819: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Elizabeth Rice, Patricia Velázquez, & Andrew Fleischer, Google

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. I have done this intro a few times over 850 or so times the last four years. Who knows how many. Interviewing of course over 250 or so college and university presidents, over 800 people in and around higher education. We've had guests, we've had co-hosts, we've had guest co-hosts. We've had so many people talking about higher ed and we've done it, we think, in a fun way. 

We're doing it here at Insights EDU conference put on by Education Dynamics all about marketing and enrollment for the online student. Why is that important? Because well, you probably need more online students and you probably need ways to get those online students and they're making really, really fast decisions.

Speaking of which, and going back to what I just said, how do you find these online students? Well, one way is you market to them. You use ads. So I don't know what kind of ads you might use, but we're going to find out. Hint, hint. Ladies and gentlemen, my guests today, Andrew Fleischer, he's head of industry. Patricia Velasquez and Elizabeth Rice, all from Google. Patricia is the strategy and insights lead for education and Elizabeth is partner lead. OK, now I can take a breath. What's up, you guys? How you doing?

Guests: All good.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All good. Everybody good. Why are you all so late today? Did you have flight delays or were you on time? What did we miss?

Guest: Well, you missed a day of podcasting. Obviously.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, obviously you missed great presentations that you probably already know about. But that's all right. How are you? Everybody good? Jet lag?

Guest: No, we're excited to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Great. Good. Good. You guys, are you sure you're ready? You seem tired. Is everybody tired? Are you awake?

Guest: Well, we all have our coffee now.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We all have our coffee. Necessary. Well, you know what, guys, what are we doing here today? We're talking about marketing to online students. So let's start with you, Andrew, a head of industry at Google. Why is Google so important? This is the worst question I've ever asked. Why is Google so important to getting in touch with students online? What role do you play for these colleges and universities here? What are you doing here?

Andrew Fleischer: You know, our role continues to evolve as the ecosystem evolves. Google is fundamentally a search platform. When someone's searching, they demonstrate the highest level of intent and they're raising their hand saying we want this service, in this case online education, and then we help our partners show up at the right time. But that journey has changed. It's not as linear, it's not as straightforward anymore. So we have to meet the students at multiple touch points. So it's not just search. It's YouTube. It's across the display network. It's helping these online institutions build their brand, get into the consideration set, nurture them as they're doing a plethora of research. This is the largest decision that a lot of these prospective students are making financially. They're trying to change their life, change their financial future. And we're there to help different institutions show up at the right place at the right time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well said. Well said. Patricia, over to you. Insights strategy, insights lead. What are you doing? What kind of work do you do and how does it contribute to higher ed and our understanding of how to get in touch with students?

Patricia Velasquez: I think I have the best job of this group of us. I get to keep a pulse on the market. So I do all the research, all the market trends and just try to have the voice of the student always in everything we do. So whenever we're working with all of our partners, essentially we want to make sure that we're bringing the student voice and make sure that that journey that is changing is ever present in everything that we do in terms of suggestions and I relay that back to our head of industry over here, Andrew, our partner lead here, Elizabeth, and together we essentially package that solution, that view of the student in a way that makes it more feasible to keep growing enrollments and just get the right student at the right time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what I heard you say is these guys cannot do their job without you. I mean, in so many words.

Patricia Velasquez: Totally like it is.

Elizabeth Rice: She's being humble. She makes us sound smart. In fact, some of her most recent research has shared that search continues to be the number one place where people come when they want to change their lives. If they are looking for a master's in business administration, if they are looking for a bachelor's degree that they can afford, if they are looking to up-level their nursing credentials, the number one place that they come is always search. But the other thing that's so interesting is that people don't always know what they need. And so to find them in these moments that matter across that consideration set, they need to use all of these different products all over the web. And we can help them. We can help these partners here bring those solutions to their students, to their future students that might not even know.

Patricia Velasquez: That is correct. One of the things that was really interesting from the research and everything that we have observed is during the pandemic, everyone went online, right? And people thought, well, things will come back to, quote unquote, normal. And then all of a sudden we realized that normal is online. That is normal now. The modern student is what they're calling it today. So students are searching a lot. They're searching with more intent. They're searching for their next academic step. And it is up to everyone here at this conference and that works in higher education to make sure that they're there for them, for that student that is looking for them.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What are you all doing here? What are your expectations? You're here, you're talking to university partners, you're talking to Education Dynamics. What are your goals for Google here? What relationship building? Is it networking? Is it doing the business? What are the goals?

