Enrollment Marketing Strategy: How to Attract Students and Align Programs:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 251 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Max DesMarais

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 251 with Max DesMarais

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

David: Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

Our guest today is Max Desmarais, the Director of Strategy at Vital, a digital marketing agency that does strategy and paid advertising. Their clients include a number of higher education institutions, clients they have helped improve the results and efficiency of their marketing and enrollment strategies.

Max is an expert when it comes to higher ed digital, and he joins me today to talk about how marketing enrollment go hand in glove, and how higher ed institutions need to change their strategies so that they can grow their enrollment.

Max, welcome to the show.

Max DesMarais: Thanks so much for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I am looking forward to this. One of the big challenges that higher ed institutions have is with marketing, especially now that the demographic cliff is coming up. Marketing and enrollment are going to be far bigger pieces for institutions with their enrollment.

[00:01:18] Max Desmarais’ Background and Vital’s Mission

Drumm McNaughton: So before we get into that, cause you’ve got some really good insights into this, give us a little bit of your background and how you’ve helped higher ed institutions with growing their enrollments.

Max DesMarais: Yeah. Awesome. So, I work at a digital marketing agency, Vital Design. We’re about a hundred person plus agency and we do all types of marketing activities for our clients, and we basically build websites and brands to drive traffic to websites and drive leads to hopefully increase enrollment objectives for higher education institutions.

We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we do so through great marketing research, great marketing execution and discipline strategies to drive more traffic, more leads, and more enrollment for our organizations.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, wait a minute.

[00:02:07] The Importance of Branding in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: You said something that is almost a total antithesis for most higher education institutions, and that’s branding. We’re going to get into that, but it’s so critical for an institution to have a good brand, a known brand. Because, as I’ve always learned it, and I’ve done a little bit of marketing work, not like you have, but it’s like a brand is the statement of who you are and what differentiates you between you and your competitors. Do I have that about right?

Max DesMarais: I think you have it perfectly. One of the insights that came to us a while ago, at Vitals, we were running paid ads for an online university, and just to highlight the importance of branding, we found that our advertising campaigns that were geographically targeted within a hundred miles of that university had, it was something like 30 percent higher click through rates, 30 percent higher conversion rates, and then the students that actually converted into that funnel converted into applications and enrollees at substantially higher rates than anyone that lived outside that geographic region. So it just shows that branding awareness that university had on that geographic locale made a big difference on those students.

And if take that across a wide range across the country, it’s very impactful.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting.

[00:03:26] Geographic Targeting and Marketing Strategies

Drumm McNaughton: You mentioned that because there’s a lot of firms out there who do marketing research and one in particular, Education Dynamics, comes to mind and the research that that Carol Aslanian has done with her portion of that says that the majority of online students and even the traditional residential students come within a hundred miles of the campus. So why would folks, unless you are a SNHU, a Southern New Hampshire University or a Capella or a University of Maryland global campus. Why would you try and spend marketing dollars outside of that 100-mile radius? If your rate of return is not going to be what it needs to be.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think It’s definitely highlights the importance of, if you have a limited budget and you have specific goals, you probably should be maximizing some of the geographic locales where you have the best brand awareness and once you need to expand beyond that’s a good time to explore.

How do we, one, increase our brand awareness outside of that 100-mile radius or, two, convert those people that maybe aren’t as brand aware about our organization into, better traffic, better leads, and hopefully eventual students on the funnel. So.

Drumm McNaughton: These are critical pieces and we’re going to get into them a lot more.

[00:04:45] Challenges in Higher Education Marketing

Drumm McNaughton: They become even more critical when we take a look at where higher ed is right now. It’s a mature market, very competitive, although most of higher ed institutions go, “Oh no, we don’t compete with xyu’s university that’s, you know, five miles down the road”. Yeah, you do.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, you do.

Drumm McNaughton: And then there’s going to be a declining demand due to the impending demographic cliff. The entry class for 2025 is going to be the last one before we go through 15 years of declines.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, absolutely it’s a very interesting time, very competitive time for educational institutions. It just highlights the importance of differentiating and also having a dialed marketing strategy that’s going to drive results.

[00:05:29] The Four P’s of Marketing in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: So let’s get into the classic marketing strategies. When I think about marketing, I think about the four P’s. Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. \ Take us through those if you would, and tell us how these things have changed over the years and what should institutions be focusing on now,

Max DesMarais: Yeah, for sure. So I guess we can go right through product price, place and promotion. I think the first one Product is honestly, it’s an area where universities and organizations have a great opportunity to differentiate. It’s an area where they often struggle, and it’s an area to continuously progress within as well.

