Broom:It's crazy. I even, like, even our TVs are unplugged. I go to Amazon Prime. What? It's that little Fire Stick we've got. We have a Fire Stick downstairs, upstairs, and then the master bathroom now that—the TV was in the master bathroom when we bought it—but I found it very useful for my four year old watches his little shows while he's taking a bath.
Erin Green:Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:Oh my gosh, there are so many devices and it's just staggering. So yeah, 20 billion, you know, in 2020. Absolutely crazy. And that's where we find that most people are starting—like you said earlier—their college searches, is all on their devices.
Erin Green:Yeah, absolutely. Like, because it just sort of, like, life happens, it's really integrated now, and that's why we go back to customer journey and student journey over and over and over.‘Cause you want to go get into the head of whoever your person is. In our presentation, the guy's name was Marlin. But you need to come up with an actual person, an actual name, and, like, when does that start? And it's probably going to happen on their phone with the seemingly innocuous but really big question, right? Like if they type in“degree programs near me” or“nursing school near me” or whatever that is, like, what that really means is is that they're ready to change their life completely, but it's happening super casually on a pretty small screen and you don't have a lot of time to be the right, relevant, easily accessible answer for that question.
Cheryl Broom:And so when you're setting up your marketing campaign, somebody does a search that you've been on, now you want to make sure that when they go onto YouTube that they're seeing something that's relevant to your college or when they go onto social media that they're seeing something about that program or the college that's based on their search behavior. Is that possible to set up a campaign that way?
Erin Green:Right, so, one of the concepts that we talk about from a broad perspective is we call it page dominance, right? So if somebody goes to Google and they're typing in whatever that search is, you did your exhaustive list of keywords and you found, like, you pick one of those phrases and I really want to rank for that one. So it's not just that you type into Google and you want to rank for that term, like, you want to show up in the ad, you want to show up in the map listing, right? If that's relevant to the query, which it almost always is, you want to show up organically, right? And then after they visit your site, you want to show up at all the other places that they're going to be, right? So you go to YouTube, you want to make sure that you have promoted ads that are there and that you have smart video content that answers those deeper questions. When they're on socials, which we know that all of the students that you have are going to be, right? When they're on Facebook, when they're on Instagram, they're on Snap, everywhere. You want to be in all of those places in an ideal world, because there's a credibility that comes to your brand when they see that. The other thing that I encourage people to think about is that you are what people see online. It doesn't matter that much what you think about yourself and your brand, right? So whenever somebody shows up and looks for you online, it doesn't matter how innovative and wonderful you think that your college is. If they go to your Facebook page and there's nothing there and you have four followers and you haven't posted since 2015, that says something about you, right? And then, alternatively, if you're not investing in Facebook, you are investing in Instagram and they show up on that, right? And you have promoted stories and that campaign, and then maybe you have really compelling content that they've engaged with and it's super active. That also says something about your brand and you need to be intentional about what people see when they show up and find you.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. And that was kind of the point of the keynote is building these stackable and snackable micro-moments, right? Where your experience builds off of your previous experience. So you go to the website, you go to YouTube, you see pre-roll about whatever it is that you had been interested in, whatever landing page that you landed on, maybe it's for a nursing program. You go to YouTube and you see 15-30-second pre-roll ad about the nursing program. That's a meaningful moment for them. That's a meaningful piece of the customer journey.
Erin Green:Yeah, absolutely. And then thinking about later, you know, so then if they go to your YouTube watch page, what content do you have that lives there? Do you have maybe an extended student's story, right, so that it's maybe it's three or five minutes that somebody really goes into detail about what that entire process was like. Are they going to be able to talk to the professors that are on campus? Are they going to be able to talk to and hear from those people? So, yeah, you need to think about continuous experience and start small, I think was maybe some of the other things that we talked about. I really liked the phrase that you came up with for stackable moments because there's all of these little moments and you sort of execute one and then you go, okay, how can I layer another one on top of that and how can I layer another one on top of that? Because you're going to be a slightly different version of yourself, yourself as a brand online. You're going to flex a little bit differently on Instagram, which is going to be very different from the expression of your brand on search, which is going to be different from the expression of yourself on other channels. But there should be a thread, like, you should be able to recognize that that is you regardless of the way.
