Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So we use AI in a number of different ways. We use it kind of tactically on the side of actual the tactics of marketing. So monitoring campaigns, making adjustments to campaigns. Let's say you're bidding on automotive technology classes. It used to be that you would have to go into the Google platform and be like, oh, this keyword's not doing well. Let's put more budget towards it. Or maybe we should try out this keyword that's now all done through AI. So it actually gives us more time to be creative, which I love.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Welcome to the EdTech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators, and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe. Subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax. Let's dive in.
Welcome to the show, everybody. Today I am excited to have with me Cheryl Broom. Cheryl is a nationally recognized leader in higher education marketing and the CEO of Graduate Communications, where she helps colleges improve marketing, communication, student retention, and success. With over 20 years of experience in the field, Sheryl has worked at every level of higher ed marketing, from leading strategic enrollment campaigns to managing public relations and government affairs. Before launching her own company, she served as director of marketing and government relations at Mira Costa College. An accomplished public speaker, award winning marketer, and host of her own podcast called Higher Ed Conversations. Sheryl is passionate about leveraging digital media, AI and storytelling to transform how institutions connect with students. Today, she joins us to share her insights on the hottest marketing trends, the role of technology in student engagement, and what the future holds for higher ed marketing. Welcome, Sheryl.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I would see Cheryl at conferences here and there and we finally realized we have a lot of overlap in what we're doing. So I love talking to founders and so Cheryl's one of those founders that I think we have to hear your story of, like what inspired you to launch Graduate Communications.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. It's, you know, you have a great niche and a good business. When you tell people, oh, we specialize in community college marketing and they say you can make a business out of that, because you can, and it's such a needed part for, for community colleges in particular, getting their story out, telling the Community about new programs they have, better communicating to students, trying to retain students, trying to recapture students. So I really started graduate communications after working as a marketing director at a community college for 10 years and being just pulled so thin, so many different directions, that I started bringing on subcontractors to help me fill in the gaps where I needed help on campus. And I realized, wow, I'm not alone. There's every single college marketing director I know is understaffed and needs help. So that's where the company began, is just really helping people fill that need and helping them do the best jobs they can to. To get their name, college name out in the community.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: I'm kind of in the same boat in that I came from higher ed and working with many schools I love, you know, do you feel like your, your experience at Mira Costa really helps you now?
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Oh, my. Tremendously. It's one of our selling points because not only am I a former college marketing director, but our director, client services, is as well. So we can speak the lingo. I mean, I know what a SIM plan is. I understand how hirings are made. I am intricately familiar with the purchasing department. So it just makes things a lot easier for us when we get started to work with a college. We can just hit the ground running. You know, we know the acronyms and the culture, but also just having so many great connections. When I was at Mira Costa, I served on a lot of state and national marketing boards. So I met people all around the country. And then when I started my business, they were like, hey, we need help, we need help. Can you come and do some work for us? So it was a great way to leverage those connections as well.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Well, let's jump right into this environment we're in now, which is the evolution. You know, this is a largely a tech, higher ed, tech focused, you know, podcast. And that's what I do. And it's evolving so quickly and so significantly so quickly. I'm just interested, from your take at the types of schools you service in marketing, what are the biggest shifts you've seen in this evolution of how colleges are marketing themselves today versus a decade ago?
