Featured Interview: Higher Education Consulting Expert Michael Clifford with Mike McHugh, PART 4

Higher education consulting expert, Michael Clifford: If I wanted to spend a million dollars recruiting students for my institution… give me a high-level boardroom presentation of how you would split out those million dollars.

Mike McHugh: The first thing our higher education marketing firm is going to look at is implementing the first 10% of that million dollars in funding creative and asset development… whether that’s TV commercials, brochures, collateral, the website. You have to have solid digital assets and/or tangible assets to be able to use for marketing.

After that, we’re looking at using 20-30% of our dollars for top-of-the-funnel brand awareness and demand creation, whether that’s television, online display, online video and radio. So the Hulu, YouTube - channels like that - are really growing. That will get more people looking for the institution.

The balance of the dollars then we’re primarily spending on pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization and social media. We’ve now got people looking for education or maybe even looking for us. How do we make sure they find us and we capture that marketplace and ultimately move them to the matriculation process and turn them into students.

Higher education consulting expert, Michael Clifford: How important is television, radio, direct mail and brochures for a university compared to SEO and social media?

Mike McHugh: Our higher education marketing firm would really put SEO and social media as the first, most critical component of your marketing, because that is when a prospective student reaches the university. Again, this is kind of your digital storefront—it’s how they reach the university. They have to have a great experience and interaction there. The difference is that television, radio, print–they are all avenues to get them to come to that storefront in the first place.

If you don’t have a high degree of brand recognition, or you are trying to extend into a new market–you’ve got new degree offerings or programs you’re trying to get out there–that’s when you really want to look at these broad-reaching, mass mediums in order to bring people to your storefront.

So a lot of it depends on what your brand recognition is… the amount of demand for your marketplace, or how you want to use those. It’s not that they are the right channels, the wrong channels or necessarily the order. It depends on what your current marketing mix is and how you are performing for where you need to go. Social media, SEO, digital, your website… all absolutely critical and number 1.

Higher education consulting expert, Michael Clifford: How important are curriculum, textbooks, in other words - the actual academic product?

Mike McHugh: That’s in many ways, the core. That is the university. That is the product that we are bringing to the market to further consumers. It’s so critical. It has to be up-to-date and contemporary. It has to be something that meets the needs of the marketplace, so it has to help students gain knowledge that is relevant for them right now: help them achieve what their goals and career objectives are.

So it is important that curriculum be reviewed and updated, whether it’s the programs themselves or just how it’s being taught. E-books, virtual interaction: there is a whole concept around the gamification of education, to really fit with a lot of what is going on with today’s youth. All those things our higher education marketing firm finds to be really important to be innovative and cutting edge.

Stay Tuned for Part 5

To continue reading Mike McHugh’s fascinating insights into higher education marketing practices for Christian colleges and universities, stay tuned for the fifth installment of this six-part article series, coming next week.

Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about our education management consulting firm Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, Contact Us.

Remember, our goal is simple:

• Provide Broader Access
• Lower Tuition and Fees
• Leave your Institution with Less Debt and More Graduates
• Facilitate Education with a Purpose

Looking forward to our possible conversation!

Dr. Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
760.801.5021(My personal cell)
mkc@mclifford.com

Featured Interview: Higher Education Consultant Michael Clifford with Mike McHugh, PART 3

Higher Education Consultant, Michael Clifford: Let’s talk about paid SEO.

I think I understand what you said about free and paid, and how someone does it, what the budget is, how it all works…

Mike McHugh: Paid is essentially a Google web page, the top three listings, and then along the right are sponsored ads. So there would be a light shading there. That is where each time a user clicks on one of those links, the advertiser–in this case the university–pays per click for that. So what you do in the process of paid search marketing is to pick what keyword you want to bid on and how much you want to pay for those clicks.

Higher Education Consultant, Michael Clifford: Give me an example for a Midwestern university of a keyword.

Mike McHugh: You might be looking for Kansas universities or psychology degrees in Kansas. It might be a keyword that you say, “I want a psychology program, whether it’s at a bachelor’s or a master’s level,” where it doesn’t matter, you want to bid on that keyword.

Google, Bing and different search engines have different tools to estimate how much money you need to spend. At each of those different positions, you’re going to spend a different amount of money. It’s not a pure auction but the simplest way to think of it is: the higher you spend, the higher you’re going to be listed first-to-eighth position on a page, and you’re probably going to be looking somewhere for education keywords between $5 and $30 per click.

It has become a very competitive marketplace, and you’ll pay per click. Ideally, what higher education market research firms want to do is measure how many of those clicks ultimately turn into prospective students, and then how many of those prospective students are going to end up at the University so you have an idea of how cost effective the marketing channel is for you.

Higher Education Consultant, Michael Clifford: What kind of conversion rates are you seeing on SEO projects?

