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00:00:01
Think Different
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In this episode, Rustam Irani challenges higher-ed marketers to stop “playing it safe,” sharing how an early-career DIY innovation project sparked a career-long commitment to testing, multi-channel strategy, and culture change. He connects lessons from building a waterproof GPS rig to the realities of rising CPCs, AI-driven shifts in search, and the internal politics of getting buy-in for new ideas—culminating in a practical weekly challenge to run one brave test.
Resources Mentioned
• TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/
• Snapchat - https://www.snapchat.com/
• Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/
• Spotify - https://www.spotify.com/
• Pandora - https://www.pandora.com/
• YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/
• Google Ads – Performance Max (PMax) - https://ads.google.com/intl/en/home/campaigns/performance-max/
• Meta Advantage+ - https://www.facebook.com/business/advantage
• Facebook Lead Ads - https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/lead-ads
Timestamps
• 00:03 — Why “playing it safe” is risky + how to apply an innovation mindset to higher-ed marketing (AI/AEO, shifting channels)
• 01:18 — Origin story: building a waterproof GPS (IMAP) and the power of constraints-driven creativity
• 06:17 — Rising CPCs and why you must go truly multi-channel (CTV, Spotify/Pandora/YouTube); from 7 to 11–12 brand impressions
• 07:49 — Fund experimentation: carve out a 5–10% R&D budget; lessons from Facebook Lead Ads
• 10:38 — What to test now: TikTok, Reddit, Google PMax, Meta Advantage+—and the guardrails you’ll need
• 12:46 — Put students first: authenticity and outcomes-driven messaging across every channel
• 14:32 — Getting buy-in: navigating internal politics and proving ROI; the inbound-test playbook
• 19:39 — Weekly challenge: pick one “best practice” to break, run a test, and build a culture of innovation
Recommended
Transcript
Common Pitfalls in Higher Ed Marketing
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
Most higher ed marketing teams don't fail because of budget or lack of tools. A lot of times they fail because just keep doing the same thing over and over again.
00:00:13
Rustam Irani
And the reality or the truth of that is playing it safe can be probably the riskiest move you can make when you're dealing with the competitive enrollment marketing environment.
Rusta Murani's Career Journey
00:00:26
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to REY University. podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders who want to change the game and themselves. I'm Rusta Murani, your host, a former recovering engineer turned marketer and also former CMO.
00:00:44
Rustam Irani
And I've spent some time on the agency side as well. So you can say I'll build a landing page or two.
Innovative Engineering Solutions
00:00:51
Rustam Irani
Let me tell you little story about one of the most impactful moments in my career when innovation became amazing eye-opening opportunity that really got me to realize that there's a lot of ways to do things differently and more efficiently.
00:01:15
Rustam Irani
Back at an engineering company, I worked at one of my first jobs back in, I believe it was around 2000, 2001.
00:01:23
Rustam Irani
The manager, we were doing a lot of coastal monitoring. So I'm in Florida. We were monitoring a lot of the beaches or a ton of storms that had come through for erosion.
00:01:33
Rustam Irani
And basically, we were going out into the near shore area, basically where the beach meets the water. And we were doing some monitoring of the depths to see how much erosion was happening.
00:01:48
Rustam Irani
But we had manual tools we were using. We were using equipment where we had a pole, we had a level. We had to do all of this manual work. And when you went out into the water, it was really tough to do things properly. You needed two people, sometimes even three people.
00:02:07
Rustam Irani
And if the waves were rough, it was tough. Tough, tough work. And trust me, I was in the water as well. So I remember a lot of that, you know, being in the water and getting crashed on by waves.
00:02:20
Rustam Irani
But our manager gave us a task. He said, you know what, we've been doing this for years, probably 10 plus years, the same exact way. Can we in this at that time, GPS, a global positioning systems was just starting to get more popular is becoming a bigger and bigger thing.
00:02:37
Rustam Irani
He said, hey, can we come up with a way to do this using GPS and build a waterproof GPS system? Because at that time, they really didn't have waterproof GPS systems to where it would only take one person going in with a pole with the GPS unit and basically getting the work done quicker and with less resources.
00:03:03
Rustam Irani
And so he gave us a challenge. He actually said, hey, Ristam team, here's... three, $400, make it happen, test things out, see what you need. And at that time we did have equipment, but it wasn't waterproof. So we actually came up with a couple different ideas. We tested things. We came up with an otter case, large otter case where we put the equipment in, we drilled holes in the side, we put waterproof O-rings and so on so the cables wouldn't get wet.
