How to Unlock the Power of Your .Edu

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Allison Turcio: Welcome to the Application, the Go-to How-to podcast for Higher Education marketers. I'm your host, Allison Teo, assistant Vice President of Enrollment and Marketing at Sienna College. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, this podcast is packed with practical tips and actionable advice to help you elevate your marketing game.

[00:00:29] In each snackable episode, we bring in experts to share their insights and experience on the topics that matter most. To you got a question or idea you'd like us to cover, email team enroll.org or reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. The application is part of the Enroll podcast network. And if you like this show, you'll definitely wanna check out our other Higher Ed focus podcasts on admissions, tech, marketing, and more.

[00:00:56] They're packed with stories, ideas, and tools to help you be the best in your field. [00:01:00] All right, it's time for the show.

[00:01:13] On this episode, we're going to talk about the unsung hero of higher ed marketing. Your edu. Nothing else has quite so much opportunity at the same time as so much missed opportunity. Our guest is Ben Congleton, a seasoned tech entrepreneur. Innovator and thought leader in the field of workplace communication and collaboration.

[00:01:38] As the c e O and co-founder of lar, a leading live chat and chatbot software company, Ben has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing customer support and improving online user experiences. Under his leadership, Olark has grown exponentially serving thousands of organizations worldwide. And earning a reputation for its user [00:02:00] friendly and accessible interface, as well as exceptional customer service.

[00:02:04] Hi Ben, and welcome to the application podcast. 

[00:02:08] Ben Congleton: I'm excited to be here. 

[00:02:10] Allison Turcio: Before we get into our main topic of web optimization, there's something else I know our listeners are going to wanna hear about. LAR and Androy just released the results of a survey on how higher ed marketers are allocating resources.

[00:02:27] Can you tell us a little bit about what you found out? 

[00:02:29] Ben Congleton: Yeah, so, um, I guess it's good to have a little bit of backstory on this. So, uh, last year we were working with enroll file lot and we talked to a lot of higher ed marketers. Uh, you know, Alex deployed on a lot of higher ed properties. And, uh, we kept getting similar questions and, and we thought, you know, what would be really helpful is to go out there and run a survey and ask actual marketers in the field across, you know, junior, intermediate, senior folks, like what they wanted to to know.

[00:02:58] Um, and you know, how they were [00:03:00] spending their budgets, give people this like view across, across what was going on in, in the high ed industry as an outsider. Like, I'm not, I'm not allocating high ed budgets myself, um, but we're part of that budget often. Um, it was, it was surprised to me how uniform the results were.

[00:03:16] So, for example, senior. And intermediate. Uh, and, and junior and new folks generally agreed in, uh, uh, both like private institution, public institution, et cetera. So there wasn't a lot of like variation in answers, which I think is interesting, but it also seems to me there's probably a lot of opportunities to look at ways of standing out or thinking a little bit differently.

[00:03:38] For example, uh, many folks, uh, regardless of what their, their top three strategy or goal was. When they were looking at social, they used Instagram. They were like, we're gonna allocate budget on Instagram as a major way of both boosting grad school enrollment, undergrad enrollment, alumni relations, et cetera.

[00:03:58] And you know, there's many channels [00:04:00] out there and there's uh, probably many opportunities to go look kind of outside that like, Hey, everyone's doing Instagram. We should do Instagram too. It's probably opportunity to sort of carve out niches in some of these other channels as well. Everyone's 

[00:04:12] Allison Turcio: doing Instagram, but maybe there's opportunity to get an audience on TikTok or on Snapchat because everyone else is on Instagram.

[00:04:19] Right? 

[00:04:19] Ben Congleton: You got it. And it, and it's one of those things where it's like, okay, like this is the safe thing to do. Like, no one ever gets fired for like buying IBM or something like that. If you're using Instagram, your plan is safe, right? You're not gonna run the problems. 

[00:04:30] Allison Turcio: I can say you're using best practices, but one of the things I always like to say is that doing what everyone else is doing is not a strategy.

