Transcript
Speaker: Alright. Our marketing reports. We're showing one thing. but the admissions was saying something else. Ever have that happen?
Speaker: Welcome to ah ROI University. a higher ed marketing show for people turning big ideas into real results. Join Rustem Arani and Chris Shepard as they explore the strategies, stories, and technology shaping how institutions connect with students.
Speaker: From marketing and enrollment to data and AI. Every conversation brings a fresh perspective. is something you can put to work. This is ah ROI University. Let's get started.
Speaker: Welcome back to ROI University podcast for higher ed marketers. Who want to change? them game, and themselves. I'm Marcia Mirani, your co -host. recovering engineer, former higher ed CMO, joined alongside with our co -host, Chris Shepard.
Speaker: Your tech. AI and marketing stack guru. Let's talk about what happens when results... just are not aligned. This is the conversation of your admissions view versus your marketing view.
Speaker: um I'm excited to jump into this, Chris, because... I can tell you um Years and years of of having these conversations between marketing and admissions budgets, there is always seems to be some misalignment.
Speaker: and it basically goes back to Admissions having a target. of enrollments based on their cohorts and marketing usually having a year -to -date budget Right, where they know. That's right.
Speaker: In a year, they're going to have X amount of dollars. And based on those dollars, you plan X amount of inquiries or leads. You have X amount of applications and ultimately X amount of students, right? And so this is something that I can tell you I've had significant conversations around, challenges around. And and so, you know, I guess my question is.
Speaker: Is there a right? ah Is there a right? ah data set to look at, or is there a right formula for the budget? Is it marketing or is it admissions that we should be looking at?
Speaker: when it comes to building out the budget and making decisions. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's all kinds of ways to look at that. i mean It kind of depends on where you sit, like you just said. um or what you're trying to look for. um This data kind of represents many different things. Like for instance, you kind of said, are you admissions, enrollment, marketing?
Speaker: Well... Also, what happens if you have a vendor that you're working with? How are they aligning to ah what they're working toward toward a goal? Is that a monthly goal? Let's just say you have an enrollment or lead an enrollment goal per program or per campus. um How is that tied to kind of...
Speaker: what the actual internal admissions teams and marketing teams are tying their data to, to be able to present to their organization. So, I mean, there's a lot that you can.
Speaker: show here and talk about I would say that the two big ones and again I hear this all the time just like you like it's cohort view and period view like How many leads actually turn into enrollments or starts within, let's just say, a given month versus how many leads that we get this month and how many.
Speaker: um Enrollments did we get this month? um So those are two different views which answer two different questions, right? Yeah, and and I think... To your point, I'd like to take it a little step further there when you mentioned like the vendors and you mentioned the sources.
Speaker: um you know i know when you were running marketing uh on your side Did the admissions team actually care to know, and I'm just curious on your side, did did they care about the sources? Did they just look at a channel or did they actually care?
Speaker: And I can tell you, um I've had experiences ah where... I would meet with the head of admissions every single week and we literally would go over every single.
Speaker: Vendor and partner to see hey how many leads? leads are we getting based on what we budgeted and what we expected? ah and how are you performing right like at that detail level like did you have that as well or do you think most schools do that or do they not do that well when you mentioned channel, are you referring to like paid, some paid social? Yeah, exactly. Search social SEO. Like and then when you mentioned a source, are you talking about. Like...
Speaker: a Facebook, Ad campaign? Yep. Facebook ad campaign or Google broad exact phrase, or even like if you're, if the school is using publishers or if the school is using, that's right. It's like,
Speaker: this affiliate uh you know we had expectations from it like how we paid so yeah that 100 all right I would say like, Yes, to your point. There's so much detail. And if you're going over that week over week, it is obviously a lot to do. I would say that.
Speaker: I... paid attention to it. primarily because we were really quick, right? We were really quick to launch things, really quick to test things. We wanted to understand what was actually working. And you really wouldn't know that if you're just attributing everything to, let's just say, paid social. You need to understand really what ads are generating an enrollment and a start.