00:03:35
Rustam Irani
Pretty amazing. Then we had this waterproof top on the top of the GPS. And we tested it a couple of times. We had to go back and kind of redo things. But at the end of the day, we came up with a solution.
00:03:49
Rustam Irani
And we called it the IMAP, the Intertidal Mapping Apparatus for Precise Positioning. And from that early moment and that early time in my career when that manager basically said, hey, Ristam and team,
00:04:04
Rustam Irani
Can you guys come up with a better process? We didn't know better process, but we did because we were challenged. And this goes back to a lot of what we do and what I've seen over the nearly 20 years in marketing and specifically in higher ed marketing.
Adapting Digital Marketing Strategies
00:04:20
Rustam Irani
We've done things a certain way, right? We bought lead lists. We've gone out and purchased, let's say, affiliate leads, or we've done Google and we've done Facebook.
00:04:31
Rustam Irani
And this is what works on Facebook. How many institutions are still hesitant to have a TikTok account? I don't know you all seen, but TikTok's probably not going anywhere. That's the reality. mean, there's literally billions of dollars that are generated on there. Not only that, I can tell you having you know, two young daughters, one's in college, one's a junior in high school, TikTok, Snapchat, a lot of those platforms are the reason why they choose to engage with the communities they do and to go to the schools that they go to.
00:05:07
Rustam Irani
My eldest met a number of people who are at her current school, Florida State University. And that experience really crafted kind of and helped her decide where she wanted to go.
00:05:21
Rustam Irani
And so I think a lot of times we get stuck on what's already working and continuing to do that, when the reality is things are constantly changing.
00:05:33
Rustam Irani
look at AI, look at where that's going with even organic traffic. Now there's a lot of our clients that are coming to us and talking about, well, what does answer engine optimization mean for us? What are the LLMs going to do to our Google traffic and our site traffic?
00:05:49
Rustam Irani
And the reality is you've got to constantly be on top of this stuff. You have to be testing this stuff. You can't just believe that you have a methodology and you're going to stick with it and that's going to maintain.
00:06:04
Rustam Irani
The other side of this that we've seen over the years is costs go up. The cost per click for a lot of the key terms that we're bidding on for our clients now have gone up 20, 30, maybe even 40% for some of the competitive ones.
00:06:20
Rustam Irani
And then you have schools that come in and they're bidding on key terms just to expand their net to catch more and more students that may not be the exact program, but they want them to learn more about their school or their university.
00:06:36
Rustam Irani
So how are we staying on top of that stuff? And There's a lot of factors that come into it, right? There's external factors as well with lot of these channels that are changing, like I said.
00:06:49
Rustam Irani
A lot of what we've started to implement with our clients is looking at a true multi-channel approach, which is connected TV, Pandora, Spotify, all of these touch points. I heard on a recent podcast where they were saying in the past, you typically would have seven brand impressions to really get somebody to learn about your brand.
00:07:13
Rustam Irani
Now it's taking 11 or 12. There's so much noise out there and there's so many different ways to engage your prospective community that it's truly more and more engagements that's important. So are you out there? Are you everywhere?
00:07:32
Rustam Irani
Are you on YouTube? Are you doing these things? And another thing I would say on how to think differently is to, you know, when new betas come out new opportunities come out, like test it out.
00:07:47
Rustam Irani
Put a small, we used to, I used to give our team about a five to 10%, you know, what I would call R&D budget, right? Okay.
00:07:57
Rustam Irani
take this, test out what's coming out. Let's look what's happening in the market. What are we hearing about? And will it work for us? And let's come up with a hypothesis. Like I literally would create a science experiment for our team and just say, hey, what's hypothesis?
00:08:14
Rustam Irani
Let's prove it out. And let's see if we can be successful at it. And if we can, then we have another channel. We have another opportunity. Perfect example of this was basically, believe it's 2015 or 16 when Facebook lead ads had first come out. Those are the ones where basically you have a form right on the ad, you click on the ad, you fill out the form and you hit submit.
00:08:39
Rustam Irani
And we were prepping all the way up until the day it went live. And we said, we're going to be doing this, may not work. And actually it didn't.
00:08:49
Rustam Irani
It took some time for us to kind of, uh, work it out, work the kinks out and do some of this stuff that, was necessary to get it to, uh, a place where it was working for us, right.
