Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Brian Hartnack: There's also a few things that they need to start doing. And, you know, one of them is really leveraging their faculty for earned media. We think faculty is kind of their secret weapon, and very few schools are leveraging this effectively. You know, the majority of AI citations today are coming from earned media and journalism. And so you need a PR strategy that's elevating your faculty, their research, their industry perspective.
That's something that can really grow your AI visibility directly.
[00:00:34] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the Signal. If you've been in higher ed marketing or enrollment for more than a minute, you already know today's guest or you've read something one of his teams wrote. I've watched Archer Education grow from a scrappy performance marketing shop into one of the most trusted enrollment partners in the country.
And the fact that they spent two decades helping schools reach and retain students tells you everything about staying power in this industry. My guest today is Brian Hartnack, CEO of Archer Education. Brian has spent over 25 years in online marketing, SEO, digital strategy, and product management. And for nearly two decades, he has led Archer as it's helped bridge more than 20 million students to to a college or university.
Under his leadership, Archer recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and was named Enrollment Management Solutions Provider of the Year. Brian's a Cornell grad with a front row seat to how AI is reshaping student search and discovery. I'm excited to dig into all of it with him.
Brian, welcome to the show. It's great to have you today.
[00:01:45] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
[00:01:47] Jeff Dillon: So Archer just celebrated its 20th anniversary and was named Enrollment Management Solutions Provider of the Year.
When you look back at two decades of helping schools reach and enroll students, what's one of the company's founding principles about working with institution leaders that that has stood the test of time?
[00:02:07] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, well, I think I'll. I'm going to give you two here. So there's really been a couple things that have really kind of stuck with us from day one. And the first one is really about treat prospective students really like the savvy consumers they are. They want real answers to difficult questions, and you're not going to trick them into making one of the biggest purchases of their life. So we always keep that one in mind. And as it relates to how we work with the institutions, for us, it's all about treating the institution like a true partner, focusing on their roi. That's why they hired you. And really trying to build shared incentives.
For us, a good partnership is really Based around full transparency and really kind of just brutal honesty about what's working and what isn't.
And, you know, that's what makes a partnership successful. So 20 years later, these two principles have really guided our choices at Archer. But I can also kind of give you the flip side here, which is, you know, there's one principle it really took us a while to truly learn. And I'd say that for years we really thought that if we could just show an institution a really compelling business case with real data and real results, that they'd act on it. I've just found this to be kind of a bit of false hope. I now understand that competing interests inside a school is really what stops them from building a mandate around an online strategy. And it doesn't matter how good the evidence is. And so we kind of see that conflicted institutions, they tend to stay that way and they keep making decisions that hurt both the students and their bottom line. So we've learned that it's really hard to change a culture from the outside.
Coaches like to say you can't want it more than your team does. And for us, it's really hard when we want to win more than our partners do. And so the change for us has been that we started looking for schools that really kind of have a shared vision for what a world class student experiences.
And, you know, when you got the right partner who's thinking that way, that's really when great results become possible.
And, you know, instead of arguing about whether online matters, you're helping guide their investments and really helping them optimize their execution.
[00:04:19] Jeff Dillon: Love that, that philosophy. One thing I think that's really changed over the last decade is who higher education is actually serving.
When I talk with enrollment leaders, the conversation isn't about really recruiting more high school seniors anymore. It's about working with adults, career changers, military learners, parents returning to school, and I think people balancing education with the rest of their lives. Those audiences bring a different set of expectations.
Non traditional and adult learners have become such a huge focus for online programs. What do these learners need from a recruitment experience that a traditional 18 year old focused marketing completely misses?
[00:05:02] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, for me, this one definitely hits close to home because my oldest son, he was born, believe it or not, the same day that Archer got its funding. And this past year, I got to watch him go through the college application process.