Cheryl Broom:I think that's what’s actually so fun about community college marketing is there are so many programs, there are so many different things to market besides just who your college is and that you're close to home and you're affordable. There are so many verticals within our college systems that you can do this for. It makes marketing really exciting.
Erin Green:Yeah. And then do you find that a lot of people find that overwhelming in terms of picking and choosing what they're going to promote?
Cheryl Broom:Oh, yeah, of course, because every department wants you to promote their department. But, you know, when we come in and work with colleges, we might take a look at their strategic enrollment management plan, and that plan generally outlines some programs that they want to see growth in. And maybe that growth has been identified because there's jobs in the region that are paying living wages. So they know that if students complete, let's say, a dental hygiene program, that they're going to get hired locally and they're going to make a great living wage. So I always like to go back with, well, what's your institutional goal? And that way when the theater department shows up and wants you to build a fantastic campaign around their show, you could say, well, actually, our enrollment management plan has me focusing on dental hygiene this year. So, you know, yeah, we'll do some posts for you and maybe we can revisit next year whether or not we can do a full marketing program. But it goes back to what your institutional goals are and building off of that. One of the questions you asked during the keynote this morning is how many people were doing YouTube advertising.
Erin Green:And I was really pleased. A lot more people than we normally see in these said yes to that. And that makes me really, really happy. What, as you might imagine, as digital marketers, I sort of ended up saying that you need to do all the things, right? And it's true, but I'll give you some backing for my statement that YouTube is mandatory. I want you to think about it, one, that YouTube in a lot of ways is a lot like search was in 2007, right? Now, whenever you say“are you doing search?” almost everybody is or has done it, right, and has at least thought about that. But a lot of people haven't.Statistics, at least from a couple of years ago, was that maybe 9% of businesses even had a YouTube video up at all, much less ran an ad. So I was really happy to see that that people did. But reasons that you should do YouTube… So if you have to justify this to somebody, let's give you like a little cheat sheet for that. So first, if you're already sold on search, but you're not doing YouTube, you're missing out because YouTube is the world's second largest search engine. So if you think that you're on all the search engines, but you're not on YouTube, you're not. Right? Second, it's the world's largest research engine. People turn to YouTube to find out how to do things and they're doing that increasingly over and over and over. If you want to think about how big YouTube is, because if you're not, sometimes we make the mistake that if you're not actively a user of a channel, you think about it sort of just the way that you've heard about it, right? Like so a lot of people I know aren't on Snapchat. We know that it's useful, but like we're not on it. So if you just think that YouTube is about cat videos, like YouTube changed a lot. It is the equivalent in terms of eyeballs of five Super Bowls a day. Like, that much attention and eyeballs is happening every single day on YouTube, on every conceivable topic under the sun. The other thing that you need to know about it is that I think it's the best value in digital marketing in terms of lowest cost per action. So we were talking about case studies and campaigns today that a cost per completed view is 5 cents, 10 cents, 15 cents. I mean, you compare that to an average cost per click for a search campaign, which is in the$2 range sometimes. It's monumental. And if you want to know why that is, it's because not everybody yet is doing YouTube advertising. The competition isn't as steep. Those used to be the numbers we saw in search. When we looked for cost per clicks, you used to be able to go, oh, it's 15 cent, 25 cent—remember?—cost per click, and now it's a lot higher and it's the bidding and the competition that goes along with that. And when we say a completed view, people go,“what does that mean?” Right? So you're only paying, at least for the pre-roll ads, the in-stream format. If somebody doesn't skip your ad, that little, you know, you have five seconds that you have to watch and then there's the little skip button, they don't skip it and they watch at least 30 seconds of your ad. So you're only paying for people who are truly engaged with your message. Yeah. And it gives you the opportunity to tell your whole story. Sometimes we do this run through and it's like, you know, tell me your favorite movie in two sentences. Making the illusion to a search ad. Right? Or tell me, show me your favorite movie with one still image and like a little paragraph of text. And maybe you can do better, but that's not the medium, right? Like, you want a trailer, you want to see in full audio-visual glory, you know, and to break something out. It's the format that people prefer most. Right? We've seen the rise of video over the past, you know, four years, and it's because it's the option between, like, sitting back and reading something or getting to sit back and, like, have it all broken out to you in audio-visual wonder. People just overwhelmingly prefer that.
