814: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Tracy Kreikemeier⁠, Chief Relationship Officer, & ⁠Gregory Clayton⁠, President, Enrollment Management Services, ⁠EducationDynamics⁠

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. And I know you're thinking about asking this question: Where are we making education your business today? Well, that's a really, really good question. And the answer is at Insights EDU hosted by Education Dynamics here in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Renaissance Marriott. I think we're at the Renaissance Marriott. I've stayed in Marriott's 1,300 and something nights over my career in higher education. Add that up, that's a lot of stays, that's a lot of years in Marriotts, so sometimes I don't know where I am, they all look the same.

But here at Insights EDU, this is the conference we've been promoting for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, of course, to my right here, co-founder of the EdUp Experience, Elvin Freitas, decided he does not want to get on the microphone today. So I get to call him out and make fun of him and he gets no retort, no response at all.

We've been promoting this for a long time and I have said it repeatedly and I wouldn't have said it if I didn't mean it. This is the conference to come to if you are concerned about online enrollment, you are wanting to boost your enrollment, you want to talk about marketing, you want to talk about all the things that feed your funnel. There is no better conference than Insights EDU. And I believe that. Why? I use Education Dynamics at Lindenwood University. They're my partner. They're my marketing partner. And there's a good darn reason why they're my partner is because they do amazing work to help my university grow. That is the truth, ladies and gentlemen. That's just not me being here. That is the absolute truth. And you can call me and I would tell you the same thing.

But I'm really excited. We're kicking this podcasting day off with a bang, with some brass, if you will. It's brass. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to bring them on one at a time. First, she is Tracy Kreikemeier. She's the Chief Relationship Officer at Education Dynamics. Tracy, welcome to the EdUp mic again.

Tracy Kreikemeier: Good morning.

Joe Sallustio: Now we got you. So, ladies and gentlemen, what happens here on the first podcast of the day is usually some technical difficulties, which we'll work through. Tracy, you have been a guest co-host before.

Tracy Kreikemeier: I have.

Joe Sallustio: And you've done a great job. And now you're a guest. So are you ready?

Tracy Kreikemeier: I hope so.

Joe Sallustio: I hope you're ready too. And of course, my second guest, ladies and gentlemen, he's Gregory Clayton, President of Enrollment Management Services at Education Dynamics. And I think two or three time guest co-host now?

Gregory Clayton: Two times.

Joe Sallustio: Two times. Now got you guys as guests, which means you're in the hot seat and I get to ask you all sorts of questions that you know the answers to. So that's easy, right? But it's all about enrollment right now. And Tracy, I'll start with you. You know, everyone is trying to boost their funnel, to widen their funnel. I would say that it's very hard, and I say this from experience, to find the right partner to help you do that. Trust is a big issue. What is it about Education Dynamics that sets you apart from the pack, in your opinion?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Well, you're absolutely right. Trust is the largest issue. Like anything, it's a relationship. And if there is not a relationship based on transparency, trust, and candor, you're never going to get anywhere. I think one of the biggest things that sets us apart is the amount of time that we invest in that relationship. Really understanding the goals, the dynamics per se of the client side to understand what the decision-making process looks like, who needs to be involved in which things that we're talking about. And then truly staying focused on solving the problems at hand, even if those problems might potentially be ancillary to marketing. If the entire ecosystem isn't working, then we can't be enrolling the volume of students that we need to be doing. And then those students aren't having a good experience either.

Joe Sallustio: That's so true. What about enrollment management solutions? Greg, talk a little about enrollment management solutions. We all know the importance of enrollment. I mean, you just see schools close, right? It's like every single day, you know, so until university just realizes they're running a 150 million dollar deficit. Who knew? You know, you just wonder how does that happen? It's like, well, we need more students now. So enrollment's big. Talk about enrollment management solutions a little bit.

Gregory Clayton: Yeah, to build on some of the things Tracy said, we like to work with our partners or think about our partners in terms of us being an extension of the team. So really getting at the problem that we're trying to solve for together with the institution partner and with us as a service provider. Those problems can have, in terms of what the outcomes are desired by the institution partner, which largely is enrollment growth. So we have a number of solutions that we can plug in along the entire student journey.