He's actually a couple weeks from now, he's going to be starting at my alma mater, Cornell. And you know, watching him, I could really see just how different the high school seniors enrollment journey is from, from that working adult experience. And that's the one that, at Archer, that's the one that we live and breathe every day.
And this difference right here, it's usually the first thing I talk about when people ask me what Archer does for me. I've been surprised that some of the biggest marketing agencies in higher ed, they're still getting this wrong. And it's because they built their business around helping institutions shape the next year's incoming freshman class. And they're bringing that same playbook to their adult programs, and it just doesn't work. You know, for a high school senior, you're kind of in this enormous crowd that's moving together. You know, there's like a sequence of deadlines and decisions, and you're sharing that experience with peers, parents and counselors, and they're all discussing this. So everyone's in the same boat. And there's really minimal handholding that's needed. You know, these high school seniors, they're already sold. You know, residential college is kind of their, their default next step in life. But for a working adult deciding to go back to school, it's kind of a lonely and, you know, if you talk to them, it's kind of a bewildering experience for them. Adults, they typically don't have peers that they're sharing this journey with, and they've got their own timeline. They also have higher priority commitments in their life that are competing for their time, their money. You know, they've got, they may have a spouse, they may have kids, aging parents, a job, a mortgage. You know, all these things are kind of taking priority in their life.
And this decision that they're making, it's about 90% career driven. You know, they want career advancement or they're going to want career change. So this is, this is an ROI purchase. It's not some sort of kind of rite of passage in their life. They are, you know, they're more experienced, so they're savvy shoppers. They're comparing multiple schools and they're thinking about that kind of total value equation. You know, they're looking at, is this program aligned with my career?
You know, they're looking at price, they're looking at convenience. Brand is still important, but they're also looking at kind of the customer experience.
And, you know, customer experience.
You got to think, you know, what does that mean? You know, for me, it's kind of like the, the vibe that they're getting that accumulates across every touch point. So students they're asking themselves, does this school want me? Are they easy to work with? Does their technology feel modern? And so with, with 18 year olds, you're competing on kind of identity and belonging and you know that they're a motivated buyer, you know, and they're on this kind of shared timeline. But with, with adults, you have to provide kind of structure, confidence, and these are the things that that kind of the crowd would provide for an 18 year old. And so you have to prove ROI at every step. And you know, for adults, the enrollment advisors and ChatGPT and Reddit, those are often kind of the only guides that they have. So you gotta, you gotta nail those things.
[00:08:22] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, it's a great point. Because even though these institutions serve different audiences, I think one thing I've consistently heard is that today's students, you know, behave much more alike than we sometimes assume. They compare options across multiple schools, they expect answers immediately. Their path to enrollment is anything but linear. And after talking with so many campuses over the years, I'm curious whether you're seeing the same disconnect. You work with schools ranging from large public systems to smaller private institutions like Texas A and M and Tulane. And where do you see the biggest gap between what an institution's enrollment strategy assumes about students and what students are actually doing?
[00:09:06] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, so the pattern that we see over and over again is that, you know, most schools will really overestimate kind of the power of their own brand in terms of influencing that adult student. And you know, I think that the power of the brand, it works very well for that 18 year old student. You know, it's the football team, it's the way the campus looks, that stuff really matters. But for that online adult learner, they're not always swayed by the brand the same way. It's just one piece of a kind of a larger equation, but it's not going to beat out tuition, relevance and flexibility. And so institutions, they often assume that the name on the diploma is so special that a student will enroll there despite any other problems. But there's a lot, there's a lot that a great brand just can't overcome. You know, high price, limited or overly generic programs, weak outreach and enrollment advising, inconvenience structures, like if you have two to three starts per year, class schedules that conflict with their jobs, those are things that a brand just can't overcome here. And so for adult students, the brand matters, but it sits alongside all these other things. And something that I think these schools often miss is enrollment advising.