[00:04:37] Ben Congleton: Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that was definitely one takeaway. Another takeaway, uh, was we also looked, uh, asked people about their self-perceived level of expertise. And, uh, what is not too surprising, um, is that, uh, many folks were very confident, had a lot of expertise in like, running in-person events, uh, doing traditional print and media [00:05:00] buys, uh, but you know, reported weaker skill sets in website optimization in things like digital advis and digital marketing and things like content strategy and, and seo.

[00:05:11] And, and what's interesting to me is, As we imagine, you know, this, this enrollment cliff and is more competition arising in marketing universities, I would expect a greater move towards digital, which likely means that most folks are allowing a lot on agencies to do work where they don't have a lot of in-house expertise, and it's often hard to hold that agency accountable without that in-house expertise.

[00:05:33] So I think there's a, there's, there's definitely room for, for growth and leveling up and career development in, in digital and, and higher ed. 

[00:05:41] Allison Turcio: Yeah, I know one of the big concerns that you had was on that website optimization piece. Can you tell me a little bit about why that really stuck out 

[00:05:50] Ben Congleton: to you? Yeah.

[00:05:51] It's interesting because you imagine, uh, you know, what, what does the modern journey of a student applying for college look like today? Well, basically they're receiving a [00:06:00] lot of marketing messages across a lot of channels, driving them towards your website. Towards your admissions website, et cetera. So you can imagine all these resources spent at driving people towards websites, and yet the thing that you are driving people towards is the area in which you have the least expertise of optimizing.

[00:06:17] And, you know, I, I get it. Like websites are hard. There's a lot of stakeholders involved. There's a lot to, to consider. In that environment, but it's also an area where developing expertise and capacity I think makes a ton of sense in higher ed, especially when we imagine like a more competitive marketing environment.

[00:06:35] Allison Turcio: I don't think I've ever seen a survey about how students search for colleges or any kind of study about the college search process where the EDU wasn't the leading way that they searched and found their information. I mean, if it's not the leading, it's number two or three, right? So the students are telling us, the.edu is absolutely crucial in their college search, [00:07:00] but are we allocating the resources and are we upskilling Yeah.

[00:07:05] To what's needed to have the best website possible and the best user experience possible for those students. And it sounds like the survey says, no, there's a, there's a gap there for 

[00:07:15] Ben Congleton: us. Yeah. The survey definitely indicates that folks have, definitely have the level of expertise they need for running in-person events, but like some big gaps in when we're talking about optimizing websites, Okay, 

[00:07:26] Allison Turcio: well we're gonna help them with that today, 

[00:07:27] Ben Congleton: right?

[00:07:28] That's the goal. We'll walk away with a couple of actions. So, so let's, 

[00:07:33] Allison Turcio: let's start in on website optimization and how can higher ed institutions and their marketers optimize their websites to improve the user experience and increase engagement? Because that's really what it comes down 

[00:07:45] Ben Congleton: to. I would start this, this sort of journey with, with saying, does your organization have leadership?

[00:07:53] Where you can actually set a prioritized list of goals for your website because I think, [00:08:00] you know, this is the one place that we know touches all sorts of stakeholders across the entire institution. And so if you can't walk away from a meeting with an ordered list of priorities, It's gonna be very, very hard to optimize because you can't optimize for multiple things at the same time.

[00:08:17] Well, like, uh, like any constraint solving problem, uh, like you're, like, the more constraints you have, the less optimal your solution will likely be. And, uh, and if you can agree on a one or two key goals you're trying to accomplish with your website, uh, that's, that's, that's where I recommend starting because there's so many micro little optimizations you can do, but if you don't have, uh, a gold, you're all agreed on.

[00:08:40] It's gonna be very, very hard to, to do tests to make progress, to sort of move in a single direction. So that's, that's where I would start. No, I can continue. It looks like you're wanna ask question. 

[00:08:52] Allison Turcio: Well, tell me, tell me some examples of the goals to consider specific for a higher ed website. 