Speaker: How long? the maturity curve is. I mean, does it take a lead from paid social two weeks to apply or six months to apply? It's going to be far different than an organic search or a paid search. Similarly, you're going to want to understand even further into the funnel and into the student journey.
Speaker: um What? What students are actually more up to drop out? I saw actually some. pretty valid data from that at, from being able to track all this. I mean, we were able to see like, Hey, maybe paid social students aren't the best they're dropping at a higher rate, you know? And so, or there's maybe there's more that we can do for attrition there. Um, so I would say like the more data you have.
Speaker: the better. um But yes, to manage it. is It's an issue. Yeah. And the maturity curve is absolutely... real And maybe one time, yeah one day we'll talk about that a little bit more in detail. But I can tell you for a lot of schools that um I've worked with over the years, ah social media has a longer tail. And actually, I think that's even getting to be a bit more now, um you know, with a lot of these other ah channels, a lot of the other exposure across the LLMs and so on. You're seeing.
Speaker: people spend more time to make these decisions, but they're getting their information from other areas as well, right? So I think the maturity curve is absolutely a factor because when you're building out.
Speaker: A. marketing budget versus an admissions budget. um You know, admissions factors in the maturity because they care when those enrollments are going to happen. They don't care when those leads came. They just expect X amount of enrollments because they have a class started. Right. So that's when that all factors in. ah Another interesting thing i I can tell you, like in you you mentioned this and this is something I can't stress enough.
Speaker: um Speed. right I think this is one thing that you and I are both aligned on is like speed to test, speed to look at data, speed to make decisions. I actually just had a conversation with somebody earlier today. um
Speaker: And she was a head of admissions. She was a head of admissions for a career school. And she came from a traditional. ah higher ed background she worked at a university a four -year university and without me even saying anything chris like one of the first things she said is she's like this is night and day i'm so it's just so amazing how i have so much access to data i'm able to make these decisions and i can make them pretty quickly versus having to kind of wait and not know what's happening so like that literally just happened today but i think that's very relevant for this conversation because like
Speaker: She's looking at those things right and making decisions on them. I think you should I think you need to be to make Like. Great decisions, sound decisions. And especially now as we move forward into, we have. All these options at our fingertips, like we're looking at like chat GPT ads, Apple map ads, like like Reddit. you know, um,
Speaker: Snapchat, like all these different things we could be doing now. and like What? What do we spin up? Where do we put... um you know our attention to and then how fast can we do it and then what are the actual results if you can't prove it and you can't see it then you just don't know what what to do after that and so i think that's super beneficial to be talking at that level again how you manage that's a different
Speaker: set of issues. Obviously you're not going to spend every single week going through every single ad and what it did. But there are ways to obviously see that data and understand. What's driving and what?
Speaker: Yeah. Absolutely. And then... I guess the other side of this, Chris, and and I know you've been kind of meaning to to share this, and and we're excited because we do have a platform now for our podcast where we can share our screen. So we're going to be doing a little bit more of that moving forward.
Speaker: I've been itching to get... you know, to move onto a platform where we can share our screen because we've got a lot. that we look at right whether it's student journeys whether it's other things that we are building um i think and sharing some of that with the audience sharing it with you all to kind of see how we're looking at things what we're looking at um
Speaker: I think it's going to be pretty powerful. So I'm excited about that, Chris. so But we do have something to kind of share with ah with the audience today, at least, and a little peek in how we are working with...
Speaker: schools and organizations and so on and really understanding. the cohort view. versus the admissions view, right? Or sorry, the marketing view versus the admissions view. That's right. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah I mean, it it like you said, and what we've been alluding to, I mean, We've been managing. I would say this for most people. um Been managing everything out of Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, you know.
Speaker: maybe even some data lakes or warehouses here and there. um But still. I just feel like you're always pulling data and you're always just trying to figure things out on the fly. And then when you get something, it's outdated. you know, that afternoon. and um
Speaker: And I know that we're all guilty of pulling data like right before a meeting and trying to figure it out so that it's up to date or pulling it on a Wednesday for a Friday meeting. but By the time you get to a Friday meeting, it's just not done even mean anything anyway. So that was kind of like one of the struggles. And I think it's a struggle for everyone, you know, and we've recognized that. um And...