It's often a Litmus test for the student. They're looking at your responsiveness and is kind of a preview of what being your student is going to feel like, because for them, it's the only touch point that they're going to have before they enroll. So if it takes four days to return a call, you know, you've really told them everything they need to know about what it's going to be like there.
[00:10:44] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. If you're not responsive in the beginning, what's it going to be like when you're there? Right. This. This really sets up what I think is one of the big shifts happening in higher ed right now.
For years, enrollment teams have optimized for Google rankings and paid search and website conversions. But AI is changing how prospective students discover information before they ever land on a university website.
So from the conversations I'm having across the spectrum in higher ed, it isn't a future trend anymore. It's happening. It's reshaping the front end of this enrollment funnel. You've said AI is reshaping how students search and compare and decide on a school. Walk us through what that actually looks like on the ground right now. Is this a slow shift? Is it already changing enrollment funnels in a measurable way?
[00:11:33] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, it's had a huge impact already. I would say the most conservative estimate is that within higher ed, we've lost at least 25% of referral traffic from organic search over the last two years.
It's mostly kind of at the top of the funnel when they're initially figuring out which schools to consider.
And if you talk to folks in other consumer categories, it's even worse than that. Some categories, it's 50, 60, 70% has been lost already.
So direct traffic coming from AI citations that is still very small in volume. And it may remain that way just in terms of consumer behavior. But. But the important thing to know is that the student journey has already moved into AI answers and chat, and that's happening before a school site ever sees the visitor. It doesn't matter whether you call this, you know, some people call it Geo or answer engine optimization.
The game has really moved beyond your domain and it's now it's about your entire online presence. And you need to think about things like Reddit, TikTok and YouTube. And so when you think about SEO, that really looks more like kind of brand and reputation management. Now you still need a mix of technical SEO, but you also need really thoughtful content and kind of brand ownership across the web. Without SEO, you're not going to show up in AI search. And if you don't have AI visibility, you're just not reaching the students. This is not a problem for the future. This is really. Right now.
I also just want to comment on kind of the enrollment advising side because I think there's just not enough stories out there about how powerful this can be. We're already seeing really strong results when you kind of pair a custom AI chat that's powered by Claude or ChatGPT and you train it the same way as you train your enrollment team. This is web chat as well as ongoing two way texting with chat. And it's not like those old kind of natural language chatbots that people used to have on their sites. Those would get 1% engagement.
This when it's thoughtfully designed and positioned right at the point of inquiry, we're seeing 50% or more of prospective students are engaging with the chat the same way that they would with an advisor right at that moment that they're inquiring. And this isn't replacing human advising what it's doing. It's really producing more informed, more engaged students who are more likely to talk to an advisor to continue the conversation and then apply. And, you know, the good news is that it's focusing the enrollment team away from outreach and really focusing them on kind of where humans can provide the most leverage. So this is a really positive outcome. But the foundations you need to set to accomplish this, they're not easy. They're not easy.
[00:14:27] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, yeah. I've seen this happen in many different ways. To your point about traffic, traffic may be decreasing to websites than it is, but the traffic that's coming now is more qualified.
So one thing, one tip to all these schools out there. Make sure your site search on your homepage is working well. And that's where a lot of schools are behind too, because they're, they're trying to nail you down as this, the final school, not just doing their exploratory stage.
[00:14:57] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, they're much, much further ahead.
[00:14:59] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. One other kind of perspective here is if the way students discover institutions is changing this quickly, then just simply outsourcing marketing isn't really enough anymore. Schools have to build the skills and processes to really adapt continuously. And one thing I've always loved about Archer is that you've positioned yourselves as a long term partner, not just an agency running campaigns. And I think that philosophy seems really important in this AI driven world. You talk about building internal capacity at institutions rather than just, you know, running the campaigns. Why is that distinction so important to you? And what does good internal capacity actually look like at a university?