[00:08:58] Ben Congleton: So let's say that our goal [00:09:00] is we wanna increase, uh, undergraduate applicants, right?

[00:09:03] That seems like a pretty reasonable goal. Like this is gonna be the main goal of our website. This is the number one priority of the website. Um, we know there's many stakeholders that are gonna be visiting this website, but this is the one goal we're trying to accomplish. Um, so let's, let's, let's take that as an example.

[00:09:18] And okay, that's step one. We've agreed on the goal. We have a priority. Now when we're putting things on the website, we can trade it off against that goal. Okay? Step two, let's establish metrics and a basic funnel for what that process looks like. So you might look at your undergrad, uh, traffic to your undergraduate related content, right?

[00:09:36] You probably don't wanna look at just your raw traffic to your website cause there's a lot of different folks that are visiting it. But let's, let's start with like, okay, we have undergraduate related content. How many, what's our unique traffic look like to that? Okay. We have unique traffic to our admissions and our rfi, uh, request for information pages.

[00:09:51] Let's take a look at that. Um, let's, let's take a look at the number of applicants, a number of RFIs completed, uh, and then let's track [00:10:00] conversion through those steps. And, and this stuff is like, I, I would call it table stakes, but not everyone has these reports sitting in front of them or are looking at it when they've also agreed that this is the number one goal.

[00:10:11] So once you've established, okay, here's our funnel, here's the conversion rates between various steps in this, you can dive into like really, really micro stuff. But I, I think high level, like I'm just trying to like, let's start high level, like funnel analytics, understand fall off between steps. And now that you've done that and you have some alignment around this, this goal being where you, what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:10:32] You can start focusing against different places of that funnel. Where do you want to put resources? What types of experiments do you wanna run? When you run an experiment, you can see the result of that experiment on that metric you're trying to move. That's kind of where I recommend starting and is a like a, a, a tactic that I always deploy when I'm doing these type of websites.

[00:10:52] Optimizations. Is, uh, you know, identifying that piece of the funnel that you really care about and then deploying like [00:11:00] live chat or a tool, like live chat into that piece of the funnel so you can start talking to your users that are in that stage. Because I think a lot of us have ideas about what we need to do to optimize things.

[00:11:11] And when you're in person, you can talk to people and like probe and gather information when you're online. You can look at your quantitative analysis, like your funnels and your numbers and your heat maps and your, there's so much quantitative analysis you can look at, but you don't actually know what's going inside of someone's head until you're talking to them.

[00:11:30] And so I would recommend, uh, you know, deploying, uh, chat as a tool to get inside of that person's head, understand what the questions are, understand what the objections are. And then you can go back and run an experiment trying to move something against those objections at that particular stage. 

[00:11:47] Allison Turcio: I want to quickly interrupt this conversation to invite you to join me at Element four 50 ones Engage Summit on June 27th through 28 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

[00:11:59] When it [00:12:00] comes to the student experience, we know that you wanna be a trusted guide from recruiting to graduation. The Engaged Summit by Element 4 51 brings the best minds in higher ed together to give you the strategy and tools to create a cohesive student experience from start to finish, explore the latest technologies, increase your skillset, and gain insights into today's students so you can deliver the most personalized.

[00:12:29] Digital engagement experience every step of the way. This is not your standard ed tech user conference. This is a dynamic, inspiring, and empowering event for all higher ed marketers and admissions professionals. I'll be presenting at this event along with some of your favorite higher ed, LinkedIn and Twitter follows.

[00:12:49] You can learn more about this event and register at Engage to Element four 50 one.com Oh, and get $50 off your registration when you [00:13:00] use the discount code and Rolly 50 at checkout. See you there. You mentioned experimentation. Can you share an example of an experiment that you've seen? With live chat or something else that's been able to move the 

[00:13:16] Ben Congleton: needle.

[00:13:17] So, uh, I can, I can absolutely share some, some experiments that people have tried. So, uh, uh, keep in mind like, these are like general enrollment optimization, rather just like, let's, let's just, just look at like the website or some particular metrics. So the, the experiments that are e that are. Easier to isolate but like still aren't great cuz there are a lot of factors going on.