Mike McHugh: When we talk about conversion rates, there are two different rates that people typically talk about. The first is from a visitor to an inquiry. That’s when people come to your website that might ultimately become a prospective student. On that, you’re looking anywhere from 2-6% on average, depending upon the institution. Some can be higher; some can be a little bit lower.

Ultimately, higher education market research firms look at the people that request information about the institution off of your website… how many of those actually turn into an applicant or enrollment. That can vary dramatically between different marketing channels. On someone coming from an organic search, you’re looking somewhere in the 6-10% range of prospective students that actually will enroll. If someone’s coming from paid search marketing activities, you’re looking a little bit lower. Those are probably in the 3-5% range, again depending on the program and degree level.

Higher Education Consultant, Michael Clifford: We talk a lot about high touch/high tech. A lot of what you’re talking about is high tech to be able to geo-target people using Internet data, and big data techniques of analyzing people.

Once somebody gets on the phone, how important is that person in the contact center?

Mike McHugh: It is critical, and I totally agree with this high tech/high touch kind or approach. The motto that my grandfather taught me that I kind of go back to this:

Business goes where it feels comfortable.

There’s always the question of how higher education market research firms can help a consumer–even in a highly technological environment–get comfortable with that institution. If you do go through forums, surveys and different focus groups, the number one reason you will almost always hear from a prospective student of why they enrolled in the school is that they had a personal connection with the Admissions representative. They will tell you that that is a big part of what drove them to make that decision.

All of this technology has to be used in order to create efficient systems and processes to measure repeatable performance. It’s a Six Sigma-ish kind of aspect, but it wraps that around a human interaction touch point. Even online learning is becoming more interactive with virtual touch points and connections with people. That is ultimately the beauty of education: connecting people with knowledge. You’ve got to have people in order to do that, and then wrap the technology around it.

Don’t make the people get wrapped around the technology.

Higher Education Consultant, Michael Clifford: Good point! So it looks like the technology brings people to a phone call, and then the person on the phone–the recruiter, the information person–establishes a relationship. Then the enrollment process takes place.

How important is faculty with respect to the overall marketing presence, and student success to the overall integrated marketing plan of a university?

Mike McHugh: I don’t think the role of faculty can be understated. One of the things I feel very passionately about is that we don’t think of marketing in the right context oftentimes when it comes to institutions and schools. We sometimes think of a marketing job as one in which we create new students in the school. The reality is that higher education market research has to do with all parts of an institution. It’s new student messaging, it’s retaining of existing students. That’s on the marketing department; that’s on faculty.

Faculty has got to be involved in new student recruitment. Also it’s on the alumni. It’s on getting information, bumper stickers, t-shirts… anything in the hands of different people. Every time a faculty member goes out to dinner and they’re wearing their university shirt, they’re marketing and branding that university. Every time that they interact with a prospective student, they’re branding and marketing that university. So we have to think of marketing as everyone’s responsibility, and it has to be evaluated across the entire institution… not just new students.

Stay Tuned for Part 4

To continue reading Mike McHugh’s fascinating insights into higher education marketing practices for Christian colleges and universities, stay tuned for the fourth installment of this six-part article series, coming next week.


Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about our higher education market research firm Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, Contact Us.

Remember, our goal is simple:

• Provide Broader Access
• Lower Tuition and Fees
• Leave your Institution with Less Debt and More Graduates
• Facilitate Education with a Purpose

Looking forward to our possible conversation!

Dr. Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
760.801.5021(My personal cell)
mkc@mclifford.com

Featured Interview: Academic Coordinator Michael Clifford with Mike McHugh, PART 2

In this six-part article series, higher education consultant Michael Clifford thoroughly interviews marketing guru Mike McHugh on everything college presidents and leaders should know about getting their brand visible, both online and offline.

Academic Coordinator, Michael Clifford: What do you see as some of the upcoming challenges in the digital space, and what are you doing to stay ahead of those?

Mike McHugh: There are a few difficult challenges in the digital space for higher education market research firms. The biggest thing that’s happening on the digital side is what’s going on with search engine optimization. On the digital side, there are a couple of big players: Facebook, YouTube and Google. Looking at Google, where education is one of the top ten marketplaces across all different industries also, the main dynamic is not only is post-secondary enrollment slowing down and actually declining, but total search query volume on Google was down year-over-year in the last quarterly report they released.

This means that you’ve got a finite volume of people out there looking for education and degree programs right now, but you have more and more entrants into the marketplace. The for-profit sectors have been very aggressive historically. The traditional university and not-for-profit sector now is beginning to create more online programs; they’re getting more aggressive and assigning more dollars to their marketing.

The result is a pie that’s being split in more and more ways, and that leads to less efficiency, higher cost per inquiry, higher cost to attract students, more focus on brand differentiation: just a more competitive and difficult marketplace. That’s really what I think presents the challenge in the digital side. You no longer just have this rising tide that everyone could be successful. Higher education market research firms have to now separate themselves and the bar is really going up on a daily basis on digital marketing.