Cheryl Broom:How do you measure success on YouTube campaigns? I've seen some where you don't have a lot of clicks. What— Is that bad? How do you know if you're doing well off the YouTube ad?
Erin Green:Yeah, so clicks is not the best metric for a YouTube campaign. Generally, a benchmark for a click for a YouTube campaign is like 0.1% so it's never going to be very, very high. But, again, we go back to student journey and user experience and that's just not what you're doing when you're on that platform. That's not the way that you show up to that platform. The most important metric that we look at is view rate, right? What percentage of people are actively choosing to watch your content? So you'll hear different numbers, but we look at, call it industry average is like 20-25%, so if you get a campaign that's doing 30-40% of people that see your ad that are actively choosing to watch it, that's doing really, really well. And then we think about, you know, rightsizing your budget to make a meaningful impact. Because, again, since YouTube has so many eyeballs, that five Super Bowls a day thing, you could have an infinite budget on YouTube. So you need to think about how are you making a meaningful impact for your program? And that's like how many, if you were able to buy views, how many do you want? And we'll look at the impressions, but the number-one metric we want to know is the creative being successful and that's the view-through rate.
Cheryl Broom:I think a big takeaway for me with digital marketing and the things that we've talked about today is you don't always get a measurable ROI on every single tiny thing you do. So you might be asked by your president, well, you ran a YouTube ad and how many clicks did you get? How many enrollments did you get off that ad? Well, the student journey doesn't work that way.
Erin Green:It’s so hard, right? Because, and I always think about the way traditional advertising was before, that, like, you didn't, if you sold a billboard, you don't have that super driven. It’s almost like a victim of having more data. Nobody said, well, exactly how many enrollments did we get off of our billboard? But you knew that it was effective, but it was fuzzy. But now that we have more data, we are very inclined to look at last-click attribution. So if you're not familiar with that term, what that means is you weight very heavily what was the previous, the most recent marketing channel that somebody engaged with before they converted. And you go, okay, well, I'm just going to put all of my money on that. And most of my people converted with organic search or with my search campaigns. So I'll just put all my money into that. But that's what we repeatedly come back to student journey, right? Like, this process is really, really long. And you need to think about the different kinds of attribution. You need to think about first-click attribution—what is the channel that's triggering people to start their journey, right? And then, like, weighted distribution models. Like, what are all of the channels that are in between? Because we know that the study that we looked at said that there's at least six touch points, different channels that people are engaging with now versus 15 years ago, people only use two channels. And you and I were talking aside, like, that number feels low. I think that maybe that's the way that they measured it in the study, but I think people are using a lot of different channels to make that happen.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, definitely. Now, how do you do things like that? Like, how do you see where your original search came from and follow somebody on their path through the touch points? How is that possible?
Erin Green:Yeah, and so we asked the audience today, for everybody that attended, and it was the opposite. So we were really encouraged when people said— We were like, hey, who's doing YouTube advertising? A lot of people raised their hands. But the other question I ask is who has Google analytics? Almost everybody does. And then I say, who here has, like, their Google analytics really set up? And then people kind of blank out and I go, by set up, I mean you have goals configured and you have, like, all of the individual actions tracked and mapped and you have custom dashboards and, like, you feel that you're getting more than metrics. Because the number itself doesn't matter, right? Like, it's the context of the number. And I don't think a single person—
Cheryl Broom:Well, there actually, there was one guy, but he, like, started to raise his hand and then he looked around and he saw that nobody else was. So he put it in his lap. But I was, I saw him, he had a red shirt on. I was like, there's one guy out of a hundred.