[00:05:18] Speaker A: Oh, it has just. The shift has been incredible. I mean, when I started working on community college marketing, the budget was tiny. I mean, if anything, and we were faxing press releases to newspapers or emailing reporters and hoping that the local newspaper would pick up a story. And then social media came along and colleges started to get really involved organically in social media. And then shifts started to happen where you really had to start to pay. If you wanted your message to get in front of the community, you had to pay. You know, mailing class schedules became cost prohibitive. People didn't want to spend $200,000 a year on sending a bunch of paper that was thrown out into the recycle bin. So the birth of digital marketing in colleges was born. And today most of our clients start their media spends, you know, around $100,000 invested in digital marketing and some invest up to a million dollars a year. It's a competitive landscape. You have to be where potential students and their influences are. And for the most case, that's online. So we're seeing more investment than ever before in social media and pay per click and even an email just having to pay to get your message out in front of the community.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: That really is it. In the last decade, I mean, print has pretty much, you know, decreased too.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And the, and local news has died. I mean, most areas do not have local news coverage anymore. So a lot of colleges would rely on their local news to tell their story. And those have all, you know, here in San Diego, we have no local newspaper where I live for 40 miles. So there's nobody telling the story of our colleges. The colleges have to do it themselves.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Well, I have to tell you my little story about my introduction to digital marketing at higher ed. And it's going to date me a little bit here, but this is the late 90s and I was the first webmaster at my school at a public university. And the position just got taken from it and put in marketing. And I was that person. So I was not too popular with the IT people. It was some guy doing it as a side job. And I got to do it now because I was in marketing. And the first thing I realized was, hey everybody, we're getting a lot of requests. People are emailing me, the webmaster, like information about tuition. And I think we're onto something here. I think like we should maybe think about this webmaster email and maybe split it up into different areas. And everyone kind of looked at me like, just handle, just do your job. Just kind of like handle the email.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: I'm like, stop thinking, Jeff.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: No, just let's. How about we create a pull down menu and like we'll have when they call admissions and one called athletics or you're looking at different programs and I'll just put the emails in and we'll send them to the right people at least and get me out of the loop. And I got, I sold that at Least that was like the first thing. But it's just kind of funny how it kind of wasn't even realized at first. Like, hey, this website could be a great tool for us.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: You know, gosh, it's too bad that you didn't think about chatbots back then, I don't think.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: I'm sure the early people maybe had I could, that would have blown my mind.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: I know.
You know, but that is something like, you know, the website still is one of your most important tools because parents especially, and students, you know, you want to find an answer, you go to the website. And that's one way that AI has really contributed to the student experience, is making things easier to find on these websites that are overwhelming.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: So you bring up AI and we're, we're talking about storytelling, and I want to try to tie those together. And you tell me if this doesn't make sense, how are you using AI and are you using it to help you craft any sort of messaging or storytelling or, you know, in general?
[00:08:57] Speaker A: So we use AI in a, in a number of different ways. We use it kind of tactically on the side of actual. The tactics of marketing. So monitoring campaigns, making adjustments to campaigns. Let's say you're bidding on automotive technology classes. It used to be that you would have to go into the Google platform and, and be like, oh, this keyword's not doing well, let's put more budget towards it. Or, or maybe we should try out this keyword. And all that's now all done through AI. So it actually gives us more time to be creative, which I love. So you can use that time that you would have been tinkering around with words and bids to actually think through the message. But we do use AI for ideas. And I'll give you an example, a technology example. We have a client that works at a chancellor's level at a state, and they have a new data sharing platform that they're trying to get individual colleges to, to buy into.
And when they hired us, I didn't even understand. I had like six meetings and I'm like, I don't understand at all what this is.
I took their whole website and I stuck it in AI and I told AI, can you explain to me what this does? And it did. And I'm like, this took six meetings and AI just told me what you did better than you can tell me what you do.
So, like, ideations, it's really good for things like that. So we will use it to ask questions like, how can we better phrase this Or. Or, you know, here are some ideas we have. Can you give us more ideas? So it's like a little extra partner. Yeah.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: I love that story. I feel like a lot of people are maybe are a little bit ashamed or embarrassed or like they don't want to fess up or it's. And I love, like, this is how we're using it. It's your assistant. It can do so much for you. It's not an end result. Right. You have to look at, you know, take what it gives you and figure out what you need to do. Inject your expertise. I love. You probably know Brian Piper. I watch his conferences all the time and his presentations. I just saw one and he's talking a lot about this. Most of when he talks, he brings up the Personas, how he creates a Persona and which is often a custom GPT. And we'll run like, here's an idea I have with this student Persona. What would they feel about that? And I love that. Takes a little more work up front.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: But yeah, it's great. I mean, you do have to go in and edit it and see if you agree with it. It's not always right. Sometimes the stuff that comes out I throw away, but it's like having another couple people to bounce ideas off of. And that's how I appreciate using it for content and story and storytelling.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: What do you think is holding schools back from using AI more? Why are they lagging behind other industries, which I think they are.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: My real opinion, I mean, higher education is the most insane bureaucracy. I mean, it is so bureaucratic. And I've always found it to be interesting that these are the institutions that are teaching the future, but yet they're so slow to move towards the future. You know, I still work with some colleges where I'm trying to convince them to make changes in their marketing that should have been made five or 10 years ago. We're sending emails. One college can't even email their own students. Like, one of my contracts is literally sending emails on behalf of the college to its own students. Like I told the president when he called, I said, this is a 1990s problem. This is not a 2020 problem.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: What's the problem? Is it a technical thing in between?