Academic Coordinator, Michael Clifford: Okay, so you've just hit on the back end of the front end of the marketing.Tell me about the business process systems, at a high level, to support something like PPC.

Mike McHugh: A lot of this comes down to a technology-enabled process. Ultimately, if higher education market research firms want to be able to do this at scale, you're managing a portfolio of anywhere from 100 to 100,000 keywords depending upon the number of degrees… the geographical scale of an institution. Different websites and search engines have their own interfaces, but usually you're looking at some kind of either proprietary system or specific bid management systems in order to manage that portfolio of keywords.

In addition, you're keeping track of how much money is spent on each keyword, how much you spend on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, what are the performance metrics of those and then making adjustments. There are all sorts of additional complexity around different match types, broad matching, negative matching - complexity that's there. At the most rudimentary place, higher education market research firms need a system for what keywords you want to bid on, how much money did you spend on them and what did you get for that amount of money that you spent.

Academic Coordinator, Michael Clifford: What are the benefits of your current media choices and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Mike McHugh: Search engine optimization is the process of helping to get your website to rank better on search engines, so right now essentially it’s a Google world in terms of search engine marketplace. Consumers will go out, they’ll type in individual keywords, so a set of Google results is their organic listing–you don’t have to pay to be in there, but they’re determining what are the most relevant and useful sites for consumers? So the job of an SEO is to help get a website to rank better in that algorithm that Google, Bing, Yahoo, different search engines use.

Academic Coordinator, Michael Clifford: If you were talking to the president of a Christian college or university and they had no knowledge of SEO how would you get them started?

Could you give me a few easy steps of what you would do to help them?
 

Mike McHugh: I’d boil it down to probably two easy steps. Essentially, our higher education market research firm refers to it as “on page” and “off page.” Without getting too complex, “on page” is a website that is set up to be search engine friendly. It’s easy to find. Think of it as having to give someone directions to make it easy to get to your house. You want to have a clear turn left here, turn right here–don’t make it convoluted. The second thing is to focus on putting out content and information on your website that consumers want or need.

One suggestion we have been making to colleges and universities is to move the ownership of SEO into the librarians’ hands. We’re finding that librarians have a lot of technical expertise that they didn’t have 20 years ago. They’re also the keepers of a lot of content for the university.

Academic Coordinator, Michael Clifford: Do you have any comments along those lines?

Mike McHugh:I don’t know that we’ve specifically explored that. I would agree that if you think the library has many ways of archiving and being able to manage digital and creative assets, which is where a lot libraries are moving (more to the digital realm), it makes a lot of sense; but yet my question is where can you get a person that can control all the different pieces of content of information by the univerThat’s the thing
when higher education market research firms talk to schools; they think, “I have to create all this content.” The reality is it’s all over the university–they just don’t have it harnessed in any one place. Getting it there–the idea of promoting it and displaying it on the website–that’s easy. It’s just getting all those digital assets into one place in an inventory. That’s the challenging part, so I think that the library idea is really good.

Stay Tuned for Part 3

To continue reading Mike McHugh’s fascinating insights into higher education marketing practices for Christian colleges and universities, stay tuned for the third installment of this six-part article series, coming next week.

Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about our education management consulting firm Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, Contact Us.

Remember, our goal is simple:

• Provide Broader Access 
• Lower Tuition and Fees 
• Leave your Institution with Less Debt and More Graduates 
• Facilitate Education with a Purpose

Looking forward to our possible conversation!

Dr. Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
760.801.5021(My personal cell)
mkc@mclifford.com

Featured Interview: Business Management Consultant, Michael Clifford with Mike McHugh, PART 1

Who is Mike McHugh?

Mike McHugh runs marketing for Plattform |www.plattform.com| one of the largest companies that provides inquiries for colleges and universities nationwide. He has been in the business for 15 years, and the company has just celebrated their 25-year anniversary in July. It is specifically focused on higher education and helping recruit new students.

Business Management Consultant, Michael Clifford: Do you have a clear definition of your target market, and how do you recruit students?

Higher Education Marketing Consultant, Mike McHugh: We tend to kind of think of marketing from a funnel perspective, not unlike the admissions funnel, marketing funnel, etc. So we ask ourselves, “how do we create demand in the marketplace either for individual programs; is there a lack of name recognition for institution; do consumers know about the specific program offering?” We need to know if this is a viable and/or growing degree field down through paid search, organic search and how we kind of capture people that are interested and are looking for a specific institution or that degree (but they don't know where they want to go).

So you find a lot of prospective students who have an idea of what field they want to study, but they don't know where they want to study. It is our job as marketers to help an institution figure out, “How do I capture those people that are out there looking for a home,” in order to fill their degree needs. That can run from collateral development to web marketing, traditional media, digital…anything.