So we’re obviously in a time where the digital landscape is changing so rapidly. We’ve got the influence of AI coming in every single industry, and that represents an example for us here on the product side of things where, universities, institutions need to develop programs or courses or certificate programs that are innovating with the times. So creating new products that fit with where the student marketplaces is going, so that we can offer programs that are best fit for those students. So there’s a lot to talk about on the product side of things.

I think institutions do a pretty good job on the Price side of things, and even the Place side of things. Price being, what are the tuition costs? What scholarship opportunities can we supply our students? How much is this actually going to cost those individual students? And then the Place side of things is also really well handled by many institutions, which is this going to be an in person class? Online only? Are we going to do hybrid learning? Where are we going to offer this course or program offering. And then the promotion side of things. So the first and last piece of that marketing mix are the areas where I see the most opportunity for universities to differentiate right now and to stay ahead of the game and innovate their marketing strategies to drive more results.

And that promotion side has a lot to do with some tactical marketing efforts. So search engine optimization and content marketing and moving up in the funnel to bring more students to that top of the funnel and also leveraging high quality paid advertising and branded campaigns to drive that awareness, drive that traffic, and drive more leads for those institutions.

[00:07:42] Product Development and Market Research

Drumm McNaughton: Which makes perfect sense, but let’s go back to that first P. The product or for higher ed, it’s the programs. Most higher ed institutions launch new programs because they want new enrollment, but what I have seen, and it’s unfortunate, that new programs typically come out of faculty and there isn’t the research done is what the needs are in the marketplace.

Is that your experience as well?

Max DesMarais: I think it happens a little too frequently where we’re launching a program that hasn’t had that necessary research behind it to answer the most fundamental question here, which is, Are there students that are looking for this particular offering, and if they are they looking for it in such a way that they’re going to understand how you even named this particular program?

It’s something that we have actually come across many of times with our institutions and we try to guide them by first saying, like, does this program have a need and desire? Yes? Great. Then we need to identify how do we get this in front of the right people at the right time, and we start to get into product naming and marketing strategies and things like that.

So, I’ll give you like a quick example. So, bioinformatics, biostatistics, biometrics, for example, is a new and growing field, where there’s lots of universities launching programs around bioinformatics. What I’ve seen recently is several organizations launching biometrics programs, for example. And when I quickly do research there’s a ton of opportunity here. There’s students that are looking for this, but launching a biometrics program might just have this little bit of issue in that traditionally people are searching for bioinformatics degrees or biostatistic degrees, and they’re not even quite totally sure what biometrics is yet.

And so this is opportunity to make sure that we’re positioning our new programs in such a way that the marketplace is finding your program and is recognizing it as an alternative or a close representative to other programs that have existed in the past. So it’s really important to get that naming structure right.

And we do this through research for our clients in many ways, like conducting keyword research. So, how are students searching for these programs online? Are they searching for bioinformatics? Are they searching for biostatistic programs, etc. And what we inevitably find is that some of these different ways that people are searching have substantially higher brand awareness and search volume associated with them than other programs. Which means there’s likely a better opportunity for us to make sure that we name the program that way and translate our program pages to show like how this relates specifically to that particular existing program.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, there’s the naming of it, there’s the demand of it. But there’s, related to the demand, is the return on investment and most institutions don’t look at what is the return on investment. You’re going to spend a significant chunk of dollars to build a new program, especially if it requires bringing in new faculty expertise, et cetera. So you’ve got that cost, you’ve got the online cost or face to face. You’ve got to look at is there going to be a good return and what’s reasonable for a time to be able to start making your dollars back.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really helpful when organizations have a similar programs or a similar audience that would fit this really well or they’re well known for this particular field where they can take advantage of their existing brand awareness in this particular field or area, which will allow them to hopefully fill these programs and in greater need.

But you’re spot on. It’s super important to understand that maybe you’re one of this program. We might have a specific enrollment goal, but you’re fine. We need to get to this level enrollment for this to be a profitable venture. And it’s really important to be understanding of the economics of it early on.

Drumm McNaughton: What comes to mind is two examples. Madeline Pumariega at Miami Dade College, back in 2020, started thinking about AI and what’s going to happen and she foresaw this thing really taking off. So she started swapping things over and they actually offer quite a number of higher ed programs, community college certificates, AA degrees in AI related topics. They jumped on that bandwagon early because they realized it would.

