830: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Brian Curtin, President, Cantab Strategy

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio winding down here at day one. I've got this episode with my esteemed guest and maybe one more depending on what juice I have left in the tank, if you will. The cocktail hour is coming up, and I would like to make that cocktail hour at least half an hour if it comes to it. But these conversations are too important to skip when we have a guest who wants to talk about what's going on in higher education today.

We're here recording episodes at the Insights EDU conference put on by Education Dynamics, all about marketing enrollment in higher education. It's a conference you don't want to miss. If you missed it this year, you don't want to miss it next year. One person that's not missing it this year is my guest here. He is Brian Curtin, president at Cantab Strategy. What's going on, Brian? How are you?

Brian Curtin: Doing great, Joe. How are you?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I'm doing very well. I'm happy to get you at the end of the day here so we could talk more about higher ed. Tell me about Cantab Strategy. What do you do and how do you do it?

Brian Curtin: So I work with organizations to help them with their marketing and their strategy, from developing the marketing strategy implementation, how they're set up internally, externally, whatever it is they need.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do we need, Brian? Where are we falling down in higher ed marketing?

Brian Curtin: Well, the good news is higher education marketing is getting better. What everybody should be striving to achieve is a marketing strategy that's end-to-end. From the time before a prospective student even hears about the organization, all the way to when they inquire about the institution. Hopefully, they enroll through the student process and even as an alumnus. Organizations, particularly higher ed institutions, really need to focus on what it is that we represent, what we are offering, and getting that sort of brand promise throughout the whole marketing process, not only in the marketing process but the experience with the actual institution.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Is the brand promise missing? Are we doing it? Because I always talk about the repackaging of higher ed, we need to get better at marketing what we do, which is why the value, I think, has been the ROI piece. But all of a sudden, the value of a degree is not there, and we don't do enough to say what the value is, in my opinion. So here's a repackaging, I think, that has to happen, right?

Brian Curtin: You're absolutely right. Right now, there's a big push against what is the value of higher education. I was talking about this in a session earlier today where the institutions and the industry as a whole need to get together and create, to treat this as a crisis response. To really proactively take it head-on and say, this is what the value of higher education is. It's a little bit easier for the pre-career programs, be that business, computer, tech, healthcare. But even with humanities, there's the opportunity for them to talk about not only what they contribute to the education but society as a whole. They're valuable institutions.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And I want to go back to my original question, which is the strategy itself. Do you think that higher ed... because let me ask it a different way. There are many institutions that have been focused on a traditional learner. And all of a sudden, to get my enrollment up, I need to focus on the adult online learner. And so I'm just going to start marketing that. It was pretty easy to start talking. But it's not. How do you shift? What do you need to do? How do you need to balance? There's only so much shelf space.

Brian Curtin: It's strategy, it's vision, all these things. You need to develop what your value proposition is. The key word is the unique value proposition. Now, it's very rare that actually a unique value proposition leaps up and says, "This is why we're totally different." What you have to do is look at the institution. Look at the students you have. Look at the prospective students. Look at the faculty, the staff, the alumni. See what the reviews are about their institution and pull those things out that make that institution special. And when you kind of weave those pieces together into a narrative, that becomes your value proposition that you can talk about. Is it a hundred percent different than everyone else? No, but it's different enough that that's what you can talk about and hang your hat on. So that you're creating something within your marketing message that's not, "Hey, we're a school, come to us." Now you're giving them a reason of why they should come to that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: "Where a school, come to us" is the old "If you build it, they will come" philosophy. I'll say to my team, "You can build it and no one will come. We gotta go get them."

Brian Curtin: That's right. Marketing is an art. There are scientific parts to it, but it's an art. It's emotional. It's empathetic. You have to connect. You have to have frequencies. So that's where the science comes in, and you have to have important messaging and call to actions. And there's a sophistication that comes with good marketing strategy.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: When you go in and you consult, how do you get started? Like, what does it look like? Do you do an assessment of some kind? How do you even get going?