[00:12:30] Speaker A: It's a technical problem. The purchasing will not allow them to subscribed.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: They're blacklisted somehow somewhere.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, this should have been solved years ago, you know, years ago. So, I mean, I think that there's a bureaucratic angle, but I also think maybe Like a pedagogical one. The faculty need to figure out how AI can be used in teaching. And I think that's a really huge discussion and I really think that they're going to be the ones to lead it across the institution. You know, how it's used in learning and teaching is going to shape, I think, how all the departments on campus use it to help their jobs.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Well, your company specializes often in optimizing enrollment for schools, I think. Right. Can you talk a little bit about what marketing channels are currently driving the most engagement and enrollment for colleges?
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah, this is such a fun question.
So the answer is it depends.
Isn't that an answer that lawyers always say it depends?
We tend to focus on channels that hit students who are already really interested in the college. So from a tactical point of view, like I would much rather have a lead that comes from a student who's actively done a search. So maybe they've searched for your program. I know they're interested in it already. They've clicked on the ad and they're looking for you. So that's a step in the funnel that definitely drives more engagement and it's a little bit more expensive. But for colleges that we see that have the best success are ones that are really starting to get hyper targeted a lot more personalized. So instead of just saying like oh let's Market on TikTok, it's saying using automotive technology, we have a new clean air hybrid program. Let's market that program. Now what type of student is interested in that program? Who should we be reaching out to? Let's not just broadcast it on TikTok, but let's target maybe current automotive technicians that need to recertify. Now how do we do that? Well, we can geofence places where they work, we can purchase email lists, we can target them on social media. So it's really thinking through who is going to be interested in what type of program and then where do we find that person and then what do we say to them to get them interested?
[00:14:51] Speaker B: It's happening now, everybody. This is available. I wrote a blog earlier this year to predict like what's going to happen in 2025. One of them was hyper personalization for enrollment. There's companies that are specializing in just this building their whole company on a lot of it is just AI driven. You're right on.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Yeah, we do like secret shopper projects where we will go pose as a student and try to enroll, which is crazy on how hard it is to actually become a student. Like especially the Community college supposed to be like, anybody can become a student, and it actually can be really difficult. So we'll help colleges look at that. And one of the colleges we shopped even has a personalized webpage for every applicant where it's like, name of the college, Jeff Dillon. And you go there and you see exactly what you have to do, where you are in every step of the process. It's wonderful. It made it so much easier to go through that journey. But I've only seen it once out of the hundreds of colleges that we've worked with. With.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Well, it's funny, you talk about the secret shoppers I remember. I think this could be the driver for many decisions on campuses where there's an administrator somewhere whose child or grandchild is going to college, and they say, I can't figure this out, and maybe they'll get some help from this person who is working in there and, like, what is going on? But they has to hit home almost like that to realize, yeah, you know.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Marketing will get blamed, you know, for low enrollment. And a lot of times it's like, oh, it's marketing's fault. Like, they haven't been doing their job. And then we'll come in and we'll say, well, let's look at your application numbers. And your application numbers are huge, which means marketing is driving interest in your college. Now. Applicants aren't becoming enrollees, so we'll come in and help look at why. Why is that? A lot of the times it's because of customer service and, like, it's difficult to fill out your application and you called and nobody gets back to you. And the webmaster, email's not answered and the question can't be found.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: So why have a. I would call it a test or a theory that the application process at schools needs to be fixed, needs to be optimized, and that if you can get through that process, you're a good candidate, you're probably going to succeed in college because you passed one of the hard tests. You got through the application process. There's a company out there, I'm not sure if you've heard of them yet. They're called Mutara M U T A R A. And they're reinventing the application process. It's really cool if you think about all you really need in the beginning is their name and their email. Right? That's the first thing you need. So after that, if you lose them, you lose them. And then what's. What is the next thing you need and really driving it, like These e commerce sites do. Yeah, like, we know what you like, we know you want. But you've already said you're going to apply. But the application process is similar. It's. He can explain it a lot better. Hopefully I'll have Larry on a podcast.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: That's great. I would love that for marketing. That's one of our challenges is people will ask, well, how many students did you bring in through marketing? And we're like, well, we had this many people click on the apply button, which is great, which is a good metric for us. But we don't know if they got through the application and we don't know what happened to them once they. Once they left it. And really, if you can give us the name and the email of everybody who came in through an ad to your application, then we can tell you how the marketing did. I don't have one college who can do that. So, yes, they put a wall up and you can't follow the student anymore. And now the student's answering 400 questions and half of them drop out. So that sounds like a great idea for a product.