Transcript
Rustam Irani: All right. So if you listen to ROI University for the last 20 plus episodes. You've seen a lot of me. in this and I've had a couple guests and One of the guests is actually on with me again here, Chris Sheppard. and I'm excited to kind of mention that we're evolving. The podcast is evolving.
Rustam Irani: And I'm excited to have... Chris, who's going to be our new co -host on ROI University, joining me. Chris, you know, I've known Chris for some time. and you know every conversation chris and i have had has really gone down the path of
Rustam Irani: where he is just so technical and comes from that type of background that we just gel because we're always talking about data. We're always talking about analytics. We're always talking about AI. We're always talking about where things are today and where things are going.
Rustam Irani: for primarily for marketing in general but more specifically in higher ed. And so I'm excited to mention that we are evolving and Chris is going to be a co -host with me. for all of these podcasts moving forward. He's going to give a great perspective from an operational side, a strategic side.
Rustam Irani: I know he's going to bring a lot to the table when it comes to AI. He's doing a lot for RGI right now. And we've got some other exciting things that Chris and I are building together. Chris, I'm excited. Welcome to ROI University podcast. And I'm really happy to have you on board as a co -host.
Chris: Yeah, Aristan. Well, thanks. I know we've talked a lot about this. I'm happy to be here finally. share or spread some knowledge and kind of get into the weeds on like you said, tech, marketing, AI and what that means for the higher ed. industry.
Chris: And so. Yeah. Great to be here. Yeah. Happy to contribute in all the ways I can.
Rustam Irani: Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to this too, Chris. And one thing we talked about earlier, right?
Rustam Irani: We're going to try to make this a little bit more of an informal podcast. We're still going to have things we're going to talk about. We still want to bring value. We still want to talk about what we're seeing in market. Even just today, we were talking to a client about... state expansion for their online programs and where things were working and where they weren't working. And that was a conversation that was really exciting to have. Bye.
Rustam Irani: We'll talk about those types of things. We're going to talk about data. We're going to talk about a lot of different things. you know, one thing i think right off the bat that that i'm excited about as well is you know.
Rustam Irani: your background, Chris, and what your, you know, some of the experiences you've had. You've been doing marketing for 20 plus years and across the board.
Rustam Irani: And you've even done it for small businesses. You've done it for franchises. You've done it in a lot of different ways. So I'm excited to kind of really. work and partner with you and and talk to you a little bit more about what works and what doesn't.
Rustam Irani: So, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Rustam Irani: Absolutely.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: so
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean. I've, uh, so... I'm... Like you said, I've been kind of in the industry for a little over 20 years, you know, and I started in IT, believe it or not. And so that's kind of.
Chris: my I wouldn't call it my main love, but I am definitely technical and I love exploring all that stuff. And so kind of as we progress through digital marketing as it is and coding and developing and all the way back to.
Chris: you know, just basic HTML, CSS. JavaScript, to into WordPress, and of course, all the things we have now with AI and Vercel and Supabase and all the good stuff there. I've loved just to kind of like understand that and figure it out and pertain it to digital marketing. And so Yeah, I mean, definitely been around. you know.
Chris: Like you said, I've worked primarily in the home service space and then in the higher ed space for a few years as well. And so I kind of know what it takes to drive leads. All the stuff around digital marketing.
Rustam Irani: Yeah. And I think one of the things you know that's interesting whenever we talk And I think a lot of people are going to get a ton of value out of this side is Chris and I are having a conversation. I tell Chris like, hey.
Rustam Irani: i've had this website for a number of years you know five or six years Here was kind of my vision for it six years ago. and the next day It's built out and Chris is like, oh, is this kind of what you were envisioning? So I think there's going to be a lot of conversations around there. We're going to share a lot of what we're working on. We're going to share a lot of what we're doing. We will give tips and tricks and a lot of resources that we're seeing. Chris actually has.
Rustam Irani: a newsletter that he puts out i think weekly right chris uh on ai
Chris: Yeah, that's great.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: And maybe you want to tell a little bit more about that. And then just. know some of the things that you're working on on the ai side that'd be great just to kind of give a little bit uh to our audience there
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do have a newsletter called The Prompt, and it's on LinkedIn specifically, and you can go check it out. Go and find me. i think my handle is cshup11 but maybe we can leave it in the notes or whatnot you could Follow me on the newsletter.