Erin Green:Red shirt. I love him so much. But if you hear that and you go, oh, I'm one of those people that didn't have my Google analytics configured, don't feel bad. I'm trying to think of a single organization that I've entered into initially that they had it all dialed in and squared away and most people don't. And it's because it's hard, right? It's a lot to think through. And we're throwing a lot of stuff at you on this podcast of, like, go ahead and just map out your entire student journey and then do exhaustive keyword research and make sure that that all fits together. Oh, and then after you do all of that, make sure that it's all completely trackable, and not just in Google analytics, but make sure that you've got reports that you can report up and report down and, like, how are you making all of that intelligence actionable? And that gets really overwhelming, but it's worth doing. It's worth laying out a roadmap to be able to measure assisted conversions because then you get to have this conversation, right? Whenever whoever pressures you about your marketing program and they go, oh, you're in the YouTube campaign. How many, you know, how many applications did we get from that? And you go, either“I don't know” or“none.” You can go, oh, you mean like last-click attributed conversions? And they're going to blank on you and you're going to go like, well, no, last-click attributed conversions. But we know that from our program, right, that in terms of the overall, like, marketing mix, it plays a critical role in trigger events. Here, let me show you. Like, how good is that going to feel if you feel that dialed in? Or, like, you might find that maybe that marketing campaign didn't drive as much action really within the overall conversion mix, so you're going to learn and be able to iterate and improve.
Cheryl Broom:That is such great advice. And you had a slide and maybe we'll put the slide up in the show notes that showed how, what the goal should look like and what the flow is for somebody coming through your website, where they came from and where they end up going.
Erin Green:Yeah. To be able to see, like, how many different channels did they bump into. And sometimes you start by looking at what are the common conversion paths. So there's some people that convert quick, there's some people that convert late, but you'll sort of get a feel of, like, okay, here are the channels that fit together. But then, I'm a big fan of going, like, deeper in, you know, go like 10-15 pages deep and then you'll find, like, one person, right? And let's call her Susan. She'll be, like, well, like, you know, only one person converted this way and it's like the look-back window will be 90 days and you'll be able to go, oh man, this woman visited our website like 130 times and she clicked on 15 different search ads and then she was on our social media this way and then she opened this email that we did, right? Like, you can see it all and you're like— And I'm calling her Susan because in my heart that's who it was, right? And Susan, she converted, but she had, like, you know, like 150 interactions with our brand before she finally converted.
Cheryl Broom:And you can see that in Google analytics.
Erin Green:Yeah, exactly.
Cheryl Broom:Wow.
Erin Green:It's unbelievable to get to see. It's really gratifying to find a single user, but seeing the patterns of, like, what channels are having the biggest influence. And I know that it gets overwhelming, but just start with first and last click, right? Like, you want to know what are, getting people, what’s the last thing they do before they convert, but also what's the first thing that's getting them in the top of your funnel?
Cheryl Broom:Gosh, that would be great data. I'd love to have you in the office when you talk to a president and be, like, yeah, let's look at the last-click attribution, please. Such great data, and it shows that you're actually paying attention to actual student journeys, to their digital journeys.
Erin Green:Yeah. Well, it just, like, analytics gives you tools to have a better, more robust conversation to both, like, educate and bring people in. If you, if they go, oh, how many did we get? And you go, oh, from last click… And then you have the opportunity to educate, you can talk about that, and then you can feed into other parts of the program. And even if you don't know, then you go, oh, well, we're currently doing testing to find that out. This is my testing plan. Then you never have to feel like, oh, I don't know. It's like, no, no, no. We have an analytics program, we're doing testing, and we're currently mapping out what our biggest driver of trigger events is. Like, say that to somebody, they're going to get real excited and be like, oh, I want to hear about… Yeah. I find that if you can get somebody interested in analytics and you get them interested in testing, the first successful test that you run, that you come back, even if it's the red button versus the green button, right? And they go, oh man, we changed it. We switched it and we tested it. And the red button, 5% more people click on the red button. People get addicted to that, right? And so you can plan all of that out. Yeah.
