836: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with David Gladson, Associate Vice President, Marketing Office, Point Loma Nazarene University

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, recording episodes here at Insights EDU, Phoenix, Arizona. The conference is put on by our great friends at Education Dynamics. What a conference it has been. I've been podcasting my behind off and Elvin Freytes, co-founder of the EdUp Experience podcast has not taken his eyes off his computer. He's been producing and flipping and editing and doing all these things, putting out as many podcast episodes as we can so you can feel like you're here live at this conference.

One of the things that we like to do is interview people who want to come on this podcast and feel like they have something to say. That's what the EdUp Experience is all about. When I say it's your podcast, I mean you get to dictate the content. We have somebody that stopped by a couple times. He said, "You know what, this looks interesting. I want to talk to you about my university." I said, "Yes, let's do it." And we're bringing them here live to the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, it's David Gladson and he's Associate VP of Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. What's up, Dave?

David Gladson: Hey, thanks for letting me come on today.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We had to reschedule a couple of times, but we finally got you here. We actually had Jamie Turgeon on, J.B. Brownlee Turgeon on earlier from Point Loma Nazarene University. But remind us, tell us about Point Loma. What do you do? How do you do it? Who do you serve?

David Gladson: Yeah, so I'm the leader of the central marketing team. We serve undergraduate admissions, graduate admissions. We serve alumni and advancement. So we do it all. We're kind of in that 50-50 space. Half of our students are that traditional coming-of-age on-campus experience. Half are online and at regional campuses around the San Diego area. So really a mix of audiences.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Cool. I'm going to jump in real fast because I want to learn more. How many students do you have? Where exactly are you located again? And you said you serve alumni. How do you do that?

David Gladson: Yeah. So our office produces the alumni magazine. We produce a lot of material for the advancement office, all their annual reports and all that print material. So we do that in addition to the marketing for the two different admissions teams.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Gotcha. How many students do you have? How many alumni do you have?

David Gladson: We're about 5,000 students. Again, half on campus, half regional and online. Maybe 50,000 graduates in the past 30 years. Don't quote me on that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You're always quoted here on the EdUp Experience podcast. That's part of it. Man, what's the trend? More online students, more on-ground students? If you're half and half, what's trending? What are you marketing for or toward more often? Is it equal? There's only so much shelf space, only so much money and so much shelf space. So balancing what you're marketing toward or for is really important. Is it based on program? Is it based on student type and what trends? A lot of questions in there, Dave, just pick one.

David Gladson: Yeah. So our traditional campus is really difficult to grow. We're between a military base, a really expensive neighborhood and the ocean. We're right there on the Pacific Ocean. So not a lot of opportunity to grow that traditional coming-of-age experience, but all that opportunity to grow the graduate, the online. How can we serve those traditional students coming through into that graduate degree? How can we serve the workforce needs in San Diego? Creating new degrees that meet those needs that we weren't meeting even 10 years ago.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I have a question. How does anybody get any work done in San Diego? I mean, it's gorgeous over there. You know, I've never been, but I hear it's sunny. It's beautiful. San Diego. I've never been to San Diego, man. And seriously, Dave, how do people work with that beautiful sun and weather?

David Gladson: You surf first and you go to work.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you kidding me? That's awesome. He's dead serious. He's not even laughing.

David Gladson: I'm not even laughing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Surf first and you go to work. I find it hard to believe. No, I don't. I totally believe that, man. That's awesome. It's different. I was in Southern California for four years, I'll be honest. I wasn't in San Diego, which is nice outside of L.A. The weather is always nice. I mean, there's always, you know, but it's like anything else when I was living in Colorado and I pass the mountains every day. Eventually, I stopped seeing them. When you live somewhere, you start to take it for granted a little bit. So it's like going to work anywhere else. Although when you go outside at the end of the day, it's not minus four degrees. Like it might be in New York City or where in St. Louis where I live, it's probably 74 degrees. So it's like 74 degrees in the morning when you wake up and 74 degrees when you go to bed at night.