Speaker: We actually started building an app around this, you know, and and kind of a software solution that can really help understand attribution and understand leads and where they actually sit in your CRM and the funnel. and um When they turn into an...
Speaker: application and enrollment a start what channels they came from, even further down to the sources, that kind of stuff. And definitely wanted to share that with you.
Speaker: with everyone and introduce that and that's called pennant and i would love to share my screen and just show what that looks like at a high level yeah and really just kind of back it into what we're talking about right now and that's essentially just what kind of views you might see a period view where you're counting the events that happen in the date range leads created applications submitted starts recorded regardless of when each lead came in or if you're looking at like Cohort view, like we talked about, is counting a lead acquired in the date range and tracking where they are in the funnel today.
Speaker: however long the conversion took. So you're really just looking at a predefined set versus kind of a big long picture view. And so let me share my screen here with you. Yeah, and I think for today, the focus on that, I think That's where we'll we'll stick. We'll focus on that. cohort view versus period view. um but i think there's a lot of other stuff in there that's going to be excited to share over time Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, I gotta figure out how to... share my screen now. It's... Not here. Hold on a minute. Um... That's... Weird. Let's see. Oh, here we go.
Speaker: All right. So you can see my screen. Um, Yeah, so we've got this app and it's called Pennant. And um currently it's really just ah pulling in all of our data. And so what this app is actually doing is it's sitting.
Speaker: on top of your CRM. So if you have a particular CRM, um just... whatever it might be, a Salesforce or a lead squared or some of these others, or even if you're managing out of Google sheets, it can actually pull that data. And so it's not, um it's not actually,
Speaker: Um, Holding any... Any data it certainly isn't holding any personal information, but it's just pulling in um records from your CRM, how you might have them marked. So if you have them, you know, a lead marked as ah or a record marked as a lead or enrollment, it pulls all that data in. But it also goes out to your different channels like it might.
Speaker: uh pull a meta ad spend it might pull your google's ah search ad spend and all of that kind of stuff. per your actual campaigns and ads. And then it it does a bunch of math on the back end to understand what's actually happening there, how much your actual costs are, how much your cost per lead or enrollment or application is based upon a lot of that data. and so um Yeah, so as you can see here.
Speaker: We actually have an overview. tab. And this is kind of what I just wanted to show and talk about a little bit right now, just because we are looking at a year over year cohort view. So if you look at this cohort view and just looked at it from this month.
Speaker: you can see that we're looking at about 291 leads, six applications.
Speaker: No enrollments and no starts. This is just cohort. So this means out of those 291 leads, we've had six applications from from those 291 leads. 11 days into the month. We'll call it 10. We've had zero enrollments and zero starts from those leads. So you can see our total ad spends about 15 .6. Our cost per lead is about 90 .44. This cost per lead is actually backed into the paid search channels. And so it does not count organic. channels um cost per start obviously not there and then our conversion speeds obviously isn't there yet but
Speaker: if If we just... held here and just looked at the period view you'd see how much different this looks now and so now you can see our cost per lead or excuse me, our leads 291. Well, now we have 57 applications. So 57 of these applications test have come in from any time.
Speaker: anytime ever so so let me let me let me ask you a thing there chris i think one other area where this becomes important right and this is another conversation we have all the time is like
Speaker: Are we counting the lead inquiry date as the source that drove this ah you know enrollment? when when when is that When are we determining it? Is it last click? Is it first click? Is it lead create date? Is it ah lead update date? like what are What is the determination? and And I know there like a lot of schools use different ways to do this, right?
Speaker: Yeah. I think that's going to obviously factor in. This view, right? Because that's right where we're going to track it back to that original lead source. or whatever we're determining.
Speaker: And right now, this is set up just for first touch attribution. You could definitely set up for like a mixed attribution or a last touch. um There's some different things you could do here. would you and Would you say, Chris, that like most schools are using first touch?