Cheryl Broom:And you don't have to do it for every single thing that you're doing.
Erin Green:Oh God, no.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. You can start small. And that was some of our takeaways in the presentation, as, you know, don't bite off everything. Take a small bite.
Erin Green:Yeah. Well, we were talking about Southern phrases, right? So I'm from Texas and one of the phrases like the, you know, you don't eat the whole elephant, right? Like you eat the elephant one bite at a time and you're going to have to do that with a lot of these things. So hopefully all of this information is washing over you, but don't let perfect get in the way of great. Don't let great get in the way of good. Like, it's better to launch and iterate and improve and get moving than it is to sort of stand still and“analysis paralysis”—that that's a real thing that we see, right? It's one of those sort of trite business phrases, but you see that where people are like, oh, I'm going to map out everything and then nothing gets done or it doesn't get done until time forces you to do so. Right? And then you end up with these sort of short-window campaigns.
Cheryl Broom:So, to wrap up, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions for people who are just starting digital marketing, people who are intermediate, and then some colleges that are sophisticated. What are your tips for somebody who's just—your number one tip? You're just starting digital marketing or maybe you have a little search campaign going or you've done a Facebook ad, but that's it. You haven't done anything else. What would you tell them to look at first?
Erin Green:So if you're starting just from scratch, right? I would say that the first channel you need to get involved with is search and I would say decide to do something well, right? So, like, if you're just getting started, decide that you're going to do search and decide that you are going to rock that. And I generally start with search because we know that it covers so many different touch points and that study, Google covered like 77% of the different touch points. Search plays well at the beginning of the student journey, the middle, and the end. It has a role all the way through. It's the most measurable. You're going to get so much data associated with that, and it's going to immediately start shedding heat and light on all the other areas of your program. You're going to start running search and go, oh, there's things that need to happen with my website. Oh, there's this. Oh, like, it's going to have, you're going to have a lot of“aha” moments and the rabbit hole goes so deep on so many different channels that that's the place that I would invest first, and it's generally the place that you have the most data to be able to understand and things get a little bit looser as you move into other channels sometimes.
Cheryl Broom:All right, and I'm going to throw a tip in there too for the newbie. Don't turn off your search.
Erin Green:Oh, good. Yes!
Cheryl Broom:I can't tell you how many people, I'm like, what? You turned it off in September and now we're starting it again in December? Don't shut it on and off. Leave it going all year. Even if it means you have to reduce budgets a little bit, I recommend that you keep paid search going so you can collect that data. You can optimize. You can follow the student journey. If you keep turning it on and off, all of that goes away.
Erin Green:Yeah, 100%.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, you’d be shocked how many people do that. Like, you hire Interact, the first thing I'm going to tell you is stop turning your campaigns off. Okay, so we've got the newbie covered. They're going to do search. What about somebody who's doing search now? What's the next thing that they should kind of be looking at? What would help those micro moments, that student journey?
Erin Green:Man, so this is a little bit more than intermediate depending on what your propensity for this is, but I'm going to go back to analytics and I'm going to throw out a statistic for this. We know that organizations that embrace analytics do three times better than those that don't, right? That the more that you can make data-informed decisions, the better you're going to do. So getting really good at analytics is going to help you in so many different ways. It's going to be able to ask for more money and be able to justify that internally. It's going to be able to inform how you're doing for other channels. When you add new channels on, you're going to have a pathway to be able to make that happen. So I would encourage you to get involved with an analytics program and even if that is short term. It's something that people actively avoid, right? But you can't manage what you don't measure. So I'll start with that, do Google analytics. If it's not your thing, find somebody on your team who it is their thing and make good friends with that person and figure out how you're going to leverage that asset. And then from there I would say, like, pick another channel, right? Like if you're really just going from, if you're just doing search and you're like, now what? Pick another channel. And we say, like, where are the kids? They're going to be on their phone, they're going to be on social. I would pick social next. Yeah, because you want to, and the reason that I'm saying that from all of the research is that the mistake that we as an industry are making is we are running these short-term campaigns that come on and off that focus only at the bottom of the funnel or at the end of the customer journey. And there's so much room to win at the beginning, right? And we know that if you get your name in front of them at the beginning, you get to be a part of their consideration group, which is only gonna be three or four colleges. They're not going to widen back out. Like, you don't get the opportunity to win later if you're not there at the beginning. So pick a channel that enables you to do that. And after search, social is going to be the next one. And there's a lot of options in that space.