[00:15:40] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, so here's why it matters to us is when we talk about helping a school build internal capacity, we're in a situation where our incentives are really aligned with the institution getting stronger rather than more dependent on us. And so that's core to why we're now 100% fee for service. We win by making our partners better at what they're doing. And so, you know, institutions, they want to evolve and if you're not giving them a path to improve the partnership, it's just not going to be durable. You're going to be a stepping stone to whatever their next chapter is. And so for us, you know, this really starts with having a custom approach. We do not have a one size fits all. We get under the hood with the partner, figure out where the partner needs support, and then we mold the partnership really around what their goals are so we can add and remove services as their needs change. And that's only going to work if capabilities are transferring over to that institution.
So when we're working with a partner, we're really trying to establish a benchmark of performance. You know, we're demonstrating, here's what's possible when you're doing it right, here's the conversion metrics that you should be able to achieve. And so we're encouraging our partners to really test their internal capabilities against us so they can measure whether they're good enough yet. And we're giving them the playbook. And so from, from our point of view, good internal capacity is when you can transfer our services in house and it's more cost effective and it's revenue neutral. You're not losing students because you transitioned marketing or enrollment in house.
So in terms of what is good internal capacity for us, the table stakes are pretty simple. A school needs a solid data foundation that is connecting all their systems across CRM, sis as well as all the ad platforms. This is what an institution needs so that they can see their own funnel end to end. So that's the starting point as it relates to marketing. They need a cross functional marketing team that includes content production, social pr, technical SEO, media buying. And this is not a job that you can give to kind of like a single Swiss army knife marketer. These are a bunch of very different disciplines that either need to be owned in house or outsourced in parts to a capable partner. And then on the enrollment side, you need an operation that is wired for speed. They need multi channel contact strategy, so calls, texts, email, and they need to be staffed and trained so they can provide excellent service to every student. So those are kind of the minimum bars for internal capacity.
[00:18:29] Jeff Dillon: This idea of building internal capacity feels especially relevant because the rules of digital discovery are changing faster than most campuses can really keep up with. I've been talking with enrollment and marketing leaders for a while now, and there's this growing realization that the old playbook for SEO in paid search isn't. It's not enough. And the question isn't whether AI will change the student discovery, it's how quickly will the institutions adapt.
They're nervous about AI search and generative engines replacing the traditional Google search results page for student discovery. How should a marketing or admissions leader be thinking about that shift right now? And what should they stop doing?
[00:19:11] Brian Hartnack: You know, in terms of what they should stop doing? They need to stop treating SEO as something that just lives on their domain. The goal now is to just have a richer, more complete web presence than your competitors. And you need to do that on kind of every node of the knowledge graph.
So you need to stop assuming that your brand name is going to carry you into AI citations. LLMs are going to cite brands that have a robust, credible web presence. And that's very different than brand recognition. But I also think as it relates to AI, one thing that we're seeing like crazy is buying these kind of AI point solutions, and that's a strategy to improve the student experience. But in our experience, when you buy a tool that's disconnected from your data, it's just a toy and it's going to become irrelevant really fast as kind of better things come along.
I would say with this, there's also a few things that they need to start doing, and one of them is really leveraging their faculty for earned media. We think faculty is their secret weapon. And very few schools are leveraging this effectively. You know, the majority of AI citations today are coming from earned media and journalism. And so you need a PR strategy that's elevating your faculty, their research, their industry perspective.
That's something that can really grow your AI visibility directly. Just recently we got a expert in space exploration at University of Central Florida. We got him quoted in the New York Times about a blue origin rocket launch. We also helped a director of distance learning publish in a university business journal, and we placed a cybersecurity professor in an industry publication about fisa. And I think that getting these wins is one thing, but the piece that most people are forgetting is that once you get these kind of earned media wins, you need to amplify them across your social channels, across your website. This is what is going to create a more complete and thorough picture of your brand within the knowledge graph. This is what's going to win citations. And it's also going to create the kind of nice benefit, is that it gets your faculty actually excited about enrollment and strategy. And so it's a nice extra piece. It gets buy in from the faculty on what you're doing.