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Well, back to the marketing channels. Which ones do schools need really digging down here? Is TikTok a must have for higher ed or just does it depend? Yeah, they're just all over the news. It's so big. It's in this controversial state right now.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Well, there's organic TikTok and then there's paid ads on TikTok. So. So if you have the staff and the personnel on campus to show student life organically, I think it's such a great spot to be. If you have, like student workers that can go out and take quick videos, if you can post fun things, you don't have to pay for that. That's just content that you make for paid TikTok, which is where my company would come in. It's lower on our priority list. Frankly, we do not see engagement with ads on TikTok. So we'll have a lot of college presidents and marketing director be like, everybody wants to be on TikTok. We want a TikTok ad. But it's not where I'd recommend you start because think about how you engage with the platform. People are on there just to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. I mean, it's quick. It's quick. You might kind of plant a seed in their head like, oh, Jeff's school's got, you know, ev plans more for.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Brand building and awareness. Very top of funnel, right?
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Your brand building, you're not going to have very many people visit your site, fill out a form, call you from those TikTok ads. So if your goal is to get names or to get students, right now that would be low priority. But if your goal is to like launch something new and build your brand, it's a great platform to be on.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Well, you talked about AI and how you're using that. Do you see any way, are you using AI for automation in any way or can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So not for storytelling or content development. So it's more for ideation but for automation. Yeah, definitely.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: For like outreach maybe?
[00:20:07] Speaker A: No, I mean we're still doing all our, our outreach to market our own company pretty standardly. But you know, we do work with some colleges that have CRMs and those are, you know, equate them kind of to AI because there's certain things that trigger other activities that automate it. So we do work with colleges helping them get that set up, writing for it or mapping out the journey. It's still a very hard thing for colleges to lift off. I've seen only a few be able to really use it well. Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: I was just going to ask you about CRMs. Are you recommending or excited about these AI driven CRMs? What I've seen is there's a couple ways. There's some that have been out, kind of came out but got popular right before the AI was really out there. Like I don't even say one slate. Slate's pretty big and so you can kind of couple those with some AI solutions or there's the all in one couple of companies out there that are doing that. Do you have any preferences at this point or any thoughts on that or is it kind of like early on? Too early to say?
[00:21:09] Speaker A: No, it's, it is too early because we've worked with maybe four or five different ones just helping support, support get them set up. So I don't really have a favorite or preferred but what I am seeing is that everybody on campus is really excited about it but then there's not enough reason. Like even if you do have like a more AI driven one, you still need somebody to be in charge of this thing. So colleges will spend money on the technology but won't give enough time to get it up and running. And that's where I'm feeling like the momentum is kind of being stalled right now.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: That's kind of where I'm going to. Cheryl. Like no matter what you pick, there's a lot of right ways to do things and Most of the success or failure is going to be around your planning and implementation. And most of the time it's just not done comprehensively enough. It's not a good enough project plan or it wasn't finished for whatever reason. Like, higher ed loses people, they're short staffed. I mean there's a lot of reasons, but if we could just maybe pick less solutions and focus on implementing them. Well, like so many of them are doing so many things and you know, then you got to watch out for picking the monolithic solution and then you're kind of stuck with it but.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Or people get overwhelmed because, you know, you want to be like an Amazon, but we don't need all the bells and whistles. Like you just need something simple. You need to start simple and communicate better and communicate more frequently. But you get focused on what it could be or what it should be and it kind of paralyzes that beginning of the action.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: So I think what really helps too is working with a company like Gradcom or a company that is a little less biased, I would say, in that they're not just trying to sell you something, but they're really just, you need a solution. You know, some companies, they can almost do everything, but you really have to express like, what problem are you trying to solve? One thing I talk about a lot is search. And so I spent the last three years of my career on content discovery and now we have AI. And so AI is just disrupting this space. And AI chatbots are kind of becoming synonymous with search, but it's not quite there yet. And so I'm kind of going off on my own little tangent here. But it's really, where do we find the trust? There's so much out there. And so I love what you're doing in that you really are helping some schools succeed. Right?