Business Management Consultant, Michael Clifford: Tell me more about analyzing existing student and alumni to develop a profile to find the right kind of student. We’re now more and more in the online world--it’s not how many students you enroll, it’s the quality of the student you enroll and whether they are right for the program.

How do you do that technically and creatively?

Mike McHugh: There are multiple pieces to that. Our higher education marketing firm prefers a very data driven approach, so that even though we’ll do some qualitative measures such as focus groups, what we really get is a student population census. Essentially, we’re looking for name, address and other information about consumers. We can then use different tools to match that up against census track information, media habits, income levels by different communities. It’s a pretty rich profile around a person, and is amazing when you look at the personas we develop for all our clients.

Our marketing firm can help them understand where their students shop, and how they use products:

• Are they a Whole Foods kind of consumer, or are they a Costco?
• Are they buying things in bulk?
• Do they rent or do they own?
• What’s the estimated household income where they live?
• What kind of magazines do they read?
• Where do they tend to go on vacation?

Once we get a good understanding of what this student looks like outside of the classroom we have an understanding of how we actually message to them and what things are important to them.

• Are they career advancers?
• Are they career changers?
• Are they looking for a degree for mastery, or is it more of a utilitarian approach?

The degree is a means to an end as opposed to just an end in and of itself. Our higher education marketing consultants want to be able to understand that so we can understand how to reach them: how do we find the right message points that are going to resonate with that consumer.

Business Management Consultant, Michael Clifford: If you were the president of a college about to embark on launching an online degree program, what are the first 2-4 steps from a marketing perspective that you would take?

Mike McHugh: The first thing that I would do from a marketing perspective is start at the end! I’m a very big Stephen Covey fan, “begin with the end in mind.” What are the degrees that that students need in order to accomplish their goals? What’s the job market look like wherever I’m going be recruiting? What’s growing, what’s in demand, what’s not being served? If I can start there and have a good, positive outcome for students, I think I’m going to be successful.

Next, I want to figure out what degrees - what programs - I want to have in order to help students achieve those outcomes. Then I start working on how to promote those. Ultimately, if you’ve got a great product, it will promote itself to a certain extent. Next our higher education marketing firm figures out whether it’s TV, newspaper or the radio and what keywords. Those kind of tactical decisions are less important than right product, right place and right message. Those are the most important things to focus on.


Stay Tuned for Part 2

To continue reading Mike McHugh’s fascinating insights into higher education marketing practices for Christian colleges and universities, stay tuned for the second installment of this six-part article series, coming next week.

Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about our education management consulting firm Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, Contact Us.

Remember, our goal is simple:

• Provide Broader Access
• Lower Tuition and Fees
• Leave your Institution with Less Debt and More Graduates
• Facilitate Education with a Purpose

Looking forward to our possible conversation!

Dr. Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
760.801.5021(My personal cell)
mkc@mclifford.com

Higher Education Consulting: Online Education is the New Endowment...

Higher education management consultant, Dr. Michael K. Clifford, talks about the necessity of modern universities and colleges getting online.

Well, we are all facing yet another incoming enrollment for the fall!

Significant Systems, our unique nonprofit higher education consulting organization, offers money, management, and marketing to help enhance online operations to provide surplus funding for a select number of high-quality institutions. We believe:

“Online Education is the New Endowment”

For Example: An endowment of $100 million is usually allowed to spend approximately 4% of the return-on-investment each year. Our higher education management firm’s model will show how 1,500 online students are equal to a 4% return-on-investment on a $100 million endowment.

15,000 online students offer a return-on-investment equal to a $1 billion endowment for your institution.

Which begs the question: how long will it take your Development Office to generate a $100 million+ endowment versus how quickly we can collaboratively generate 1,500 or more online students?

We are seeking to fund institutions that are perfectly positioned to take advantage of our no risk funding. Our higher education consulting firm offers our unparalleled successful experience in helping to create, plus manage, the most successful online higher education schools ever created.

Please consider scheduling a 15-minute phone call with me personally to dream together about creating a proven new model for your institution to help broaden access using technology to reach more people with your Mission-Objective, while creating significant financial stability via surplus for your institution?

Sincerely,

Dr. Michael K Clifford, Chairman

Dr. Michael Clifford is a higher education thought leader and entrepreneur with a passion for making higher education attainable to anyone with the dream of a degree.

Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about our education management consulting firm Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, Contact Us.

Remember, our goal is simple:

• Provide Broader Access
• Lower Tuition and Fees
• Leave your Institution with Less Debt and More Graduates
• Facilitate Education with a Purpose

Looking forward to our possible conversation

Dr. Michael K. Clifford
Chairman
760.801.5021(My personal cell)
mkc@mclifford.com