Higher Ed Marketing Lab

We sit down with Will Patch, Enrollment Marketing Leader, at Niche.com to talk about strategies for more effectively engaging parents during the college search process. We start our conversation with a review of some key findings from a recent survey the Niche team conducted with parents, then we dive into concrete steps schools can take to engage parents more effectively.

Liz Gross, CEO of social listening agency Campus Sonar joins us to talk about all things higher ed social media and her new book, Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy: A Guide for College Campuses.

Echo Delta's Senior SEO Strategist, Catherine Reich, joins us to discuss the long-term trends shaping organic search today, along with a major algorithm update Google will be rolling out in 2021.

As an episode bonus, Catherine has developed a guide you can share with your web developer to optimize your site. The guide is available for download in this episode's show notes at EchoDelta.co.

In this episode, we talk with Matt Sluzinsky, Director of Web Strategy and Services at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. While Mayo Clinic is one of the most recognizable names in medicine, many are surprised to learn the clinic also provides over 400 academic programs ranging from entry-level certificates to elite residency programs. As part of the school's efforts to raise awareness about the extraordinary range of opportunities available at the college, Matt and his team partnered with an outside firm to create a series of journey maps to better understand how different types of students engage in the decision-making process and how to better tailor the college's online content to support prospective students in their journey.

According to Matt, the results were illuminating and helped to energize his team's efforts as they set about a full-scale redesign of the college's website. Backed by fresh, compelling data, his team was able to focus their efforts on developing the specific types of content they knew would have the greatest impact on prospective students, including the creation of a comprehensive online healthcare careers guide.

In this episode, Matt outlines the process his team used to create the journey maps and shares specific examples of how the journey mapping process informed his team's work.

In this special episode, we talk with President Richard Dunsworth of the University of the Ozarks about the impact of COVID-19 on his school. From leadership in times of crisis to wide-ranging operational changes to the long-term impact this global crisis could have on the institution, we explore how one school is coping with profound and rapid change.

Podcasting ranks right up there with influencer marketing and AI as one of the most hyped marketing trends over the last few years. But what's really involved in launching a podcast, what's the potential pay-off, and is it too late for your school to jump on the podcast train?

We tackle these questions and more in our latest Higher Ed Marketing Lab podcast. Joining us is Jenna Spinelle from Penn State's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Since 2018, Jenna's produced and promoted the Institute's Democracy Works podcast, and she's got great advice for anyone considering starting one.

You'll hear:

• Why podcasting has become such a hot medium over the last few years
• Whether or not it's too late to start your own podcast
• How to set realistic expectations for exposure and listenership
• How to pick the right topic for your podcast
• And smart ways to make the workload of podcasting more manageable.

In this episode, we'll be talking about social media, and specifically, what do when you suspect it's time to sunset a social media account that's outlived its usefulness.

Joining us in the conversation is Rebecca Stapley. As former Assistant Director of Social Media at Nazareth College, Rebecca has first hand experience managing social media at her school and engaging with colleagues in other departments who want to or maybe already are running their own accounts on behalf of the school.

You'll hear from Rebecca about:

• The key questions internal teams should asking BEFORE they start a new social account
• How to approach colleagues when you suspect their social media accounts could use some help and how to do so in a way that minimizes defensiveness
• And the specific process she used to wind down a set of alumni social media accounts at Nazareth College and integrate them into the school's main account.

We talk web accessibility with David Carpenter and Jennifer Garvey of Colorado State University. David is the Director of Operations and Jennifer is Assistant Director of IT for Web and Business Systems at Colorado State's College of Health and Human Sciences.

In this discussion, we shy away from the technical details surrounding accessibility, and instead focus on how to effectively align people and resources within an organization to get the work done. You'll hear from David and Jennifer about some of the challenges they faced--and even mistakes they made--during their early web accessibility initiatives. And they share important lessons learned about how to more effectively engage both internal resources and external partners to get the work done. And perhaps most importantly, they detail practical examples of how they've integrated web accessibility into the fabric of their organization so that accessibility remains an on-going priority and not just a one-time project.

This was a great chat with tons of practical insight. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Jennifer Garvey and David Carpenter.

Jason Buzzell is Director of Digital Communications at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I met up with Jason at the 2019 eduWeb conference to reflect on some of the most interesting ideas and themes we encountered at this year's conference.

We discussed:

• How to humanize digital experiences (which was the topic of a talk Jason delivered).
• We talked about why today's students place such a high priority on authenticity and how schools are attempting to provide it.
• Some of the more interesting findings from RNL's 2019 E-Expectations report, which was presented at the conference.

Connect with Jason on Twitter @buzzilinear.

The campus visit remains one of the most impactful moments in the college decision process, and there's probably no one who knows more about the campus visit experience than Jeff Kallay, Principal of Render Experiences.

His work on campus visits has been featured in numerous publications including the Chronicle of Higher Education, University Business Magazine, and the New York Times, and we were lucky enough to have him join us on the Higher Ed Marketing Lab podcast to share some of his best insights.

We cover:

• why our complex digital world makes the campus visit more important, not less
• how Gen Z and their Gen X parents present new and interesting challenges to recruiters
• why rock star students don't always make rock star embassadors, and
• why your guides should never, ever talk and walk backwards.

http://www.renderexperiences.com/