Rustam Irani: Leave it in the notes. Yep.
Chris: It is weekly. I've kind of missed a couple of weeks here and there just due to some traveling and whatnot, but I try to do it every Tuesday. And really what it is, is it's. kind of just some updates and news about AI and how it impacts or affects the higher ed space.
Chris: And so I try to. cover what that might look like and then kind of just give a tip or trick to with just a simple prompt or some prompts you could use to understand more marketing data or how to kind of leverage AI to look at your website to do an analysis or an audit on it, different things like that. And so, yeah.
Chris: Try to do that weekly. Feel free to. pop in and give it a follow. But But yeah, I mean, AI, you know, it's just moving fast and I remember when ChatGPT first came out and I was like everyone, you know, like instantly thought I was smarter than everyone else and I'll use it to.
Chris: you know write all the content for everything and you know. did that for a couple months and then you know, everyone else's content looked exactly the same as mine.
Chris: And of course the EM dashes and M dashes, whatever you, however you want to call them, everyone had them. Right. And so you see that more and more now.
Rustam Irani: Yeah.
Chris: And in fact, I just put out.
Chris: Well, I didn't put out a study. I was just kind of going over a study that was put out by Pew Research Center about how 10 % of all of the content across the website is AI. created. And interestingly enough, only about 1 % on the edu space is and so that's actually great. And I kind of just talked a little bit about how it's really important to continue that human creation, you know, from a storytelling perspective. uh experience those types of things but you know it's moving fast and
Chris: Yeah, just to kind of segue into some of the things I'm working on. I mean, I love to understand not only but how we can actually use it and implement it in our workflows and our systems from an operational perspective. And so I don't necessarily mean. taking all the humans out and replacing everyone with asians but
Chris: human loop kind of stuff like how can we actually use this to benefit quality control and quality assurance and actually doing some repetitive tasks and some low -level tasks that nobody else wants to do even like stuff like audits analysis, reporting, gathering data, organizing data, reporting on data, all that stuff you could do with AI that
Chris: essentially is almost probably going to be if you if you do it right, is going to be more accurate than... you know, humans as you know. human error. is pretty essential.
Rustam Irani: Yeah.
Chris: They're pretty much, you know, happening all the time. And so, you know, that's a lot of the things I'm working on, specifically even in RGI and some of our other projects as well.
Rustam Irani: Yeah, no, that's exciting. I saw that post you did earlier this morning about the Pew Research. I think it's... awesome and fantastic that it's such a low percentage in the education space.
Chris: All right.
Rustam Irani: Because like, again, for us right the story that the contacts the experiences like Those are the things that resonate. not cookie cutter.
Chris: All right.
Rustam Irani: standard language about an MBA program or other programs. So I think those are the things that definitely resonate. And it makes me think about, I actually just had a post. The post I did, it was last week, actually, I think it was Thursday or Friday. I posted about my daughter, who's a senior in high school. She's getting, I must get probably at least.
Rustam Irani: She must get four or five flyers a week from different schools and universities. And there was one that came out from Macalester College. and it was a letter that said basically her name and it said blah blah blah blah blah your application for blah blah blah blah
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: It was nothing we'd ever seen before.
Chris: Yep.
Rustam Irani: And I showed it to my wife and she was like. This is so cool. What is this? Let's look at it. So we opened it up. My daughter opened it up. We were all looking at it. And literally over the last, probably I would say.
Rustam Irani: maybe it was yeah maybe it was last week over the last probably five or days or so the couch has come up a couple times in our conversations we went to uh we went to the web we looked it up we looked and it's actually a great school with some pretty significant credentials
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: not an easy school to get into and what i love is you know
Chris: Sure.
Rustam Irani: the differentiation there this their story behind that like breaking the mold being a little different
Chris: Yeah, right.
Rustam Irani: We also received another, actually, maybe it was a little over a week ago, it was a week and a half, because we received another thing from them where it said they were in between two cities. I think they were between Minnesota. Minneapolis. And it had both cities in the pamphlet. And it was a cool pamphlet that they did. I've seen tons of that stuff.