Andrew Fleischer: You know, there are a few. We partner very closely with Education Dynamics, so we're thrilled to be here and we're thrilled to help support them. Patricia and I are speaking tomorrow morning going over some of those trends in higher education and how marketers can capture demand in this new world. I'm speaking on a panel in a bit with some colleagues from other places like Salesforce and LinkedIn, which I'm excited for. And it's important for us to show up at these types of events. We feel that we are the connective tissue in this higher education ecosystem, especially as it shifts to online in this digital wave.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: For those of you that are listening here, Patricia, as we weren't sure if she was an AI program, or if she was a real person. She's real. We've been getting these emails from her randomly over the last two years. It's been two years. I feel like it's been longer than that, right?

Patricia Velasquez: A long time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: She's like, you guys need to do this. I'm like, okay, whatever you say. It's like she's a very direct AI program. She is a real person. She's awesome. You do great work. And we've been privileged to work with you. And shout out to John Farrar who has co-hosted many episodes on this podcast before and hopefully will you all. Yeah and hopefully you all co-host with me at some point. Open offer for you. But online higher education is evolving. It's getting harder to reach people. The journey that they're taking through education. Elizabeth I'll come to you with this is it's like a it's not direct it's curvy nonlinear.

Elizabeth Rice: Thank you very much for that. Yes, I said curvy.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I was really getting technical. Professional podcasting was way better. I'm very professional. How important is it to try and understand that journey? Because we're spending significant dollars with Google through marketing partners. We have to know how to spend it.

Elizabeth Rice: Absolutely. And I don't think it's really on us to understand every individual's journey. I think what we have now are a set of tools that can really speak to this. And those tools come in the form of AI from Google. And they come in the form of AI in predictive machine learning. And they come in the form of AI for creative messaging tailored towards the right audience. And they come in the form of AI in terms of measurement and modeling. So I think the way that we can understand each unique one of these journeys is, I mean, there are infinite journeys, right? But the way that AI can kind of learn that ahead of time, and we can use our predictive models to help find those students is really a unique offering that Google and the partners can come together and use the best of their resources to find those students.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You said AI. I know I want to just hand in this. I'll open it up. Should we do a word count? How many times do we say AI here? It's been a couple times so far, but I'm assuming that Google, we push the limits of science and technology. That's probably been happening in the background for a long time. When you say AI, we're like, wow, Chat GPT, I'm guessing and educated guess that AI has been built into the algorithms at Google for a very long time. Can you just speak to it? Like what's happening with AI, Google, how there's a it's escaping me. I had it the search console. Now is it the Google search console? That's like the next level of search. Yeah, that's the right. But schools can kind of up their game through the Google Analytics platform and so on. Just talk about what's going on with AI Google.

Andrew Fleischer: AI is the foundation for everything that we're doing as far as marketing goes today and going forward. When you rewind, you think about the beginning of search. Marketers used to have to upload a list of keywords and pick specific words that they wanted to remember. This. That's no longer the case. Right. If we can understand what you as the marketer wants to achieve, we could optimize everything towards that and we could automate everything through AI to achieve that. So you get rid of keywords, AI powered keywords. You stop bidding on a cost per click basis and you bid to that action that you want, whether it's an application or an enrollment. And we were talking about meeting students where they are through different places in the journey. That's YouTube and it's serving the right message at the right time to the right person. That's all powered by AI.

Patricia Velasquez: I was actually, now you mentioned YouTube. I was talking to as part of the research, I was talking to one prospective nursing student and she was telling me, you know, I was actually looking at videos of a day in the life of a nursing student at X school. I was like, you know what? So we talked to me about this and she started unpacking why and she needed to visualize herself there. And she already came in with a preconceived notion of, are the schools that I want to apply to. But then she started unpacking more and learning more and seeing herself more there. And at that point, she started pivoting a little bit and she's now enrolled. She is on her way to become a nurse. But that just tells you students are searching in a different way. They want to learn about programs in a different way. And we essentially have to keep up by using the right tools. And that's not something that can be done manually as it was in the past.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And that's just one journey, right? So that is one piece of anecdata is the word I like to use.