00:09:02
Rustam Irani
Where we were engaging with the right types of students and in a cost effective manner. And, and interested students, right? High intense students that were a good fit for our program and vice versa.
00:09:14
Rustam Irani
But for probably two or three months, we were just tweaking it. We were testing it and it was new. So there were a lot of communities and people talking about what was working, what wasn't working.
00:09:26
Rustam Irani
And it was just so fun to be a part of that. And the team got really excited about that. And eventually we did get it to a point where it was a very,
00:09:37
Rustam Irani
Good channel for us. And so, you know, I challenge you when you think about these things, when you see some of these new opportunities, like a TikTok, or some of these other areas, Reddit is such a huge one right now where Reddit engagement and conversations are leading the LLMs engagement and search queries.
00:10:02
Rustam Irani
So are you communicating on those? Are you figuring out a way to be involved in those conversations when it comes to relevant searches for programs that you might have or in your local area?
00:10:16
Rustam Irani
So there's so many different opportunities. So I encourage you to take a look at that to question kind of what's happening now and test things.
00:10:27
Rustam Irani
Another perfect example is with Meta and Google right now AdWords right now. AdWords continues to refine Pmax, right? Which is kind of its AI tool where basically it'll put you on all of these search engines or sorry, not search engines, but within its platform, it's got Gmail, it's got discovery ads, it's got YouTube.
00:10:49
Rustam Irani
So what it'll do is it'll put you everywhere where it thinks it's relevant based on your conversion goal, right? Or your goal. It could be a conversion goal. It could be little further down the funnel. could be an app.
00:11:02
Rustam Irani
But it'll basically find you more of that type of student or prospect. And it does it across its entire inventory, which is pretty powerful. And it uses its algorithm to determine that. Now, it can also be challenging because you've got to put up guardrails.
00:11:20
Rustam Irani
It might send you what it thinks is the right type of prospect, but it might not be. And we've seen that happen. But are you testing this? Are you figuring out if it'll work for your marketing efforts or not?
00:11:35
Rustam Irani
Same thing with Meta, Advantage Plus. I've actually been reading more and more about how ultimately the goal of Meta and Zuckerberg is to have you be able to log in to Meta and automate accounts based on a core goal.
00:11:52
Rustam Irani
I'd like to get amount of... MBA online students for my program in this area and give it a budget and let it go. Now,
00:12:04
Rustam Irani
I have some reservations against that, obviously, and I think maybe at some point it could get there, but there's still a lot of manual strategy and efforts that have to go into that. But are you testing some of the new features of Advantage Plus is what it's called for meta?
00:12:20
Rustam Irani
And we are. We're testing that. We're testing PMAX. We're testing all of these tools. We're running Spotify. We're seeing the brand engagement and Lyft.
00:12:30
Rustam Irani
Like these are all things that are continuing to evolve multi-channel kind of marketing efforts. And I think, you know, that's thinking different. That's continuing to push the envelope on what we're used to, right?
00:12:46
Rustam Irani
We still run core Google ads for our clients. We still run meta ads. But, you know, over the years, you know, testing and continuing to do that is huge.
Authenticity and Student-Centric Marketing
00:12:56
Rustam Irani
And so, you know,
00:12:58
Rustam Irani
The other side of this, when you do do this, and so thinking of the student, the student's got their – which the student is the hero of the story. They're the most important thing in this whole process, at least for us, in marketing with institutions whatever you're doing, wherever your platforms are that you're deciding to be on, just be authentic.
00:13:23
Rustam Irani
That's the most important thing. Be true to who your brand is. Be true to who and what you provide. And that authenticity will come out regardless of the platform, regardless of how you're thinking about these new tools and doing some of this new stuff.
Navigating Internal Challenges for Innovation
00:13:42
Rustam Irani
And look at the end of the day their goal is outcomes right so making sure that you're factoring in the students core goal which is outcomes right
00:13:57
Rustam Irani
the other side of this is some of the internal factors right trust me i've been there done that i've uh Played the politics game in my career.
00:14:09
Rustam Irani
Not that I enjoy it. actually don't. I can't stand the politics within companies. And I get why they're there at times, which it's fine.
00:14:19
Rustam Irani
And I understand, but I'm not good at it. I'm not a fan at it. But you're going to have these internal pushbacks sometimes like, hey, you've got this budget.
00:14:31
Rustam Irani
I want to see what this budget is going to do. And basically, if you're going to deviate from this budget, you better prove that you're going to be able to generate the ROI. If I'm giving you this additional budget or if you're taking away from a certain portion, are going to be able to prove that ROI?