Speaker: I don't know. um i actually I would say yes. I can tell you. i would I can tell you, yes. Okay. A lot of schools are definitely using first touch. Oh, good. Because that's when that lead inquiry comes in. That's when that lead create date is, and that's what they're pulling back all their enrollment data from when they're looking at it, this view. That's just from my experience. but Again.
Speaker: um It's important to know that. like Yeah. What are you looking at? That's right. And that's the way I've always done is first touch to I mean, I assume like the cost of doing in business kind of further down the funnel if I had to pay for a lead two or three times, but I also got a lot of information back so i did track um every touch point. So, you know, if we had a recapture, I...
Speaker: I understood where that recapture came from, but I gave the first touch the credit just because you kind of have to give something credit. And I figured if we were paying for it once. That's...
Speaker: where it's coming from. um yeah And not to go too much further, but I think another area that obviously I'm makes excited to kind of tackle with this. um is the attribution, right? So like that's exactly what you said. um And we're going to see more and more of that. I really feel like with the zero click.
Speaker: With the LLMs, with all of what's happening. um
Speaker: It's going to get a lot more cloudy. where that actual, you know, who actually was the originator of that lead, who was the influencer of that lead and who was the decision, uh, converter of that lead. Like, I think we're going to continue to see more and more, uh, you know, it's going to get cloudier on that end and it's going to be more difficult. So I think with all of this, it's going to be important to just understand as much as you can about the data behind that, um, and what's happening.
Speaker: I agree. Yeah, 100%. So... Yeah, so again, you can see this period view, 291, 57, 35 enrollments, and 16 starts. And what was it in the court cohort view?
Speaker: Core view is. 291, 6, 0, and 0. So right you can see. So you got no enrollments this month from any of the leads that came in so far. But if you look at from admissions team, they see how many enrollments?
Speaker: like 30, 40, whatever it was in your in your yeah data set, right? So so they see 35 enrollments, right? That's right. And I think that's like having that snapshot and having that there.
Speaker: it's It's key because, um again. How many students are actually coming in and... signing up. for the next cohort or for the next star class. like This is a way to look at that. yeah marketing mate Marketing will not.
Speaker: tell you that on a month -to -month basis. And this really, this is kind of what we're working toward is we usually would have a goal for an enrollment on any any given month. And so you're kind of working toward that. So this period view really helps to understand where you actually sit to your goal. And by the way, we actually have goals baked into this platform where you could set goals and understand how you're pacing toward those goals. You can kind of see a little bit of it down here with some of the starts and lead. goals but we have a whole page dedicated to goals and pacing. But yeah.
Speaker: ah Again, yeah, to your point, this is great just to be able to see this and and just understand at a high level what's happening. you know As you go through, obviously, this overview and some of these other pages, you can see some high -level, like biggest movers kind of a thing, some trend and composition charts. um, like what source, what. um channels are doing what here uh but
Speaker: The meat and potatoes is kind of further down where we, all of our... um all of our channel views campus program views we have this table that kind of just shows you um a day over day breakdown of what's actually happening. in the marketing. yeah So you can see here.
Speaker: On the first look, we spent 1910. uh gross so Spent $17 .75 plus our vendor fee, $19 .10, got 32 leads, 18 of those were paid, two starts, zero paid starts, um lead to start, you know, cost per lead $106, cost per enrollment $9 .55. So you can see that every single day and start understanding what these numbers really look like and represent.
Speaker: You also obviously see it a weekly view and a monthly view if you have this date spread out far enough so you can really start understanding. uh trends and what's actually happening every day i think that's also a ah big part of of things and people aren't tracking things yeah this granular to even understand seasonality or even understand like what is actually happening um or
Speaker: to help you even re -forecast. I mean, there's been a lot of instances where we've re -forecast in the middle of the month because it's like, we need more or we need less, or we have a start later next month and maybe we should, you know, pull in more resources to hit that. Yeah. And how many different spreadsheets are you typically looking at to pull from? That's right.
Speaker: ah yes I mean, i I definitely have been in situations where admissions has got their spreadsheets, marketing has their spreadsheets, finance has their spreadsheets. like it's It's all over the place. Yeah.
