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

Re-Learning Education: A Profile of Our Chief Higher Education Consultant, Dr. Michael Clifford

The Huffington Post profiles Michael Clifford, Chairman of SignificantSystems.org.

He never went to college. But there's no arguing he knows a bit about education. And Michael Clifford - Chairman of SignificantFederation - has found himself comfortably sitting in the middle of the conversation about what is best for the future of higher education. The debate, however, has often been considerably less than collegial.

Change can make the old school uncomfortable.

There is money in education, even for non-profit institutions. But for-profit and online universities have begun to proliferate across the American landscape, and the Internet. They prompt questions that challenge traditional thinking about public institutions like state universities, community colleges, and even private colleges. Higher education consultants and analysts often suggest that profit margins, essential to please shareholders, will force a cost cutting that affects quality but increases revenue. Almost everyone, however, acknowledges the old models are no longer adequate to meet educational demands.

But higher education management consultant, Dr. Michael Clifford, is optimistic about a transition that he is helping to facilitate.

"The future of higher education in America is very positive," Clifford said. "Because there is a generation currently under 35 years old that understands innovation, especially in technology, with a true passion of reaching the world with high quality academic opportunities."

Michael K. Clifford's expertise as a higher education consultant is on his resume, and the NYSE for public scrutiny. He was instrumental in the creation of Grand Canyon University (GCU), the Jack Welch Management Institute, Ken Blanchard College of Business, Forbes Business School, and the predecessor company that became Bridgepoint Education.

From a business standpoint, whatever Clifford is doing, ultimately, appears to work. Wall Street investors made the IPO for GCU (just four years after his investment group recreated it) the most successful of 2008, and the school became the first regionally accredited university in American history to convert from non-profit to for-profit.

"I help create the higher education marketing strategy, but the CEO's and their management teams make it happen," said Clifford. "I have had many more failures than successes. It is OK to fail with integrity, but one must keep moving forward."

Bridgepoint also went public a year later and has given investors a 60 percent return with a market cap of $900 million. Marketing materials claim a $10,000 investment at that time is now worth more than $1,000,000. GCU, which is just one of Clifford's visions of for profit institutions, has 10,000 students living on the 110 acre campus in Phoenix and a total of 50,000 are enrolled online. Clifford is unique as an investor because he originally owned one hundred percent of the start-up companies that experienced back-to-back major Wall Street IPOs. A man of deep and abiding faith, Clifford believes his achievements and his losses are provided for by his God.

And he has known mostly success.

For-profit and online education, however, are consistently under attack for costs and quality of education, and the inevitable question is whether a profit motive detracts from educational standards.

"Every industry has bad apples," Clifford said. "There are people in the for-profit industry that I personally would put in jail for deceiving students. But it is not American to apply regulations just for for-profit schools when many non-profit institutions have equal or more severe misconduct."

The federal government provides billions annually to non-profit public universities and the private for-profit institutions, overwhelmingly in the form of student loans. (The debt, once acquired, cannot be discharged by bankruptcy and has been characterized often as predatory lending by Washington.)

Open enrollment means that the moment a student signs up for Grand Canyon University or any institution they are eligible to apply for Pell Grants and other government assistance. According to critics, those grants and loans and the profit motive are more important than the quality of education delivered online or on campus at a for profit university.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who studied for-profits, issued a report condemning their business and the value of the education offered.

"You will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on higher education marketing strategies and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation," said the Iowa Democrat, who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "These practices are not the exception; they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions."

Harkin's 2012 report claimed the majority of students leave without a degree and that half of them drop out within four months. The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) called the study the "result of a flawed process that has unfairly targeted private-sector schools and their students."

Although Clifford has never created a school with the vocational status of those represented by APSCU, his higher education consulting company, SignificantFederation, has helped develop profitable education institutions around combining the notion of quality online learning with a traditional campus environment. His family has also donated millions to non-profit educational institutions.

As more students get turned away from competitive non-profit and public universities, and community colleges reach their capacity, Clifford believes the private sector can deliver a valuable education at a competitive price. If enrollment and economic impacts are accurate metrics, his argument is convincing.

"Every school I have been involved in has lower tuition than any school in their respective state," Clifford points out regarding Harkin's reports.

Clifford's higher education marketing research and consulting endeavors include:

•    10,000 new jobs created in the last eight years,

•    500 million in real estate construction during a down economy,

•    Resources and compensation for faculty unlike any other traditional universities,

•    Hundreds of thousands of students completing their degrees,

•    Tens of millions of dollars of scholarship money for under-privileged students to graduate, and

•    Increasing thought leadership to improve the student experience.