So there is your early adopter, which, in this case has worked out very well for them. And then you’ve got American University, the Kogod School of Business, who has gone back and revise their entire MBA program to ensure that all courses have a AI component in it whether it be how to use it or in some cases how to create it.

Max DesMarais: Those are great examples of innovation to have success and jumping ahead of the curve. I love it.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, and you have to be able to do that but you’ve got to be able to do the market research. And I guess that’s the big point with launching new programs is doing that market research to make sure that it is in fact going to be something that’s important. So how would somebody go about doing that type of market research that’s necessary?

Max DesMarais: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a lot of different ways to go about it. For us, we are commonly doing this research in a few different ways. First being, ask your students, ask your potential students, what programs are they interested in, what programs they feel like are lacking at your organization or institution. Some really low hanging fruits where you can learn a lot just by polling your own students and your own employees at the organization. Just through those methods, you’ll uncover lots of opportunities.

I know for me, when I was going through my undergrad in marketing and finance, I recognized a shortcoming at the university that I was at. I’m in a marketing field. Marketing is heavily moving towards digital, building websites, lead generation driving traffic and SEO and paid advertising, and our program was lacking that. And if my university had polled me early on, I would have been able to tell you this is this feels like a big gap for me and I think many other students would have done the same. I think it’s very surprising how quickly universities can just learn from their internal teams there.

And then taking another step outside of just your internal team and your employees and your students, is doing some simple market research. A very tactical way for us is leveraging Google trends or Google keyword planner, or other keyword research tools. So we can actually see how individuals are searching online.

So if we start to see the influx of AI related program queries on Google or other search engines, it’s telling us a trend is happening. So if you go back and look at those examples that you had just showed back in 2020, I’m sure there’s going to be a very low search volume for, AI business degree programs or AI engineering programs back in 2020. But what you will see is if you compare the numbers that you were seeing at that time to the previous year or the year before that you’re going to see massive growth. So through these tools, you can start to see, “Oh, this is trending upwards. There’s 60 percent more people this year searching for this than last year”. You can start to gather some initial insights through simple free tools like keyword planners.

Drumm McNaughton: The other piece with that is go out and talk to the folks who are hiring your graduates.

Max DesMarais: Absolutely.

Drumm McNaughton: They’re certainly going to know and those institutions that have business advisory boards who can help advise on curriculum development, new trends in the marketplace, are easily a step, if not two or three, up on your competitors.

Max DesMarais: Absolutely. Who’s hiring and hiring firms and recruitment firms are usually way ahead of the game in understanding how the future job market looks.

[00:15:39] Pricing Strategies and Innovations

Drumm McNaughton: The second P, price. Most institutions, you know, you’ve got your general price on what per credit hour is gonna be, but your research should also be telling you what price you can charge for these programs. I mean certain programs have got a higher cache and you could potentially charge more for them. There’d be more return on investment because graduates would be able to get a higher paying job. So it’s not necessarily just, “this is what we charge per credit hour”. You’ve obviously got to make your ROI, et cetera, but certain programs could be charged a premium.

Max DesMarais: Absolutely! Certain programs can be charged premiums. And then I think the opposite side of this is, and we’ve seen this with several of our clients as well as, is being a little bit innovative with how you do charge your tuition. So an example of one of our clients that’s been innovative in the price category recently is offering, it’s very common for in state tuition and out of state tuition to differ pretty substantially, and out of state tuition can be a large barrier for many potential students. One of our universities is actually located pretty close to several state lines. There’s several state universities within a couple hours drive, which means there’s a lot of competition, and what they’ve done is actually created specific metropolitan rates for out of state students that live within this time frame, which allows them to not quite offer that in state tuition, but it’s substantially cheaper to the student than that out of state tuition cost. And this is a great way to innovate and try to capture a new pool of students that you might not otherwise be able to.

Drumm McNaughton: I’ve heard that happening before about, state line crossing, et cetera. That is a great strategy to try and pull in quote out of state students at a lower rate than they typically would pay. So thank you for sharing that.

[00:17:31] Place: Delivery Methods and Market Research

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s go to Place. Again, is it residential is the program going to be online or is it going to be a hybrid. That to me also comes out of your market research. If you’re doing market research within 100 miles and these are the demand areas that are necessary versus if you’re marketing outside of 100 miles away from the college, that is an online or potentially a hybrid is there demand for that. So that to me comes out of market research as well.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, absolutely. And the other important thing to consider is who is your target audience here. If you’re a graduate program, you’re offering a certificate program for career advancement, you’re often having employed people that need to do this after work hours or on the weekends or at their own pace and some of those things just make it very clear. This has to be an online specific program, or this has to have a hybrid component to it. Whereas, some undergraduate degrees can go in either direction, depending upon, the individual program. So it’s absolutely essential to get that right here through the market research. You’re spot on.