[00:13:39] So like for example, um, you know, we worked with University of Oregon. Uh, what they learned was that when students got all their housing sorted out, they're way more likely to attend. So they were doing some interventions in their housing system to, uh, to add live chat there to put RAs and other kind of their housing onboarding staff to, to be available [00:14:00] just to make sure people got all their questions answered.

[00:14:02] And, uh, and improve the customer service at that proportion of the funnel. What they saw, you know, again, many factors going into this, but they saw like much higher enrollment yield than they typically did, um, when, when they did this process. So I, I think this was more of like a cross, like there were many factors, but, you know, chat and insight and customer service was a piece of, of, of that, that strategy that they used to boost that enrollment yield.

[00:14:26] You mentioned, 

[00:14:27] Allison Turcio: you know, hit look at a goal and then map out that journey and what's the conversion rate at, at each points of those journeys. Mm-hmm. Have you found that there's some common mistakes, or let's frame it as common opportunities when it comes to boosting the conversion rate in, uh, in a customer journey on a website?

[00:14:47] Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:14:48] Ben Congleton: I mean, I think. Uh, this comes back to my like, strategic thinking 1 0 1, which is like, let's go agree what the goal is, because I think, you know, most of the conversion drop-off can almost be tied into like an alignment [00:15:00] problem with what's going on on the website. So let's just take this enrollment example.

[00:15:04] If we agree that the number one goal of our website is to have people let, let really, there's like two options, right? Do we want them to sign up for a visit or do we want them to apply? Let's agree on which one of those things we're trying to optimize for, right? Because there's a lot of discussion around which one of those two things it should be, right?

[00:15:24] And so, uh, you can try to make them both the same level CTAs, but I think a lot of folks may not even be so clear that their two goals are visit and application. And so I think if you can agree on what the, the overall goal is, and you can line up your website towards accomplishing that goal, that alone.

[00:15:43] We'll give you pretty good lifts. So you might like, let's just take the visit example. Let's say visit is our number one priority. We've agreed that this is the highest value thing we could do with our website. We might put a visit, uh, a visit link, right? Like, In a easily visible way in our top nav in a [00:16:00] different color that makes it pretty clear this is what we're trying to accomplish.

[00:16:03] We might ensure that above the fold on mobile, where that top menu is hidden with a hamburger menu most of the times, um, that there's an above the fold c t a that moves you in that direction. Um, and. And these would be like just some simple examples, but I think the thing that stops that from happening all the time is the, is the top level alignment because someone might say, oh, there's like an alumni lunch coming up, let's make sure that's highly featured on the website.

[00:16:28] And so, uh, so I think that's where people get a little bit of ch uh, uh, start running into some challenges when they're trying to optimize against a goal. 

[00:16:39] Allison Turcio: And what's funny to me about that is that when it comes to our advertising campaigns, That, you know, not, uh, not what we're doing on edu, but when we're doing paid marketing, we are so clear on what our goal is and what we want the user to do.

[00:16:55] Ben Congleton: Right? A lot of times, and I think it becomes easier, especially if you're running digital campaigns, right? [00:17:00] You may run a digital campaign that takes you to a landing page that has one action you can do on it. Uh, and then people can do that action or not. And you know, obviously there's a lot of stakeholders who are gonna arrive on on your edu.

[00:17:12] They can have all sorts of different things, but I think if you can agree on what the number one thing you're trying to accomplish is now. Uh, what I have seen, uh, some tools be able to do, and this is more like B2B marketing, a little bit less inside of, uh, what the higher ed folks have seen higher ed folks do is use kind of like realtime personalization.

[00:17:30] So like when you hit the page, you can use some, you know, you can buy data basically and, and have the page sort of optimize a little bit based on some demographic information, some segment information so you can kind of like, Okay. Like this person is of, you know, certain, they're a certain age group.