What's your selling point? You know, I'm always curious to kind of find out what differentiates you? Because obviously for people outside of California, San Diego, you're talking about San Diego. I mean, that's amazing, right? Those who are there in your backyard, they're like, "Eh, you know, I'm from here." Like, why should I come? I mean, that is the challenge, right?

David Gladson: For that student coming from out of state, we have that beachfront experience. You know, we are a private Christian institution, so that is a selling point for a lot of our audience. So the traditional undergrad experience is somewhat easier to sell. It appeals to a lot of people. The online and graduate is a lot harder to differentiate. How do we show a truly differentiated product? It is a lot harder.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, gotcha. How do you spread your dollars? Like thinking about traditional digital, you know, billboards and you know, the geo that you're in versus national because you know, the monies, it's much harder to compete on the national level. Because if you're going online, you're competing against big online universities, it drives up your costs. If you're going regional, do you have competitors that are probably well, California's got so many stinking schools, you know, they're all around. How do you spend? You know, what are your spending strategies like?

David Gladson: Yeah, we've made some really big strides the last five years in centralizing the marketing dollars and really being able to do so much more with them.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Was it decentralized before, by area? Everybody got money or different?

David Gladson: Exactly. Yeah. Five years ago, every program had its own little tiny marketing budget and we were supposed to spend marketing dollars for that specific program. So doing really segmented, really micro trying to target for individual programs, highly inefficient, no budget for brand building. We've now over the course of many years brought that all together into a single budget where we're able to do true brand level marketing. We are now spending just under half of our marketing budget on brand level advertising and the other half on that more program specific conversion advertising. And we're seeing the results from it. I mean, our conversion rate to enrollment from digital advertising has gone from like 2% to 7%.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Wow. Trying to go to 100%. I mean, we all have to have goals. That would be nice. So I want to know, I want to jump in. So talk to us a little bit more about where are you spending? Right. And what's happening there? What are you guys doing on that platform? Is it YouTube? I mean, I keep hearing YouTube is where it's at, for you guys, maybe somewhere else.

David Gladson: It is very regional. So we spend a vast majority of our marketing dollars in the San Diego region or Orange County, Riverside, Imperial Valley, really, really close to San Diego.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Online, not hurting for population to market to around those areas. Right. There's a fair audience there.

David Gladson: Online is for our backyard. We will take online students from out of area. We have tried some different strategies to try to expand out of area, have not had much success so far. We're still struggling to build that strong enough brand reputation to draw on those out of area students. But for our local students, online is a great option for them. And that's where we're seeing that growth is those online students from our backyard.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you doing any type of billboards, buses? What are you guys doing like that?

David Gladson: Yeah, we do out of home. So we do the boards in San Diego. We've done buses and trolley wraps before.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. Also a very expensive market to do all that stuff. Yeah, that's the DMA in San Diego. DMA is like up there in terms of what it costs to do out of home, outdoor stuff. It's very expensive. So you have to make sure you're maximizing your spend.

David Gladson: Exactly. And making sure that we can keep setting those KPIs where we can show the value long term because you don't see that return from the brand spend immediately. It's not for that next upcoming enrollments, but over time we see that rise every single quarter of better conversion metrics and it's that consistent brand messaging that's creating that bullseye.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So where's the mouth? How do you track that? How do you... I mean, references, referrals. Tell us about that.

David Gladson: And that's all organic. I mean, on the paid side, it's, you know, it's the out of home, it's the digital radio, it's the over-the-top TV, digital TV.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You guys are doing that too? Okay, cool. Nice.