Patricia Velasquez: Anecdata?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anecdata. Done. That feels made up.

Elizabeth Rice: When you think about the thousands and thousands and thousands of those student journeys that are happening every single day, whether that's for a bachelor's degree, whether that's for a parent who's looking for the right next step for their younger child, whatever it is, we need to be able to speak to all of those students. And there's no way for a college, a university, a K through 12 program to really know the unique trigger for every single one of those folks. But what we can do is we can use predictive modeling and we can use kind of this backbone of AI to help find that point of truth, that zero moment of truth.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I got to ask you guys one more quick question. Would you all allow Alvin to ask one question? Alvin, you just made the list. I had a cat named Alvin once.

Elizabeth Rice: No way. Seriously?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: He had these little Elvis ears and he was orange.

Elizabeth Rice: What's his name? Alvin?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No, Alvin. Like that.

Elizabeth Rice: Elizabeth, we're best friends. E.L.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love it. Okay. Inconceivable. Anecdata. Listen. Andrew, you said you were giving a presentation, right? Can you give us a scoop about what you're going to talk about specifically? Can you like anything you can say, any trends you was on? And you could give up now. Patricia, can we give a little sneak peek? A sneak peek something. What do you got?

Andrew Fleischer: So we're going to talk about what we see as the three biggest shifts or trends in higher education. We talked about this earlier. The student journey is no longer linear. It's nonlinear, and understanding your first party data as an institution and leveraging your first party data is key to being successful in this nonlinear student journey. The second piece of this is the focus on outcomes and ROI that the students have. It's no longer an institution is based on sort of just purely academics. The student wants to understand if I invest this much money into this degree, this short course, this boot camp, this certificate. What will I get?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do I get? What's in it for me?

Andrew Fleischer: Exactly. What will my salary uplift be? What does my career trajectory look like from this investment? The third piece, you know, we sort of coined this as expansion. If you think back 2008, there was a recession. It was the first time in a long time that birth rates in the US started to decrease. Fast forward 18 years, we're going to be at that point soon where high school graduates in the U.S. is going to be on a decline for the first time in a very long time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It's fuzzy math. I think it adds up.

Andrew Fleischer: Yeah, I think so. But you can't just keep looking in the same place. You have to expand where you're looking for students, especially with access to online education. If you're a local school in San Francisco, you can have a prospective student sitting in New York. Or better yet, you can have someone sitting in India. Where international pursuing, we talk about the international expansion is one of the biggest opportunities in higher ed today, especially when you look at a market that puts a premium on education and willing to spend a higher portion of household income to support that education like India. 

So we're going to go into those three things and then we're going to give the marketers in the room the takeaways and how they action on it. And ultimately, you know, we're here with Education Dynamics. You know, my team, Patricia, Elizabeth, Kern, who's in the background taking photos here. Shout out to Kern. Yeah, man. Hey, how you doing? Partners closely with the folks at Education Dynamics on a daily basis. And, you know, we're here to help meet them in the moment to capture this opportunity.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What does success look like for you guys here at this conference? You walk away and you're on your flight home. Is it connections networking? What does success look like for you? What makes this a good conference for you?

Elizabeth Rice: It's already been successful. I'll pay you later for that. I think if we have everybody in the audience understands that Google has been an AI company for the last nine years and that this has been built in to every single one of the products that they use that Education Dynamics uses as part of their partnership. I think that would be successful. What do you think?

Patricia Velasquez: Yeah. One thing I would add is in order to move and implement these AI technologies, you have to measure them. And I think that's something that we keep on repeating and repeating because if you don't, there's a great saying that our team always repeats and it's if it gets measured, it gets managed. The only way you're going to move forward is if you measure everything and that's how you're going to get results. You're going to grow, you're going to grow your enrollments and expand.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: 100 percent. Schools aren't really good at measuring by the way most schools are and there's some really really good schools. In fact, one of the things I've noticed I used to work in for-profit higher education and the for-profits were way better at measuring and management than the nonprofits were. And in fact, some of the big big nonprofits that exist today have employees from the for-profit sector who have worked themselves in and changed the way we look at information that I call the best of the for-profit higher ed mixed with the best of what nonprofit higher ed is. And that's when you really start to make a great institution that looks at things. I do want to address what you talked about, Elizabeth, the AI is embedded in things. And you guys are the experts I'm not. But I do know that when you're bidding on terms, those costs can be managed through your AI programs. And it's not like manual management any longer. Optimization of buys, optimizations of clicks, all of that's built in so that the institution is not overspending or underspending to get the results they need, right?