Chris: Yeah, right
Rustam Irani: My eldest, who's now a senior in college, she got a really cool thing from Tulane. My youngest got one as well. It was like a briefcase with your stuff. Arcadia University.
Chris: Oh wow.
Rustam Irani: I did like a composition notebook, which is really, really awesome.
Chris: oh that's cool
Rustam Irani: Yeah, there's a ton of creative things.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: But again, that goes back to what you're saying with that. you know, being genuine and having that content that has context and storytelling and how do you stand out.
Chris: Yep.
Rustam Irani: So I was really happy to see that post from you today and like to hear that in higher ed, which is awesome.
Chris: Yeah, that's great.
Rustam Irani: Still, there's still a lot of human.
Chris: So... The.
Rustam Irani: content.
Chris: The envelope with the McAllister. I'm curious, was the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Was that in the little window in the envelope so you could see it or did you have to open it?
Rustam Irani: It was and we actually could see it through the window.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: Yeah, that's exactly where it was.
Chris: Yeah. So it got you to open it up, right?
Rustam Irani: A hundred percent.
Chris: That's awesome.
Rustam Irani: That's exactly where it was. It was in that window.
Chris: Hmm.
Rustam Irani: And.
Chris: That's so cool
Rustam Irani: yeah and we saw them like what the heck like that absolutely
Chris: Yep. You have to open it.
Rustam Irani: Absolutely still.
Chris: Right?
Rustam Irani: How do you not open that?
Chris: That's so cool.
Rustam Irani: And, you know, and people have, most people, and that was actually a LinkedIn post that I had that had, it's gotten over, I think, 400. engagement, so likes or whatever.
Chris: Amen. Yeah.
Rustam Irani: and I don't know, almost 50 comments or so maybe 70 ,000 impressions. So it's definitely has legs, but there's been very few people. you know, that have said anything negative, like one person. commented about.
Rustam Irani: you know they expect students to be professional in their writing in their essays and then they do something like this but like
Chris: That's marketing.
Rustam Irani: That has nothing.
Rustam Irani: That's exactly what I said. This is marketing. And from a marketing perspective, this is genius, right?
Chris: This is... Great.
Rustam Irani: Hands out, it does exactly what it was meant to do.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: right
Chris: That's right.
Rustam Irani: taught us to open the letter and learn more about the institution. which is exactly what we did.
Chris: That's right.
Rustam Irani: And so I applaud that. And actually, the president of Macalester, actually, she put two hearts in their school colors.
Chris: uh -huh
Rustam Irani: as she commented with two hearts.
Chris: All right. Alright.
Rustam Irani: Yeah. And she's got, she's got a bunch of comments under her too.
Chris: Okay.
Rustam Irani: And like students are commenting on there saying how they love McAllister.
Chris: Okay.
Rustam Irani: It's a great school alumni instructor.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: How awesome is that, right? That's human.
Chris: Yeah, that's cool.
Rustam Irani: Right. And I think
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: More and more, that's going to be important. And I know we're going to talk a lot about that. I know we're going to give examples of that. Chris, I'm excited about that.
Chris: Yep.
Rustam Irani: And I think the other thing I'm excited about, Chris, is you know, One thing you and I both are very passionate about, and this is why our university kind of fits. here is you know data performance what's happening right and So just to put a little teaser out there uh you and i have been working on something together we've we've co -founded a a venture called Pennant.
Rustam Irani: And. Pennant is actually going to be a sponsor. of ROI University, so we're excited about that. But yeah, go Pennant. But maybe you want to just kind of give a little bit teaser on Pennant.
Rustam Irani: We're going to definitely talk about it a lot more as we go and how to use data more effectively and give examples of that.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: you know uh chris sure
Chris: It's I think it's... Yeah, I think it's going to be a game changer for a lot of people. you know the problem was and i'm sure a lot of people can relate i mean you're just digging through. spreadsheets right and like whether it's an excel spreadsheet or google sheets and pivot tables and exporting data from your crm or any other platform i mean meta google ads and you're trying to stitch it all together and That was kind of like.
Chris: One of the parts of my job that I actually didn't like. all that much and it's really because it just took a lot of work and it took a lot of work to get the data you needed or even a piece of data that you might have needed or data that was quite frankly Not even accurate. by the end of the day or the next day.