Cheryl Broom:All right, so, to summarize Erin's recommendations, which are fantastic and I concur with, you're going to start with search, you're going to leave it running, you're going to invest in your analytics to analyze what's happening. Maybe you make some website changes, you mix up your campaign, you bid on new words, and then once you feel that you have a good mastery of that, then you start moving into your other channels. So you don't have to jump right in and do everything at once. Actually, that would, you'd probably drown.
Erin Green:Yeah, it'd be very overwhelming.
Cheryl Broom:Well, you've had some absolutely fantastic advice. Is there anything else that you think people would find valuable?
Erin Green:Well, I guess if we're going to look at it for an advanced program, what that you should do, and for that, like, you have the opportunity to plan out all the things, right? And if you have a truly advanced program, you probably have a lot of data that you can mine to inform your decision-making process. But I would go back to the basics, right? Which is actually mapping out what your student journey is, which as much as people talk about it, they haven't actually written it down. Right? Who are the students that you're going after? And come up with an actual person, like, come up with your Marlin. And what is that person's life like and how do you want to get in front of them? It ends up being a very interesting rubric because it adds in the emotional elements that are going to be important to your marketing campaign. So if you're a big brand or you have a sophisticated program, the thing that we see is that sometimes people's marketing becomes monotonous or they're saying the same things. And, like, if you, we talked about a brand agency last night at dinner and one of the ways that they wanted to drive this point home was that they had the board come in and they were like, can you pick out your marketing from all of the other marketing? And they had, they'd blown up all of the digital ads and put them all around the room and they all looked the same. And the way that you get around that is being really intentional about what do you want your brand to be and how do you want to say that? And one of the campaigns that I hope everybody gets to see that you guys executed, you do that by not trying to say everything at once, right? You start small, you stack, you layer, and you find a way to be impactful and speak to that person.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. You know your audience and you don't try to cram everything down their throat at once. Yeah. And we love colleges love to do that. Administrators want to put… They want to be helpful.
Erin Green:They do.
Cheryl Broom:And I think it comes from a good place, but it's not helpful when you have so much text on a digital ad, you can't read it.
Erin Green:Well, marketing is such an interesting field, right? Like, if I go to a doctor, and I guess, like, this is actually changing. We used to say this, but people's access to information has changed. But if a doctor tells you to do something, you do it, right? If a lawyer tells you to do something, like, you really take that advice. If a plumber says you need all new copper pipes and it's going to be an outrageous amount of money, you probably say yes to that. But if a marketer who has, like, you know, the same experience or maybe you're paying the same hourly rate in order to get that advice, people really push back. And I always wondered why. And it's because we consume so much marketing. So we all have, like, our feelings and opinions about what is going to work and we bring that perspective. And like, that's why people have such strong feelings about things. It's because they have their own journey and how they engage with that. And so that's one of the things that we navigate a lot.
Cheryl Broom:Very true. Like, your board members are consumers of the local newspaper and therefore your college needs to book some ads in the local newspaper.
Erin Green:Yes. So I guess I would add that that's the last thing. So if that comes up and somebody goes, oh, like, we should, we gotta do newspaper because of this. Like, maybe newspaper is a good channel. Maybe it's not a good channel, right? Depending on your students, your area, and how that fits together. But the thing that you should be aware of and maybe tell people is there's something called the curse of knowing. And the curse of knowing is once you know something, once you've learned a new piece of information, it is very difficult, as a human, to remember what it was like to not know that. Right? And so being able to bring people awareness of that concept and then going back to be able to meet somebody before they knew that piece of information.