[00:21:30] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, great tip, Brian, to elevate your faculty research and content for these generative engines.
Since you've spent two decades partnering with colleges and universities, I'm sure you've seen patterns emerge pretty quickly. You've built Archer around really long term institutional partnerships rather than these campaigns. What's a red flag early in a partnership that tells you an institution isn't ready to actually grow? It's online enrollment.
[00:21:58] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we're first starting to work with an institution, you know, you find that some are going to treat a firm like Archer as a vendor and others really kind of take a partnership approach. And to me, you know, a vendor relationship is kind of a zero sum game. Each side is trying to kind of take value by negotiating and grinding the other side. And that's where kind of honesty and transparency ends up taking kind of a backseat. A true partnership is going to run on shared success and really kind of clear eyed honesty about what's working and what isn't.
So if a school is negotiating like they're trying to beat you, guess what, they're going to beat you every time. But then both parties are going to lose.
So from having worked with now dozens and dozens of these partnerships, there are certain red flags that can really predict a bad outcome for the partnership.
First one is just reluctance to share data. You know, if a partnership isn't going to give a company like Archer the data that they need to improve and optimize your roi, that's not a data governance issue. You know, for that kind of situation, they're really just, it's a trust issue and they're, they're pretending that it's a, some sort of data governance issue. The next one is if you're bringing to them problems about the student experience. You know, if you're highlighting real opportunities to reduce unnecessary friction and really improve the student experience.
And if they are either silent when you bring this to them or you're getting pushback, you know, to us this tells us that the student isn't actually at the center of the equation. And it usually means that People are trying to just protect the status quo. And then I would say, you know, kind of final red flag here is just seeing kind of uneven internal buy in. You know, in our experience, partnerships that struggle are really brought down by an institution that's. That's fighting itself from within.
And, you know, sustainable enrollment growth is just one priority among, say, five others. And so as a partner, it's really difficult for us to change this mindset from the outside. So that's. That's a big red flag.
[00:24:03] Jeff Dillon: Sometimes I think the challenge isn't the execution, it's the strategy itself. And I've seen institutions respond to slowing enrollment by asking for more campaigns or more advertising, more leads, when the real issue runs really much deeper.
Given the breadth of institutions you've worked with over the years, I'm guessing you've encountered moments where incremental improvements just weren't enough. What's a moment where a school's enrollment strategy needed a complete rethink rather than just an optimization?
[00:24:35] Brian Hartnack: That's an interesting one. You know, we took on a partner really recently, and when you looked at it kind of from the outside, you know, at first glance, it looked like this partner was just really doing quite well. They were growing much faster than the market, so they had kind of a lot of signs of success. But when we dug in deeper, you know, what we found was that the previous company that had been running their campaigns, they had really been kind of optimizing the top of the funnel. There was a lot of sloppiness involved. They had a lot of errors in their data. They had wrong deadlines, misspellings. But they also. What we saw was this was an institution that was in the northeast, and they were spending the same amount to buy a lead. No matter where they were in the country, they were spending the same amount regardless of the program. So they had, you know, the same acquisition cost if it was a certificate versus a degree program.
So overall, the school was performing well, but there was so much opportunity to improve it. And so, you know, we came in and we rebuilt all of their campaigns, really about optimizing for the bottom of the funnel enrollments and not for a price per lead. And what we found is we were able to dramatically reduce the level of investment that they put into this, both on the marketing and the enrollment side. And their enrollments haven't taken a dip at all. So they're getting a much, much better ROI now. And so I think, you know, kind of the lesson here is, is that sometimes success kind of hides the deeper problem.
You see this a lot with schools in the Southeast right now, where just demographics are heading in the right direction in places like Texas. And so, you know, they're experiencing growth regardless of whether they're doing things right. And that's going to really rear its head. The moment the market takes a turn for them, they're going to realize that they're really kind of behind the eight ball in terms of operating the right way.