In America, he is convinced the next big shift in the entire higher education model will be with community colleges.

"As economies explode in Asia, India, and places like Brazil, you simply can't meet demand with the traditional four year university," he said. "Partnerships are being formed where you can design your own degree. There are already six million people doing online college now and it will be fifteen million in the next five years. How many people can afford the costs of four-year degree any more?"

Clifford's success as a higher education consultant makes a compelling argument that traditional educational models are not meeting demand or quickly adapting to new technologies for learning. He is beginning to concentrate a part of his business on managing technological services for higher education because students are accessing most of their education from various wireless devices.

The vision Clifford has for education involves online universities with tens of millions of global citizens learning incrementally how to provide better lives for themselves and their families via mobile devices.

"We will see soon in our lifetimes," he said, "Mega Universities leveraging platforms like the billion dollar investment of Apple with iBooks and iTunes U globally. That's where online education really gets exciting."

The current manifestations of for-profit universities may be struggling against a reputation developed by earlier versions of technical schools that offered culinary, automotive, and various vocational training programs. They continue to flourish in an economy where jobs are increasingly difficult to find. However, marketing efforts often leave potential students believing they will become million dollar a year chefs or CTOs of Fortune 500 companies, and that is statistically unlikely.

There is no doubt, however, technology is increasing access to education, and that is driving demand. The new challenge is to sustain standards along with profit margins.

Which is a lesson American innovators have long taught the world.

Source: The Huffington Post

Contact Significant Systems

To learn more about Dr. Michael Clifford and Significant Systems, check out our website. If you have any interest in pursuing our new model of education for your institution, don’t hesitate to 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 Consultants Ask: “Does Your College Have an Online Degree Program Yet?”

Higher education has been changing rapidly over the past two decades because of the Internet. This article explains what your college institution needs to do in order to survive – and thrive –in the age of the Internet.

I have been learning so much about the future by traveling around the country and meeting with University and College Presidents. Since the beginning of online education two decades ago, the landscape of higher education has changed more than any other education industry. It’s moving so rapidly that few people actually realize what is truly going on. Our minds evolved to think in a linear fashion, but now that we have exponential technologies, the world no longer changes in a linear way.

Enrollments in traditional college education are beginning to decline for the first time in history, report higher education consultants and many are asking “why?” Billions of dollars have been spent on higher education marketing firms to advertise the benefits of online education, and this has created an entirely new marketing environment. Digital college education is on the rise. Students are now going to college on their mobile devices in lieu of spending 4+ years of their life living in a dorm room setting while incurring massive student loan debt. Education is getting cheaper and it’s going mobile.

Brick-and-mortar educational settings, as well as online educational institutions, are getting increasingly competitive. Those who fail to evolve and innovate rapidly will inevitably go out of business, warn higher education consultants. While in the past, this change happened slowly in education, today’s changes are occurring rapidly.

It’s more important now than ever to carve out a niche of your own in order to attract exactly the right type of student for your programs. Instead of attracting a handful of students for 200+ different majors and minors, you may only want to attract students who want to, for example, become graphic designers.

“If you don’t choose a niche and you try to be everything to everybody, your institution will be nothing to no one,” say higher education marketing firms.

Did you know that by 2020, the number of Internet users will be double what it is today? In addition, nearly every individual in the world will have access to a smartphone. A new social media site crops up nearly every day, and each year a handful of those become the next big thing in social media. It’s the new reality that we are all facing.

How does this affect higher education? Well, students who were born between 1982 and 2002 are what many call “digital natives.” Those students have been using a computer their entire lives. Therefore, they expect a college education to take place in a digital environment. After all, this is also how they interact with their friends and family. The old ways employed by higher education marketing firms (newspapers, television, billboards) are not reaching these digital natives. Most of them have never subscribed to a local newspaper and few would even pay twenty-five cents to get one. Why? Their twitter feed already tells them everything that is happening in the world that they would ever want to know.

While the Millennials have always been comfortable with digital technologies, in today’s world most Baby Boomers are also comfortable with using Facebook, Pinterest, and Google. They, too, are interested in online educational settings that focus on their individual interests. Those reaching retirement age may be interested in taking an online college class in photography, creative writing, or painting in order to have a part-time form of income during retirement, say higher education consultants.

The message from higher education marketing firms is loud and clear to college and university Presidents and Dean: if you want to keep up enrollment and remain contemporary, you’ve got to expand your services to the vast online consumer base.