On Dec. 9, 2020, RHB principal Rick Bailey joined Jenny Petty, Director of Enrollment Marketing at the University of Wyoming (soon to be Vice President for Marketing at the University of Montana) and host of The Servant Marketer podcast. In the Season One finale, Rick and Jenny discuss falling in love with our customers, delivering…Read more
Author: Sam Waterson
Seeking Seamless Modalities: Revisited in 2021
I originally formulated this post in–what will now be described as–better times in many ways. Of course, market forces were present at the time, the very ones that informed my perspective. I had returned from assignments on multiple campuses where the organizing principles were built and duplicated by delivery method. “Online” had its own organization,…Read more
Coherence, Cooperation and Cocktails
If you missed Coherence, Cooperation and Cocktails with the RHB team (our substitute for our annual Slate Summit gathering), you’re in luck. Here’s a recording and summary of the webinar where you’ll enjoy a great metaphor featuring a house (from the genius of Jess Ricker of Wellesley), a fair amount of talk about sports cars…Read more
The Case For and Against Generalization in Higher Ed Marketing
For much of my early career, I was engaged by clients to research and consult on the best way to communicate with millennials. Typically, this meant identifying a set of characteristics and preferences that afforded our clients the opportunity to better communicate with this target audience. It started with Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising, and then…Read more
Decoding the Enrollment Marketing Budget
Most enrollment leaders struggle with precision when planning an enrollment marketing budget. The marketing cost to acquire a particular class is indeed calculable, but only if the institution is prepared to measure individual marketing initiatives. And while there may be a great deal of certainty about the divisional budget as a whole, when it comes…Read more
Reconciling “the Numbers” and Market Positioning Progress
For most institutions, May represents early returns, to say nothing of frantic or disciplined refreshing of reports to reveal the evidence of the size and shape of the class that may be on campus in the fall. “How are the numbers?” memes abound, making light of the fact that “the numbers” to most only mean…Read more
Four Ways Prospective Students Search for Your Majors
When communicating with your prospective students, you undoubtedly strive to connect your offerings with their goals, interests and values. In doing so, you emphasize the benefits of your distinctive market positon and your ability to provide an exceptional education that is supportive of your prospects’ plans, hopes and dreams. But because the goals, interests and…Read more
The Trust-Personalization Matrix
The correlation between a prospective customer’s trust and the personalization of your experience offering shapes behaviors, impressions and outcomes related to exchange. Let’s look at a model* to help us understand its significance for enrollment marketers. On the y axis is trust. Trust, for purposes of this model, is defined as the degree to which…Read more
How To Train Your Recruitment Team
I have been involved in a number of recruitment trainings, primarily on the marketing/messaging side, with a smattering of sales when the team doesn’t know the distinction. My intent in this piece isn’t to prescribe training or offer a training service. Rather, I intend to outline a few key tactics that, in my 15 years of experience, have produced the greatest successes; in particular, I focus on parameters for training that have a significant positive effect upon recruitment…Read more
Translating Customer Experience to Meaningful Marketing: The Value of Interpretation
This is part three of series of insights that aims to articulate when an institution should judiciously consider an outside expert. You can read the introduction here and pieces that outline the value of objectivity and broad perspective here and here. Customer experience (CX) as a discipline takes two primary forms for our enrollment clients.…Read more