[00:26:29] Jeff Dillon: Higher ed rarely has the luxury of planning for only the present.
The leaders I speak with are really trying to make decisions now that will make sense for three or four years from now, even as AI continues to reshape how students discover and evaluate colleges.
Looking ahead, I'm curious what you think is flying under the radar. What's the change you think most enrollment leaders aren't preparing for yet?
[00:26:55] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, so this one, it's going to sound boring, but you're hearing about it more and more right now. And there's different names for it.
We can call it data interoperability.
And everyone is shopping for AI solutions right now, but very few are kind of laying the data foundation that actually makes AI useful. And this is a problem. It existed long before AI, but now everyone is really seeing just kind of how important it is if you want to take advantage of AI. And so it starts with, you've got your CRM, your sis, your lms, and they each have kind of a different notion of who your student is. And there's no common identifiers. So the solution is what's called Master Data Management. And this is about how you stitch together all of these different sources of data into kind of one golden record. And, you know, I think it's a concept that you're going to be hearing about for a long time. Your job is not to build AI. That's Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. They're all doing a great job at that. Your job is to build the data foundation that's going to let you use AI a hundred different ways. And, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're Delta Airlines or State Farm Insurance or Arizona State, they all have the same problem right now. And the solution, it's not just another software that you go buy. It's you have to develop your own custom solution. And there's really ongoing human work that you have to do every day to solve this problem.
Every day, you've got to deduplicate and clean records. This is what allows you to create a really personalized experience for your students that they're going to feel.
[00:28:36] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, you got to think of it like a layer. I think Jeff Bezos compares it to electricity. A lot of leaders do. It's going to affect everything.
It's becoming clear that it's not just a marketing conversation anymore. It's really institutional strategy.
It reaches the president's office, the academic leadership enrollment, it. So I'd love to close with this last question by zooming all the way out. If you could hand one piece of advice to every college president or provost about how their institution should be showing up for AI driven next gen student searching for their program right now, what would that be?
[00:29:11] Brian Hartnack: I think presidents should be thinking about kind of both externally and internally. So externally I think they need to think that your brand is now really what the entire Internet is saying about you. It's not just what you put on your homepage. So AI engines, they need so much more than just your website.
You know, when a student asks Gemini for the best master's in online nursing, the answer is really assembled from earned media. It's assembled from faculty citations, Reddit, reviews, journalism, all of those parts, as well as your website. Obviously that's important too. That's the entire knowledge graph. So the goal is driving a robust brand presence across all the key topics. And this is very different from creating brand recognition. So my recommendation is to elevate your faculty, earn media and amplify it everywhere. And then internally, it's really about a president really kind of putting the dollars behind inflation funding the mandate to build a world class student experience, create a shared vision of success and pair it with investment to make that vision come true.
And I've learned over 20 years that the institutions that are winning online are the ones who want to win it within every corner of their organization. And you know that the presidents who can cast a really clear vision around that they're going to win when they turn that vision into a mandate for the institution.
[00:30:40] Jeff Dillon: Well, Brian, this has been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you sharing your perspective and lessons you've learned over your two decades in the industry. We'll put links to Brian's profile and Archer Education in the show notes. So thanks Ian, Brian, for joining us on the Signal.
[00:30:56] Brian Hartnack: Yeah, thanks Jeff. Really appreciate it. This was fun.
[00:31:00] Jeff Dillon: That's a wrap of this episode of the Signal. If today's conversation sparks a new idea or challenged your thinking, that's exactly the point. This show is about cutting through the noise and helping you see what's actually shaping higher ed right now. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found this valuable, leave us a quick review. It helps more higher ed leaders find the signal. For deeper edtech insights, news and trends delivered monthly, subscribe to the Signal Monthly newsletter at edtechconnect. Com.
Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