Cheryl Broom:I like that. The curse of knowing.
Erin Green:The curse of knowing.
Cheryl Broom:It is so true. Because even when you supervise people, you're like, this is so easy.
Erin Green:Yeah. But it wasn't. Remember when it was super hard? It took you six times to figure out, yeah, how it was going to go.
Cheryl Broom:Like doing a formula in Excel.
Erin Green:Yeah, because you've done it a thousand times and it's completely integrated. Right? But no, it's the curse of knowing.
Cheryl Broom:Well, I always learn so much talking to you, so thank you so much. There's one more thing I want you to share with people because you've been such an inspiration and I think that your hobby is such an inspiration and you just hit a milestone and I would love to finish up our podcast by you sharing what you've been doing and what you've been collecting.
Erin Green:Okay. Yeah, so for background, I am originally from small-town West Texas and I escaped as soon as I could. One of the really cool things about getting to be in marketing is that you get to fly around to different places and Plainview, Texas is a flat, waterless, dry place. Right? And I went to California and I blew off the end of the conference to be able to go out to the beach because I hadn't been to the beach. Like, I think I went to the beach as a kid, but I didn't, like, really remember. And it was as close to a spiritual experience as I think I am likely to have, right? And this is a pre-iPhone, pre-everything… I brought my camera in a plastic bag because I didn't want to get it messed up. And then I dropped my camera immediately and messed it up. But then I had this plastic bag and I put sand in it and I was like, I'm going to be that basic girl that brings the bag of sand. And it was amazing. And then when I came home I had it sitting on my counter and I was like, this could become my life side quest. So, because I'm in marketing, I gave my project a name. I call it my world beach tour. And I set a goal, and this was back in 2007, I set it to get to 50 beaches, which seemed, it was going to be really, really difficult to do. Like, even if you're going to two beaches a year, which is a lot, it's going to take a really long time. But I've gotten to go around and see all of the beaches. And this year I hit beach number 50 which was my goal, and I got to do it in my dream beach, which was in the Maldives. And what's funny is that we talked about, like, customer journeys and stuff and how long things incubate. Like, how long have I been incubating?‘Cause I had the goal to go to the Maldives in 2007. I've been incubating on that journey, like, for a real long time. But yeah, that's one of my hobbies. I'm also into driving race cars and scuba diving. So it's, like, branched out.
Cheryl Broom:Very awesome. What a journey. Like, what a moment. You had a moment.“I'm going to get out of Texas” moment.
Erin Green:I did, absolutely. Yeah. I had an“I need to get out of Texas” moment.
Cheryl Broom:And look, it brought you to 50 beaches all around the world.
Erin Green:Absolutely. Yeah.
Cheryl Broom:And that is the power of moments. And with that, I think that we're done.
Erin Green:Cool. Thanks everybody.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Marketing MasterClass. Always so great to see you, Erin.
Erin Green:Oh, thanks.
Cheryl Broom:And that wraps up this edition of Community College Marketing MasterClass. Isn’t Erin just the coolest? Before I sign off, I want to remind everyone that if you're interested in joining Erin and Interact Communications at the Google event on April 20th in New York City, then please reach out to me or to anyone at Interact right away. Besides making sure that you secure a spot in the workshop, you'll also want to learn about our room block that we've secured at a really cool hotel in the meatpacking district, and there's only 70 rooms available in that room block, so please, if you're coming to the conference, get on that right away as the hotel will release that room block in mid-March. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening. Thank you for all the hard work you do for our students each and every day, and I hope you've taken something away from this podcast. I'll catch you next time. This is Cheryl Broom with Interact Communications. Thank you so much for listening.
Announcer:Thank you for joining the Community College Marketing MasterClass podcast. For more great tips on how to improve marketing and communications at your two-year college, visit interactcom.com and join us next time as we discuss and share actionable, time-tested strategies on topics directly related to community college marketing.