00:14:48
Rustam Irani
And if you're not, you better be able to back it up. But I believe there are ways and opportunities for you to position testing, for you to position thinking differently, for you to position little bit of R&D based on the evolving landscape. And I think that's smart. And I think any executive within your organization should understand that they need to constantly look at how to get more effective and more efficient.
00:15:21
Rustam Irani
And where our students are or where our prospects are, they're all over, you know, and they're continuing to expand the reach and target.
00:15:33
Rustam Irani
There's also a point of, you know, basically where you can hit a threshold. You can only spend so much in one channel and get results. At some point, there's only going to be so many prospects within that channel.
00:15:47
Rustam Irani
And then you're have to look elsewhere. Then you're going to have to look at how are they finding out about us? Again, going back to the 11 touch points, you know, that's important.
00:15:58
Rustam Irani
I'll tell you one more example of, you know, when I failed a couple times and the third time was a charm, but for two times I had failed, I had tried to put together basically an inbound campaign for potential students to come directly into our admissions team, speak with an admissions rep.
00:16:19
Rustam Irani
I got a ton of pushback. One, admission team was already busy. They were not going to be able to do this. And why would they do this when they're just used to doing what they're doing and they're good at it? I would have disrupted that, right?
00:16:34
Rustam Irani
So I said, please, let's give it a go. why. had a big case of why we should be doing this. And they said, okay, let's go.
00:16:45
Rustam Irani
But the reality is, they gave couple of folks to test this with, they didn't really coach them on it, they didn't really tell them to put any real effort into this. And so flopped.
00:17:01
Rustam Irani
and then they said, Rustom, this was a waste. said, okay, well, I still believe in it and here's why, but I understand. couple months later, I came back with because I was again, hearing more and more about how this was being successful.
00:17:15
Rustam Irani
So I said, okay, let's give it a go again. Same thing. Didn't really put all the effort into it. Guess what? Didn't work. And then I said, OK, but I still believe in it, right? And here's the reasons why. So I went right back to him.
00:17:30
Rustam Irani
And then the third time, this was maybe another couple months afterwards, I was at dinner with the president. And I said, listen, I get it. We didn't make it work the first two times, but we also didn't put the right effort the first two times.
00:17:43
Rustam Irani
I believe this will work. Here is why. But we need a dedicated process for this. And he said, you know what, Rustam? All right, let's have a meeting tomorrow with the head of admissions, and we're going figure this out.
00:17:59
Rustam Irani
We did that. Eventually, that succeeded. Our test was successful. They put the dedicated effort. It worked, and it grew to multimillion-dollar part of the business from this new kind of effort.
00:18:19
Rustam Irani
And I'm grateful that never gave up, even though I was turned down twice. I'm grateful that president believed in me enough to give me a third try.
00:18:29
Rustam Irani
And we created a really successful campaign. And so... you know, again, you're going to have these internal factors, but like, you've got really believe in yourself. You've got to push things forward that you believe in, that, you know, you know, need a shot and why not?
00:18:49
Rustam Irani
So, you know, again, the end of the day, when you're looking at innovating, when you're looking at your current budget, and I know this kind budgeting season for a lot of folks who are going into this, like,
00:19:02
Rustam Irani
Think about opportunities to put little R&D budget on the side or some other way to test new campaigns, new strategies, because it's only going to benefit you and it's only going to make things keep you ahead of the game for sure.
00:19:21
Rustam Irani
At the end of the day, it's not about shiny tools. It's really about the culture that you're building internally, like within your organization. That's with your executive team, that's with your partner teams, whether it's admissions, whether it's your campus presidents, whatever that might be.
00:19:38
Rustam Irani
And that's where that culture becomes huge within the entire organization. I challenge you, identify one area this week that you've just been relying on best practices. It could be a campaign. It could be a process. It could be an automation campaign. There could be so many different things.
00:19:59
Rustam Irani
Run a test. Try something new. Ask your team, hey, what can we be doing differently here? Is there anything we can do differently? Are there any tools out there that can do this?
00:20:10
Rustam Irani
things differently. And I guarantee you there are, especially with the thousands or tens of thousands or who knows, millions of AI tools that are out there, right? So I challenge you, do that.
00:20:21
Rustam Irani
I think you'll be pretty amazed at how many ideas come out and you probably could get a breakthrough one to come through. So that's all for this week of ROI University, where the biggest ROI is personal.