Elizabeth Rice: Correct. That's layman's terms. That's exactly right. And they're no longer bidding towards a keyword like they were 10 years ago. They're bidding towards the outcome. They're bidding towards the lead or the enrollment or the application that they want. And so I think that that's a crucial piece of the puzzle too.

Andrew Fleischer: I'll add one thing, Joe, to piggyback off something you said a few minutes ago about higher ed institutions aren't good with data historically. Well, we're in Phoenix. We're in Scottsdale's backyard.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Good point.

Andrew Fleischer: Arizona State University is one of the best at leveraging data. And, you know, we've showcased them at different events that we've hosted. Jonathan Carroll, who leads the MarSci team there, he's helped spearhead a propensity model that understands the likelihood of a student's success within the program, which fundamentally changes how they can work out their cost basis to acquire students. So you're right, like this is the Mecca of higher ed, right? We're in it. We're some of the biggest institutions ever. University of Phoenix, obviously, is one example in the for-profit sector.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You don't get to five hundred thousand students back in the day by not understanding data. No, say what you want about UOP. But at one point, 500 something thousand students, that was a big deal. Google search has expanded, we rely on it as institutions, we need to better understand it, we need to know our acquisition costs. I talked about this earlier. As we talk about marketing, a lot of people will ask me, you know, what can we do to better our marketing? I say, understand your cost per lead, cost per enrollment, cost per start. Until you understand those three things, you're inefficient. Once you understand those, you can start to build higher efficiency.

That's important. So when we talk about data and we talk about tracking, Google's all about that. That's the baseline, isn't it? Spend money, but we're gonna tell you what's working and what's not. And we're gonna give you an opportunity to better spend your money. And then understand the value that that student has over the lifetime for your institution, and then leverage AI to find more folks that look like that person. Elizabeth, what else do you wanna say about Google and your visit here? Final words to you, then we'll go to Andrew and then we'll go to our boss, Patricia. She's been our boss for a couple of years.

Elizabeth Rice: I just am so excited to meet all of the Education Dynamics partners and folks here. This is a great moment. And I'm so happy to meet you guys. I've been listening to you guys for years. For me, you guys are famous in the community.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We will pay them later for all these great comments. Thousands of dollars coming. Andrew, final words about Google and your visit?

Andrew Fleischer: Yeah, look, I think a lot of marketers are threatened by AI and what AI means. And I think the only threat that AI poses to marketers is inaction. You need to be the champion of AI for your institution. It takes a coalition of the willing to be successful in leveraging AI. So I hope that the folks that are here this week can take some actionable next steps as far as AI goes, bring it back to their institutions, and lean on Education Dynamics to partner with my team to leverage this.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Coalition of the willing. I might have to take that one and use that. That's really good. Anecdata. Anecdata, of course. I'm writing these down. I like about coalition of the willing is that for a change to happen in higher ed too, if we look at academic calendars and that student wants competency based education, they want non-standard term accelerated, they don't want the spring fall online students don't do the spring fall summer like they used to anymore. You have to have a coalition of the willing to change hundreds of years of embedded non-change bureaucracy. So I like that.

Andrew Fleischer: Bureaucracy. Right. Speed to action will be the difference. And that'll be what differentiates good from great in higher ed marketing in the years to come.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Love it. Last words, Patricia Velasquez.

Patricia Velasquez: I mean, in the spirit of higher education, this is our industry. If we as marketers, marketing leaders do not take a step back and say this is our time to learn and to adapt and to incorporate AI and to do things in a new way, then what are we doing here? Education is about learning. Marketing leaders also need to learn to adapt and move forward. And it's the only way that we'll essentially be able to grow and support students at every step of the journey.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, we want to thank you all for supporting this podcast. You guys have been partners with the EdUp Experience for four years and have been great supporters. We appreciate you and all that you do to help our industry of higher ed serve students. This is what this is all about, right? A better educated society helps all of us and Google is a key part of that. Ladies and gentlemen, our guests today, Elizabeth, Patricia, Andrew, all from this little tiny company called Google. You've heard of it before. Ladies and gentlemen, you just EdUped.