And the way we do it is with flexibility and with transparency like Tracy just mentioned, but also it's completely a la carte. So we just plug in where the gaps are. We work really hard with our partners upfront to identify those. And a lot of times it can be just scale and strategy in terms of marketing and then the execution part of it, which we provide. And other times it's the B part of the AB equation, the enrollment management or admissions recruitment. They just do not have the scale and throughput to be able to do that, to get to where they are. And we can provide the solution for that as well. Sometimes it's an A solution, sometimes it's A plus B, and sometimes it's just the B solution.

Joe Sallustio: Sometimes it's C. Or it can be C. Tell it like it is. OK, so talk to me about Insights EDU. Tracy, why is this so important to come to? Let's just start there. And what should we expect this week?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Yes. So I am so excited that it's finally Conference Week. We start planning this basically two weeks after the last one's over. So for it to finally all come together is very, very exciting. And I think one of the things that really sets it apart is how particular we are about the content that's presented here. We will be kicking things off with Greg and Katie Tomlinson, our amazing Director of Business Intelligence, with our Online College Students report and some of the new findings. We revamped the instrument this year and have some new findings, which is very, very exciting.

But also just all of the things that we are talking about from the student experience to the impact of AI on the student journey, affordability, just all things that the schools that are winning and growing are thinking about and have top of mind. And being able to give people actionable insights to walk away with so that they can go back to their institution and make it better there. And in the process, hopefully meeting some incredible new connections as well.

Joe Sallustio: Absolutely right. Networking is an important part of this. And Greg, I saw the - you know, I'm privileged to be able to see the report in advance and truly because that report, I will tell you, the Online College Students report every year becomes the basis for how we look at our decision making, right? Because the student is changing and they're changing by the year. What can you reveal early about the report at a high level? Changes from year to year about online learning? You know, talk about anything you can talk about before you do your big reveal, if anything, or else we just skip to the next question.

Gregory Clayton: You know what, I'm going to reveal something that I have seen. So we have been doing this report for I think 13 years now. And every year when I look at it, I am trying to spot trends like what can we really find that's changing year over year? Sometimes it's very hard to see that. But when we look back three or four years ago, we can find some things, the needle has moved in some areas that are really interesting to look at.

So the one big thing I think that I have seen and our team has seen this year, is the number of schools in the consideration set for this audience of adult learners, define it however you want, is shrinking. Okay, so those that are serving the adult learner as a set is shrinking. So the number of schools a student will put in the consideration set has shrunk from just four years ago, five years ago, it was three to four. A prospect may inquire at three to four schools. Today, that's one or two.

Joe Sallustio: Wow. OK, so think about that for a second. So I'm a student. I'm much more aware of where I want to go. So I don't have the time to search. I'm going to go to the schools that hit me first. And if they have what I want, I'm going there. I mean, it's something like that, right? Versus I spread because you do hear about the undergraduate student going to 10 different schools post-COVID because of the testing is so, but the adult student, the online student you're saying is much more specific about where they want to go.

Gregory Clayton: Today they are. Interesting. Three to four years ago, like I was saying, you have three schools in the consideration set may inquire at three, sometimes even four. And, you know, I think the difference is where our thinking has evolved. And we look at all of this data that we have. There's so much information out there available in all these different channels in the messy middle of the whole marketing journey that we talk about where, you know, a student is bouncing around to different places to find information.

And we think that students are way more informed when they come into the funnel. So they may choose to enter off the school website. They may choose to enter off a Google ad. They may choose to reach out to an admissions advisor or something. To us, what we're seeing is that, we used to say speed to inquiry was highly important because you're in competition with so many. Today, it's still true, but establishing that relationship with that student, with the admissions recruiter and so forth and having that professional be well-trained and ready to have conversations on a multitude of different topics that we're gonna talk about in the presentation. Today has never been more important. Enrollment management is more important today than it's ever been.

Joe Sallustio: Can you dig it? Yes, you should be able to dig it. And Greg's right. And I will - I can back that up, right? You know, we're talking to students and their questions are specific. The affordability piece is very specific. I need this school to be affordable or else I'm simply not coming.