[00:18:38] Promotion: Effective Marketing Tactics

Max DesMarais: And so let’s go to the final P, Promotion. This is your wheelhouse in a major way. It’s incredibly important for institutions to leverage several different marketing tactics when launching new programs. Let’s go through some of those.

Tactically, for our clients, we always want to make sure that we have the key foundations to the content that is necessary to launch a new program. We have to have a program page. We have to have information about this program and the enrollment deadlines and the cost to the students. We need to be talking about scholarship information and financial aid information. We need to have an easy way for these students to inquire about this particular program, whether it’s requesting information or getting a program guide or speaking to an enrollment advisor or a current student at that program or a current student at that university, whatever it may be. It’s essential to have the foundation content to launch a program. Without that content, you’re not going to be able to educate people on your content, or you’re not even going to be able to promote it via marketing efforts or via paid channels or via organic efforts.

Max DesMarais: So from our perspective, it’s key to have that base foundation and where a lot of universities lack, in our experience, with creating this content is thinking a little bit outside of the program page specifically.

Some of the examples of this for us is higher up in the buyer funnel content. Creating career guides. What careers can you get with this particular program for undergraduate degrees? If it’s a graduate program, it might be slightly different than that. It might be, what are your earning outcomes if you get the certificate program or go with this graduate degree over not doing that?

Some undergraduate or graduate programs, it’s great to have guides about comparing different degrees. So if I get this degree or this degree, how will my life differ and what is best fitting for me? These pieces of content are heavily lacking across many organizations in the U. S. and we found that when we produce this content for our clients on either existing programs, or net new programs, it creates a massive increase in the traffic that we can drive and the awareness we can drive to these programs, but secondarily, a massive increase in the actual leads that we can generate because if you’re getting a thousand people to your program page, only a hundred of them might be ready to hit that request information form submission or ten of them might be ready to apply at that stage, but there’s a hundred other students there that are still deciding whether this type of degree even makes sense for them or whether they should be considering this degree or another degree.

If we move up the funnel in our content promotion, it can open the pool pretty substantially reduce the competition comparative to other universities or schools offering similar programs and Bring people into this funnel at a much earlier stage. And so I think that’s one of the areas where we’re seeing a huge gap still in the higher education space. Universities need to tackle this.

Drumm McNaughton: And I’ll go back to something that we said earlier in this episode is the competition. Make no mistake, institutions are in competition for a limited number of students. And if you’re opening up a new degree or even current degrees, you need to provide the information that a student can get. And they need to be able to look at it on their cell phone because that’s how the majority of the folks look at institutions right now or any places, their cell phone, their smartphone, and that’s got to give them the information they need to be able to click that button to say, “I want more information”.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, exactly to highlight this example, this is one of the most competitive spaces on the planet when it comes to digital marketing and paid advertising. So, it’s not uncommon, I’ll get tactical here, but I promise there’s some value here. For paid search campaigns when you’re launching a new program. So, let’s just go with an MBA program. Those keywords might cost you legitimately fifty to sixty dollars per click to go after those particular keywords. Which is as competitive as it gets across many industries in the world from a digital advertising perspective.

What we found is there’s this opportunity across all types of programs to, instead of go for that bottom of funnel, I’m looking for an MBA program right now, what about if I do comparison terms? So MBA versus MPA for example? Or career outcomes with an MPA. Or my career earning potentials with an MBA? We move these clicks up the funnel and the advertising they’re running, we create the resources to add a ton of value to the student that’s searching in that way.

And what we inevitably see is a massive reduction in the competition because every school is bidding on MBA degree keywords, but only 10 percent of those schools, actually even less than that, are bidding on these higher up things. So what that equates to is something like from a $60 cost per click down to a $2 or $3 cost per click. And we can convert those students into the ebooks that we just talked about earlier. So that career earnings guide ebook or comparing degrees ebook or the guide to getting scholarships in this particular area, we can convert those people oftentimes at, 5x to 10x higher rates than we can these bottom of funnel keywords.

And so that means all we need to do next is to convert half of those people into a request information or an application and suddenly your cost per lead or your cost per conversion for this program goes from $600 to $50 and your cost per application might go down from $400 to $150. There’s all of this opportunity to move up in the funnel and reduce the competition as long as you’re producing the content and thinking about the key empathy points of your potential students in that program.