Chris: And or by the reporting term. I mean, you could put together a report on Wednesday and Friday. You got it in a slide deck and it's not even accurate anymore. I think there was just a lot of things through that. I started seeing more opportunity to.
Chris: What does this look like to put all this? under one roof, essentially. So what does it look like to get all my meta? all of my google ads all of the crm data minus PII, of course, but CRM data. or any other platform, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and kind of bring it all under one roof and really understand what it means to show it.
Chris: track attribution. Track leads. track enrollments. And then kind of give everything credit. So, you know, whether it's a an enrollment for a particular program in a particular campus from paid search. We were able to track all that. And so. I wanted to kind of understand what that looked like. So I started playing around with it a little bit. you know put together some
Chris: Oh, I guess some mock ups. And, and in fact, what came out of that and And Rusam and I started working together on this quite a bit during this part. But we started kind of just understanding what we really wanted to see and how we wanted to see it.
Chris: And that data is just a living, breathing thing. And so we actually built Pennant. And before we named it Pennant, it was just it was another thing we were just kind of working on just to kind of get it out there and see, you know, get data into it.
Rustam Irani: Yeah.
Chris: And we thought, wow, this could be something. This could be cool. I think a lot of people could really use this because I think a lot of people have the same. problem, right? They're just sifting through junk. And, and again,
Chris: I think it's more than sifting through everything or even if you're not and you've got like this tried and true Excel spreadsheet that's 100. you know, or 700 makes. big The data is just still.
Chris: we just launched it a couple weeks ago or something and
Rustam Irani: Yep.
Chris: in in uh actual its format it's true format and so I will show you some more of that later. But I mean, it's dashboards and showing campuses and programs and attribution and pacing and cohort views versus period views year over year, seasonality. I mean, everything that you could possibly want in this. And we have a lot more that's actually going to go into it. So it's really exciting to be able to launch this and get it in front of folks.
Rustam Irani: Yeah, I... Again, I keep remembering Chris every time we are, you know. talking about where things are today where they're going where some of the opportunities are especially with reporting.
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: and data in it analytics. Even the most sophisticated schools and systems I've seen are still utilizing a lot of different sheets and data sets.
Chris: Yep.
Rustam Irani: man i'm just so pumped for us to work together to kind of create some more clarity there and and provide uh some opportunity so that that's exciting i'm extremely excited about that so
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: Chris, I think... you know, With this with this new format We're gonna bring a lot to the table we're going to bring insights we're going to bring some examples we're going to show some of what's working some of what's not And that's the part that I think is going to really stand out from our experience.
Chris: Yep.
Rustam Irani: from what we've seen. over 20 plus years in marketing and in higher ed and that that's going to be uh i'm excited to share that i'm excited to share that with the community i'm excited to share that with a lot of people
Chris: Yeah.
Rustam Irani: And the other quick thing before we hit out is I'm excited to see you. So Chris is actually heading down to Tampa on Thursday, and we're going to see each other in person.
Chris: Yeah. Yep.
Rustam Irani: We have our team on site. uh here in tampa and so look forward to seeing you on uh on thursday chris any any last words before we uh
Chris: Well.
Rustam Irani: Get out.
Chris: I can't wait to get out of the hot weather into hot. Hotter weather.
Rustam Irani: Hotter, definitely hotter. I can tell you that much.
Chris: Well.
Rustam Irani: Yep.
Chris: No, I think this is going to be great. I mean. Yeah, as you could tell, we definitely want to have a conversation, you know, and really share. all the things that we know with you guys and kind of keep you up to date with what's happening in the world. I'm sure we'll be learning a lot through this as well. And just from hearing from you guys and all your comments and different things that you share with us on our platforms. But, you know, I would say that if I could.
Chris: Plug Pennant, I would go to pennant -dot -com, P -E -N -N -A -N -T. dash .com and you can check it out there we have a free demo or not a free demo but if you could Booker. book a time to check it out with us. And there's a lot more to come on that for sure.
Chris: but but yeah i think that we have a lot to offer here and i really look forward to it
Rustam Irani: All right, well. Chris. Excited about this new venture, excited about the new direction of ROI University. And as I've always said with ROI University.
Rustam Irani: the biggest roi is personal. So catch everybody. Next episode.
Chris: All right. Goodbye now.