Brian Curtin: Yeah, it's an assessment process that involves a lot of questioning. Questioning of not only the marketing team, questioning of the leadership team outside of marketing, from the head of the institution and then those sort of marketing-adjacent areas, not only enrollment, but the legal side, the finance side, compliance, talking to their external partners that they work with, talking to the agencies as well as the media partners, taking a deep look at what they're doing with their marketing, the content, the website, where they're placing their messages, what their messaging is.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Website's kind of important in all this, isn't it?

Brian Curtin: The website is huge. And that can be a great boon to an organization. But if they haven't invested their time in building a quality website that really speaks to what the prospective students want to know and not treating it as, "You're on a website, give us your information so we can just keep asking you to enroll." It has to be that repository for them to get the information they're looking for easily.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Do you ever go in and do a consulting gig and you get everything in place, you talk about all the inefficiency, and then you look at the website and go, "I don't know if I can help you guys. You got to redo your whole website."

Brian Curtin: Certainly, changing the website can be a big part of it. And if they're not willing to make the changes, it makes it much more difficult. But the clients that I work with, they want to do what's right. They want to make the changes. And so although it's not an overnight process, they are saying, "OK, we understand what you're saying. We've built out the strategy. This is what we need to change." For example, the website team would love to tell you that, "Hey, we're doing great because we're getting more clicks," but that doesn't turn into more students. Let's look at it. Let's look at it and focus on those people who do become students, what are they clicking on? And let's optimize the website.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Like heat mapping.

Brian Curtin: Exactly. Get more clicks from the right people, which may be less clicks overall, but it'll help you with the student.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Do you do user experience testing to find out where people are going, what they're clicking on, how they're navigating a website? Because you can get them there, you can have great effective marketing and get them there, and then you're going to have click-out rates and you're going to have, you know, you're going to have short sessions. And if somebody can't navigate it appropriately, you've then wasted all your money to get them there, right?

Brian Curtin: They're going somewhere else. I will work with my clients and their website partner to make sure those things are happening. I'm not the one actually doing it. And if they don't have that external partner, we'll identify that as a gap and we need to get them the right expertise to help them with the actual testing and the constant evolution of their website and getting to the right place.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: How do I know if I need marketing consulting? How do I even know? Like, what do I... how am I sure that...?

Brian Curtin: There's a couple of questions that are usually looming in your head. One is, you know, "We're spending a lot of money. I'm not sure we're getting the return. The results are not getting any better. I'm getting a lot of leads. I'm getting more leads than I got before, but I'm not getting more students." I just have this nagging thought in my mind that maybe we're missing something. We haven't taken a look in a while, and we could do a little bit better. And that's why it starts with the assessment. Because it's a, "Let's take a look at what you're doing. Let's see why you're doing it. Let's see maybe what you're not doing that might be additive to the situation." And let's kind of build that plan out and get it bought in. And one of the key pieces is getting all aspects of the organization. Marketing extends far beyond just the marketing team. Everybody in that organization is responsible for the marketing. And marketing needs to lead that conversation to get all aspects of the organization on the same page about "These are our messaging, this is our brand promise, and this is how we should deliver it."

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Now, as I lead the conversation, not dictate the conversation, because you're going to get that buy-in from the other pieces. How do we get in touch with you if we need marketing consulting?

Brian Curtin: The best way to get in touch with me is via email. Curtin, C-U-R-T-I-N at Cantabstrategy.com.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you've heard it here from Brian Curtin, all about marketing. Brian, what makes this a successful conference for you? What do you hope to take away on your way home to wherever you live? You go, "You know what? This one was worth it."

Brian Curtin: This is my second year coming to EDU Insights. And what brought me back to it is there's great data and insights presented. The Education Dynamics team does a wonderful job letting us know what's going on out in the marketplace, what trends they're seeing, and they've been doing it over a period of years. And already just in day one, there have been some great stuff presented.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can contact Brian if you need higher ed marketing consulting. I know that he will be there and provide you great service. Brian, thanks for being on the podcast today. We appreciate it.

Brian Curtin: Joe, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Great time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you just EdUpped.