And Tracy, I want to shift to you and I'm going to ask you kind of a curveball, not a curveball question, but I want to just use this opportunity since you're in front of me now and you may not be later because you'd be busy in the VIP room where Tracy hangs out. Two years ago, Lindenwood University, where I work, was in an OPM relationship. And we got out of that OPM relationship, which is very hard to do for any school. It's an OPM relationship that takes - if you think about leaving their contracts are like ironclad somehow. And the story goes they hated dealing with me. They hated dealing with me because I would be like, what's this? What's that? Give me this. Give me this. And they were like, we hate Joe. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. So I came to you instead. No. And I came to you. We went through an RFP process, but I've known you for like 15 years. And I said, Tracy, I need your help. I need to come out of this OPM relationship and with no marketing data, they wouldn't get us any data. So we had to stand up our entire marketing infrastructure from scratch.

So for anybody that's doing anything significant in marketing, you think about how big that is. And, and in all the created from scratch, all of the website, all of that from scratch. And I came to you because I felt like you would be my true partner, like you were going to be the one that was there in the grind in the dirt, you and your team. And that's exactly what happened. How hard - how aware are schools of the investment in marketing infrastructure that they need to have today to get students? Because there's a big infrastructure we set up just to to equal what was going on with an OPM who puts a ton of upfront cash into the funnel, right? Like, that's the deal. Then they take it on the back end. If you can do everything on the front end, you better be ready. How ready are schools and how much more ready do they need to be?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Yeah, I think one of the things that, you know, that we talked a lot about in the process was this like, we have to, we don't have any of the data. Our website is new to Google. We have to go back out and get farther faster, which again, you work with an education expert that knows where to go, knows to grab, how to grab those audiences quickly and get us to where we need to be. But just even site infrastructure that someone needs, the attention and care to UX that you need to have of that website, making sure that you've got the things that the students want to understand, affordability, like you referenced earlier.

I think schools have a good understanding of the pieces that they need when it comes to the marketing side, paying attention to your website, doing organic search, paid search, making sure that retargeting is a part of this, having a remarketing strategy, a lead nurturing strategy. What I don't think that they appreciate is that you have to start over and you're not getting any of your data. All of that marketing that you had been doing and that someone was doing on your behalf is just out the window. And you know, you don't want to share it and they don't want to share it. And that is - it's very difficult to even get any sort of, you know, much less the true data pieces of it with the top line. How much were you spending? What program mix did you have in play? Different things like that.

The other thing is the understanding of the admissions infrastructure. It's one thing to go out and to generate the inquiries and get that prospective student interested in us, but then what happens at that point? And to Greg's point, you have to have your admissions reps, counselors, ready to go to be able to have those conversations and to be able to handle that volume when it is coming in. And in being able to do that in a speed lead is still critically important. It's understanding like having all of those different pieces in place to be fully ready to be able to do that. Because the last thing you want to do is get marketing up and running and then not have these students have a good experience and their first interaction with your institution is one where it's like, I was ready to go and there was no one to talk to me.

Joe Sallustio: Let me ask this to both of you guys, because the adult student, the online, let's just say the online student is a market we all want to access. And I say we, the institution that's looking to increase enrollment. However, we might be built institutionally for a traditional student, but we're to go get the adult student. I mean, it's - I mean, it's easy, right? We just go and get the adult student. How ready are schools? Let me rephrase that, because I see schools start to dive into that. We're going to go change our strategy. We're going to go after the, you know, what is it? Forty-two. What's the millions of students with some college? No degree. Forty-two. We're going to go get them. You know what? Our brand's strong. We can just - they're just going to line up and enroll. I see this lack of transition, like the infrastructure needs to be different, the investment needs to be different. All of those things. How different is it to recruit an adult student from a traditional student? I'll put to both of you.

Gregory Clayton: It's very different. It is, you know, clearly the audience is completely different. The motivating factors of a prospect - we, one of the other things we're going to reveal today is instead of calling the audience adult learners and so forth, they're getting younger. So we're calling them modern learners.

Joe Sallustio: I like your style, dude.

Gregory Clayton: So with the modern learner, the modality that is preferred is flexible. So the more flexible your modality that you offer - online, hybrid, on campus, whatever it is - make sure it's not only accessible, but available to the prospect that's trying to figure out how to fit higher ed into all of these other competing priorities that they have.

And the affordability part that you mentioned - a modern learner or an adult learner may have access to more ways to fund their education journey, you know, than a traditional student. There are different types of sources. One could be employer tuition reimbursement and everything for a working person that's going back to school and everything. So being ready to have all of those conversations of that type with that particular audience is totally different than the traditional audience that the parent guided kind of traditional first-time freshmen, just completely different in the strategies that work in that market will not work in the adult learner online market. We see this over and over again. It's probably the one mistake that schools make when they want to make a bet on that particular audience and they think that the traditional methods are going to work for it and it just does not work.