David Gladson: Obviously a lot of Google AdWords, but everything else it's organic. And I don't spend a lot of time trying to disaggregate those different organic sources. I paid and organic and...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. Cause you're hoping for lift, right? Are you just hoping for overall lead lift? From your organic, it's hard to distill that down by source, you know, cause billboards and TV are like the two most mythical creatures that exist if you're running, you know, you try to, you know, if you're running TV or ads, maybe they heard that ad for the third time and they saw the billboard and they saw your website and it's the third touch point, you know, so how do you gauge it? You're looking for overall lift.

And you know, one of the ways that you can market is by program and you talked about it, you talked about, you know, about the percentage of your dollars goes to program marketing. Do you feed the winners only? Or do you try to evenly spend across programs? This is something that I deal with as a marketer myself at my institution. Obviously, every faculty member, every academic wants to grow their program. You know, "Why can't we get more interest in my program?" And sometimes I'm going, "There is no interest in your program. You know, we tried to run ads. We've tried to get it, but nobody wants this program. Maybe it's not a good program. Maybe it's in decline across the nation." There's so many variables. How do you think about program marketing?

David Gladson: Yeah, I mean, as much as possible, I want to feed the winners. I mean, a great example is our school of education had no ad dollars in the past. They never requested them, so they didn't have an ad budget. They're our highest converting program within the campaign. So I try to put as much dollars there as I can, because that's where we see the students come in. If I can show return on investment, if I can show these ads are bringing in students who enroll, yeah, I'm gonna try to divert as many dollars towards those programs as possible.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Do you have faculty or deans or whoever come to you and go, "Dave, Dave, what are you doing for my program, man? What are you doing to grow my program?"

David Gladson: Yes, all the time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And then I talk about nothing what we're doing on the organic side. That's funny. It's funny because it's common across higher ed. There's always a return question. "What are you doing to grow your program?" Like, let's talk about organic activities. Can you go put set up a table somewhere? Can we go to the local high schools if you're trying to grow traditional? What are the other things that we can do? There's shoe leather and elbow grease that goes into marketing, too. It's not just digital ad spend. There's a lot of ways that you can develop interest and not everyone is motivated to do so. What do you do to keep that motivation going for everybody to really be on board with marketing and sales?

David Gladson: Yeah, I mean, it's also asking those questions like, are there barriers to your program that we can remove? Like, let's do a deep dive. Let's compare against other programs. How can we make your program easier to market? Easier to sell? To use that word that nobody wants to hear? But it's true. But yeah, it's the reality. Like, if I did every strategy that got sent my way, I'd run out of ad dollars really quickly, and we wouldn't have results. So holding that line, staying true to the numbers, staying true to the KPIs. That is the hard part of the job, but that is the job.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. What else do you want to say about... wait, can I ask a question? Yeah. Well, no. Yeah, I guess. So, Insights EDU, this is your first time. Have you been here before? Tell us about your experience.

David Gladson: Yeah. I came last year to Insights, you know, usually do other ones like, American Marketing Association or Higher Ed Web, but yeah, second year here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Nice. Very positive. Love the lineup of speakers. I've got a whole notebook full of inspirations to go back.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Sure. Which one's the biggest one? What do you think? Pick one. I know you got a bunch and don't say it was something that Joe said. Don't feed my ego is what he's saying.

David Gladson: One that I'm excited to take back towards our enrollment planning team is what would it look like to build some of these industry certifications as credit into a degree program. How could we take getting a Salesforce certification and giving that as credit towards an MBA with a specialization in... like, is that even possible? Would faculty be willing?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yes, it's possible. Question is, who's going to do it? Like you said, faculty, that's really where it comes down to. Anything is possible if you want to take it. If you have motivated faculty that want to take it and give credit for it, you absolutely can. There is nothing that says that you can't. Only desire and willingness, which means you got to move those people along with you. Good luck.

David Gladson: Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What else do you want to say about Point Loma Nazarene University? Anything at all? Open mic.

David Gladson: I'll say I said it all.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you heard him here. He is our guest. He's your guest. He's David Gladson, an Associate VP of Marketing, Point Loma Nazarene University. You've just had EdUp.