Speaker: i think Yeah, I think this is a good overview, Chris, at least on that end. on the Cohort side. Yeah, the the other cool part about something like this is, like, I know that... I mean, I'm constantly looking at year over year and I know that any kind of like.
Speaker: sea level or anything like they want to understand like what's happening year over year and how we're progressing. And so this is just kind of automatically baked in. We can understand what year over year looks like. So if you look at this period view year over year, let's just say we're looking at September 1st through the 11th. Look, 291 leads versus prior year 234. Applications 57 versus prior year 56. enrollment so we get to look at this at a year -over -year level too but down here in this chart.
Speaker: In this table, we get to look at it even again in the year -over -year view. view to understand like leads last this year we have 291 last year 234 you can actually break that out and start looking at leads by channel start looking at what what's actually happening here uh this year versus last year again there are a lot of other tabs here where you can explore a lot of this deeper but the goal, we'll get into that. We'll get into that at some point. Right. chris Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, but the goal here is just to understand like there are like period view and cohort view and they each have their like. defined set of answering questions and why you'd look at that, right? Yep.
Speaker: Awesome. um I think, you know again... The spreadsheets are plenty. And if you've got... that kind of happening you've got a ton of different spreadsheets i think There's, there's.
Speaker: Probably four kind of key takeaways I'd say here from what we're looking at work what we're talking about today is Like you're going to have these conversations between. your goals as a marketing team and then admissions goals, right? And the enrollment goals of the institution.
Speaker: And then um it the alignment is so critical. So looking at both of these and understanding that is just such an important thing to do. i think A couple key takeaways. like
Speaker: Don't just look at marketing view, right? That's important for our marketing team. Make sure you're looking at the admissions view as well. um And I think the flip side of that is don't just look at admissions ah conversions and admissions numbers because that's not the true impact of your marketing efforts, right? Yeah, you have to know what. what question you're answering. I mean, that's,
Speaker: that's the point exactly exactly The entire funnel, right? You've really got to be looking at the entire funnel. um And then... I guess lastly, I would just say is like.
Speaker: Make sure you're looking at the same data. Like you've got to be looking at it. at the same campaign, same sources, same programs. That's right. Same campus. like All of those things need to be there and and be aligned.
Speaker: um And like. that's at the end of the day what what matters right enrollment performance Depends on marketing and admissions alignment. And that's really where it all boils down to. Anything else on your end, Chris? Well, I would say i all your points are...
Speaker: I 100 % agree. I'd say like something like this is super cool because it allows everyone on the team to dive in and look at numbers however they want to see it. And to your point, like if it's marketing or admissions or even the vendor, to be able to understand a source of truth and everyone's working from one thing rather than, ah like you to your point, a bunch of spreadsheets and whatnot. um I think this is a great opportunity. I would say that... um
Speaker: you know If somebody wanted to understand a little bit more about this, we're certainly happy to do a demo with you guys on it. um you can Hit us up at pennant -dot -com. forward slash book.
Speaker: dash a dash demo, so pennet dash dot com forward slash book dash a dash demo And we'll leave that URL in the show notes. We'll put it in the show notes, yeah. But yeah, I think it'd be awesome to be able to show you this. And I mean, that was just the tip of the iceberg, just talking about cohort. and you know, period of view, but there's so much more it can do and a lot more information you could obviously digest out of it.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think... At the end of the day, ah what you don't know can hurt you. Right. I say that all the time. And even internally, I say that's like.
Speaker: Do we know what's going on here if we don't? like like It can actually be a bad thing. So, uh, well, Chris, I that's. It's awesome. I'm glad we were able to kind of tackle this because I know it's come up in our calls. I know we've had these conversations with our clients. ah over the years, many, many times. um Awesome. where there is There are solutions out there for this, but if you're still using spreadsheets...
Speaker: More power to you. I just would get alignment. I would absolutely making sure that those numbers match both ways and you can quickly kind of look at those things. And um yeah, we're excited for what's to come ahead. And as far as today, that's all for this episode of ah ROI University. We're the biggest ah ROI. is personal.
Speaker: All right. Bye.