Drumm McNaughton: And that is so key because SEO has gotten significantly harder over the last 18 months. The pay to play is becoming far more expensive. Whatever you can do to get people early on in the funnel and to eliminate competition because you’re providing them something that others are not providing, that’s a win for everybody around.

Max DesMarais: Exactly. You’re getting in front of students earlier, you’re creating that brand awareness earlier, and then there’s all these tactical ways that you can take advantage of that too. You get them on your website and now you can remarket them. You can follow them around the web with more offers and build that brand awareness for your organization.

So, it’s hugely impactful.

Drumm McNaughton: And so what you’re doing is something that we like to do with our clients, is you’re looking at the enrollment funnel holistically. You’re looking at what are the different steps that students need to be able to check off going in and you’re moving those up higher in the funnel to where they can get that information that they want without the human interaction, and it eliminates a lot of the competition.

Max DesMarais: It does. Yeah. It literally eliminates the competition for many types of programs. Especially if this is a newer program, where universities haven’t quite picked up on that. So, it’s just an untapped area.

 We’re an agency that we traditionally, five years ago, did a ton of B2B marketing, we’re now a lot more focused on higher ed. It’s an area where we learned that this worked in the B2B marketing space and looked at the higher education space and saw that the organizations weren’t doing this at the same level. They hadn’t caught on to that lead generation tactic that’s being leveraged in other industries.

And it’s crazy to me, but, five plus years later, there’s still all of this opportunity to do similar tactics here.

[00:26:38] Differentiation and Competitive Advantage

Drumm McNaughton: The last piece of the marketing that we need to talk about is differentiation. And we’ve talked about that to some degree with the programs, but each institution needs to differentiate itself, “what it’s known for”. The story that comes to mind is Carnegie Mellon. I’ve used this on multiple, multiple podcasts and talking, frankly, talking with a lot of clients as well as back 25 years ago they weren’t any, huge, big university. They had a president who said, we’re going to change our focus. We’re going to become known in the top three world for technology. And they have certainly done that with AI, with robotics, with other areas as well.

And so they made that decision that they were going to differentiate themselves from other institutions. And now when you think about tech universities, you think about MIT, you think about Carnegie Mellon, you think about Caltech, those are the top three. So what do institutions need to do to differentiate themselves?

Max DesMarais: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it obviously depends upon the individual university. There’s lots of different ways to differentiate, but it really is key to be thinking about what does make our institution better or different from the other organizations.

In some cases, it’s campus life and the beauty of the campus. Sometimes it’s athletic programs. Sometimes it’s job placements rates. Sometimes it’s career outcomes for your students. Sometimes it’s you have unique programs or degree offerings that no one else has or it’s the elite professors that you have at your institution. There’s all of these different ways that you can differentiate your institution, and you just need to be thinking about those constantly.

 Some institutions have been online only for decades before others, and there’s a great differentiating factor there because you’ve been doing it for so long that you know your way ahead of the game. Hopefully that experience has enhanced your experience substantially over all these universities trying to jump on that train. So there’s just tons of different ways.

Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that I’ve seen, one of the mistakes, is when an institution is trying to differentiate themselves, is they’ll ask internally, ” what are we great at?” That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?

Max DesMarais: Yeah, I think so.

Especially in today’s day and age, it’s crazy, but you just go on Tic Tok, you just go on Instagram, and you can look at your own students and what they’re saying about your university and your organization. You can learn a lot about what they love about your organization and what they don’t love about your organization and all of those key differentiating factors.

It’s been hugely impactful for some of our clients to be leveraging their student body, not just for learning about it, but you can actually get a whole bunch of great marketing content from these individuals that are creating this user generated content that we can then use in advertisements about how beautiful our campus is or how awesome this class was. There’s a ton of this opportunity out there and you’re spot on, like, ask the students, watch the students.

Drumm McNaughton: And also, sometimes we get a little mixed up on who our customer is. And frankly, I think about it, there’s three customers. You’ve got the folks who are hiring your graduates, you’ve got the students that are going there, and then you’ve got their parents as well, who in many times are footing the bill. So who’s your primary customer? It’s probably the student, but you’ve also got to be able to satisfy, especially from a differentiation perspective, how are you different? And if you’re graduating students that are job ready, that’s really going to talk to both the students and to the employers. And the parents, because they’re not going to have to support the kids any longer. Probably shouldn’t have said that, but.