Joe Sallustio: Yikes! True, right? What else?

Tracy Kreikemeier: Well, and I think the most difficult thing for a school to understand is that for a traditional learner, it is a point in time decision. I have turned 18. I've graduated from high school. It is now time for me to move into my next step. Then understanding who the buying committee for...

Joe Sallustio: Ooh, I remember that. That's you back in the day.

Tracy Kreikemeier: ...is, you know, and having the parental involvement and everything with that. And I think the difficult transition to the modern learner is understanding that you need to be ready to talk to them when they're ready to talk to you, not during the office hours or on the campus visit day or those other different events that they will have. And to understand that there isn't just one point in time. There are many different moments that are what triggers somebody to want to go back to school, whether that's finding something that they're passionate about and that's the career that they want to have, whether it's getting passed over for a promotion, making their family prouder. It's just time to finish what they started. And so it is making sure that you've got the messaging and that you're using all of the different tools that you have and the channels that you have to be able to meet them where they are and when they're ready.

Joe Sallustio: So I don't know if you guys know this, but right now, Elvin is producing this episode. He's actually getting it ready. He's getting the graphic ready. This will be flipped in about an hour, right at the time you're done with the presentation and the online students report. So there's gonna be hundreds, thousands of people that listen to this episode today and going forward the next three days. What do you wanna tell them about Insights EDU, the online students report, Education Dynamics, speak to the audience.

Gregory Clayton: Yeah, you said it earlier. If you wanna go to a conference and learn about addressing this audience and this market and everything, this is the place to be. Let's put this on the list and try to be here if you can. The second thing I would say is, go get the report. www.educationdynamics.com. Download the report. It's free. It doesn't cost anything. And you need to read it word for stinking word because it's so good. And if you want it before Monday, when it's officially released to the public, you have to reach out to Greg or myself to make that happen.

Joe Sallustio: Good point. Good point. And I would recommend that you do do that because a conversation with these two could change your trajectory of your college. I'll tell you that right now. Keep going. Sorry I interrupted.

Gregory Clayton: Yeah, get the report, there's a lot to digest in it. We're happy to engage with anyone. We have business development consultants and consultants that are, I call them problem solving architects. Our sales team is really, really good at identifying where the problems are and how to plug in a solution for it. So we're happy to do that. And then the third thing is, when you're thinking about this, if either you're already in and you're working through different strategies and trying to execute, it's just not working or you can't find the pathway to the success that you're looking for or you're beginning the journey, like trying to figure out where to start and everything, engage with us. We are, like I was saying before, consultants and problem solvers first and foremost before we even dive into trying to figure out what you need to do to solve what you're looking to do.

Joe Sallustio: I love it. Elvin, I'd love to call you a problem solving architect, but you got to solve a couple problems first. Tracy, what do you want to say to the audience?

Tracy Kreikemeier: I want to say that there's going to be a ton of great content coming out over the course of the next couple of days via the Ed-Up experience. So listen to the remarkable guests that are going to be on and next year. I know if you couldn't come this year, next year we'll be in New Orleans at the Ritz. Get ready. You can come. Join us then. But also we have a ton of great resources on the website and like Greg said, if you want to walk through the online college students report with us individually or join us on our webinar on March 7th to get a download of that information as well.

Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to conclude this episode because Greg's got to get ready to talk to an audience. We were going to hold him here to the last five minutes before to see how much he could sweat on his way to the stage, we won't do that to him because we want to come back next year. Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard from two amazing individuals. And I wouldn't say that if I didn't believe it. He is Gregory Clayton, President of Enrollment Management Services and Tracy Kreikemeier, Chief Relationship Officer at Education Dynamics. I will tell you guys one tidbit. You know that the audience here is about 20, 20 to 25 percent bigger than it was last year, which means this is resonating with people who are interested in online learning.

I will tell you guys and I mean this, if you want to come and you are concerned about enrollment, and I've said it and I'll say it again, this is the conference to be at. The energy is already great here. And there is nothing better than being in a conference with marketing and enrollment professionals because the energy is literally off the charts. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, you just ed-uped.