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yeah, we had one, we have one college that we worked with three years ago who wanted to like have us map out the touch points that they could put into their CRM. So when should a student hear from the college? And first we came in and did a content audit. What was happening was every department was emailing every applicant. So when we filled out an application within 24 hours, we got 36 emails from departments across campus. It was like completely overwhelming. So our job was to streamline it and have like certain points in the journey where different departments would reach out. So we mapped this all out and then we finished. They accepted it and it was a great project. And then we said, look, we can help you write all this now, would you like assistance writing these messages and get them into your CRM? And the college said, no, no, no, we have it from here. We have it from here. Three years later, I get a call, hey, Cheryl, nobody ever wrote the messages. We haven't used the CRM. Can you guys come back and write the messages?
[00:24:38] Speaker B: It's gonna cost a little more now, but yes.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: Yeah, there's inflation. Guess what? There's inflation. But I mean, it's really well intentioned. They had every intention to do it, but people are too busy and they don't have somebody dedicated to do this work. So I don't know. That's advice that I have to colleges who want to be better at communication. Like, even with AI, you have to have people who are dedicated and passionate and willing to put in the time you have to make the time for it.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: I love that, that story. It makes a lot of sense to me. You talk a little bit about, you know, you have to have AI and people say, but isn't it just going to replace our jobs? And I'm creating this diagram that I can present to people that's like, maybe a little bit, but only, you know, really everyone's just going to have their own AI assistant and then we can just get more done. Like, if you start just embracing it and be more productive, you're gonna be really valuable.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah, you can spend time on the things that are really important, like personal connections, you know, like calling a student, like speaking to somebody. You know, technology can take care of all the things that you were doing before. So maybe you can spend more time being personalized and making connections and things that AI can't do.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: So I have a interesting question and I want to know what you think. What, what is one outdated marketing strategy that you think universities should abandon immediately?
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Okay, so this is, this answer is not going to be what you expect. Because I thought about this before. I'm like, gosh, like everything I want to say we actually do for clients. Like, literally, like, first thing that comes to mind is like, newspaper. But we just booked a newspaper ad last week because we're helping a college with some bond marketing and we've got to reach older voters in a conservative area and there's a conservative paper that caters to older voters, but for the.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Most part, yeah, I get it. Like, newspaper is not your go to.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So honestly, if I could tell them to stop doing one thing, it is to stop chasing the shiny object. Okay, So I can't tell you how many times a wonderful marketing campaign has Worked so well. And then somebody gets bored and they move on to the next thing. And then enrollment takes a hit. If something's working, keep doing it. So that's the message I want to send, is stop chasing the shiny object. Stick with things that work. Even if you're bored of doing them. They're working, keep doing them. So I think I see that the most.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great advice. You better be tracking things so you know it's working too.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: And track it. Yes, track it. That happens a lot. And we just, our company, we just shake our heads like when a contract will end and we'll be like, do you want to do this next year? And they're like, oh no, this is great. All our seats are filled, we're not going to market anymore. And then next year the seats are only half filled. And then they come back, we got to market again. It's like, well, we should have just kept doing what we were doing. You wouldn't have had to. You wouldn't be in the spot. Just keep doing what you're doing if it's working well.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: To wrap it up, I want to ask you one last question. I want you to give me your boldest prediction for the future of higher ed in the next three plus years or so.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: What's my fault?
[00:27:42] Speaker B: You give it to me.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Well, no, you give it to me. No, I think we already touched on it, really. It is personalization. It is figuring out how to be hyper targeted and speaking to people more like individuals rather than just blasting messages out. So I think personalization is going to continue to be really important. And I think if you're not figuring out how to bring that into your marketing and communications, you're going to see some challenges. So that's what people are looking for and that what they expect.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Well, you heard from Cheryl. If you're interested in personalization and don't know where to start, I'm sure she'd love to talk to you.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Yes, lots of really, really cool things happening right now. And technology is what's letting us have marketing more personalized. It really is the technology behind it.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Well, thank you for being on the show, Cheryl. We'll put your links in the show notes and it was great catching up.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