Max DesMarais: No, you’re spot on. It’s particularly for undergraduate. It’s so important to be thinking about the key stakeholders in this decision-making process. Very rarely is it just the student, especially with undergrad. You got to be thinking about, in particular, the parents here and the differentiating factors for the students and the parents might be very different and I think that’s important to understand.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, we in 35 minutes, or a little bit less, we’ve managed to sum up all the problems with higher ed institutions for branding and marketing. Commendations to you, sir.

Max DesMarais: Oh, thank you. I would love to go for hours.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, I have no doubt that both of us could. This has been really good.

[00:31:08] Key Takeaways for University Leaders

Drumm McNaughton: We always wrap up with three takeaways for university presidents and boards. So if you would, what are the main takeaways that presidents and boards need to be thinking about going forward in this heightened age of competition with less students, et cetera, et cetera.

Max DesMarais: Yeah, I think the first thing is that we’re in the midst of a rapidly changing digital landscape. We talked about this a little bit before, but we’re shifting more towards this pay to play model where it’s highly competitive to pay for these clicks and getting your programs or your university out there. But there’s new platforms that we can leverage. There’s new ways that we can move up the funnel. And it’s extremely important to make sure that whatever you’re implementing and whatever you’re paying ads for, that you do so in a manner that’s highly optimized. So, gone are the days where things are completely noncompetitive. We have to be really dialed in our ability to drive traffic, turn that traffic leads and convert those leads into actual applications and convert those applications into enrollments. So it’s really essential for us to be thinking outside of the traditional marketing realm from these universities perspective.

You should be thinking about CTV ads and OTT ads on these new streaming platforms. You should be thinking about advertising on the social channels, if you’re not already, you probably should be pretty heavily. You should be still leveraging the existing paid search channels. You should be taking advantage of the aggregate sites that exist there.

There’s just a rapidly changing digital landscape that everyone needs to be on top of it.

Takeaway two. We talked about this a lot. Differentiation is just so important. It’s going to continue to be even more important as the advertising landscape gets more saturated. How do you stand out from your competitors? How does you elevate your brand for a particular thing or a particular audience above the rest? We just talked about this, but it’s just absolutely essential to find ways to show that differentiation off for your key target audiences. The last thing for me is like having a quality foundation for data. You need to understand how your marketing efforts are leading towards leads, applications, enrollments. And you need to understand if I’m spending dollars here, what does that meaning for our institution in terms of enrolled students down the funnel? And if you don’t have that full funnel measurement, you really should be progressing to get that full funnel measurement. Cause it’s key to making quality decisions that are going to lead to positive return on investments. And if that foundation isn’t in place, you inevitably are going to make marketing decisions based on the wrong data. And the more you can avoid that, the faster you’re going to innovate and the faster you’re going to drive up that return on investment.

[00:33:48] Future of Digital Marketing and Conclusion

Drumm McNaughton: As much as many folks will say, higher ed is a business and you have to apply business principles to education. What’s next for you? What’s next for Vital? I know you guys are doing some amazing stuff.

Max DesMarais: The simple way to put it is we’re finding more ways and innovative ways to win for our clients. How do we drive more traffic, drive more leads, increase enrollment, and highlight the differentiating factors of our organizations? We’re in an area now where the digital landscape is changing so rapidly that we’re calling it “digital marketing 2. 0” for us. So what are all of the things that we need to be trying as an agency that we haven’t traditionally done for these universities and experimenting with so we can be ahead of the curve. So when certain things stop working, we now have these new avenues that are going to drive success for our clients.

For us right now, we’re doing tons of over the top and CTV advertising on streaming platforms because it’s still a space where we get really great targeting. It’s not fully competitive yet, so we get low cost per clicks. So we’re doing tons of experimentation for our clients there.

We’re doing lots of influencer purchasing and user generated content. We’re doing lots of, this isn’t really new for us, but we’re still doing tons of top of funnel, style marketing activities for new clients that are coming on board with us. So like we said, instead of just going after that student who needs to apply to a program right now, let’s think a couple months ahead of that. Where are they at? How do we get in front of those people? So those are three areas specifically where we’re trying to continuously innovate.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, those are great things. Max, it’s been a pleasure having you on this show. It’s rare that I get to talk to somebody about pure marketing and you could obviously tell I love it.

Max DesMarais: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been very fun.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you sir. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk.

Max DesMarais: I look forward to it as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest Max Desmarais, CEO at Vital. Max, you shared a lot of great things for my higher ed institutions. I certainly appreciate your time and thanks again. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.