[00:17:45] Let's assume they're either a parent or they are like an alumni, right? So you can start making those assumptions. But I still think that like this starts with like, Hey, let's not like rely on magic. Let's just pick a goal. This is our number one goal. This is what we're gonna optimize against. [00:18:00] These are secondary goals.

[00:18:01] We're also gonna optimize against them. We're gonna understand the steps in the funnel for each of these goals. But like ultimately someone has to make some decisions along the way in order to like, Uh, just say like, this is more important right now. And, and if you wanna optimize on the web, um, additionally, right, like, let's say we're going in this direction, we've agreed on our goals, we have our metrics, um, we talked about experiments, live chats, experiment.

[00:18:25] I like to run another experiment you might wanna run. We'll be like changing some headlines, changing some messaging, changing some flows. I think, uh, when those metrics are in place, now you can start running ab tests in a, in an effective way. And an AB test is a great way. Of eliminating like armchair quarterbacking and discussion and just say, look, we're gonna run a test and we're gonna find out what the result is.

[00:18:49] Because another thing that I think can highly hinder, uh, optimization is the lack of folks wanting to make a decision or to put themselves out there, or the fear of being wrong. [00:19:00] And so I think, uh, AB testing is a pretty good way of doing that. Another tool that has been really helpful for me personally is there's this guy named Brian Balfour.

[00:19:09] He basically ran growth for HubSpot in the early days. HubSpot's a really big B2B crm and he has this sort of online learning thing called Reforge where he tries to charge people a ton of money to learn his techniques, but if you dig around in there, there's some blog posts on, uh, experiment frameworks.

[00:19:27] And so I think having a good experiment framework means that when you're running these experiments, You have rigor and you have, uh, the ability to predict the outcome you are hoping to achieve and then test yourself against that predicted outcome. And you can use the same idea when you're running a campaign.

[00:19:43] But I think like the idea is like, as a marketing team, as a growth team, you should be getting better at predicting outcomes and achieving them. And if you're not gonna get any better at prediction, if you don't force yourself to put down a number or a goal or something before you run an experiment. And then you can hold [00:20:00] yourself accountable like, oh, did it do way better than I thought?

[00:20:02] Did it do way worse than I thought? This kind of thing. 

[00:20:04] Allison Turcio: Well, we're definitely on our way to defining some of those skills in that gap that we need to develop. Cause I'm hearing you say we need a real, really good strategic thinking on defining those goals. Yeah. We need collaborative leadership to get people.

[00:20:22] To buy into what those goals should be for the website. And then this idea of being able to run really sound experimentation on the.edu is, is perhaps that something that we were taught if we, if we went to undergraduate years ago studying marketing? Right. These are, these are new concepts for all of us and I, and I'm, it makes me wonder if the reason.

[00:20:48] Our allocations are the way they are, are we relying on things that are familiar to us, things we feel most comfortable with, um, versus what [00:21:00] is going to move the 

[00:21:01] Ben Congleton: needle? I come from a very sort of data driven perspective, so I think like it's really important to have those mergings of both, right? Like I think you need.

[00:21:12] You need folks that are able to make decisions with incomplete information and to like try stuff out. And the same time when you're talking digital, you have the ability to make decisions using data that were, were in the past like quite hard to do. And I think that the folks that I know who are very successful at website optimization are, are it's accommodation.

[00:21:34] You know, it says part art and it's part science, but you can't ignore the science elements of it. 

[00:21:39] Allison Turcio: I don't want to leave this conversation before we talk a little bit more about live chat. Mm-hmm. Tell me a little bit about how and why live chat can be such a key piece to that optimization aspect to our websites.

[00:21:53] Ben Congleton: The best way of looking at is why is there anyone in stores at all? Like why do you, why is there human beings in stores? And it's [00:22:00] because like in many cases, folks have questions before they take action. Like if you're, you know, shopping at REI or you're, you're shopping around in, in many cases, like if, if you're making considered purchase, you often want to build trust with the person on the other end of it.

[00:22:15] And when you have a website, there's typically just no one there, right? It's, it's just like a brochure. It's like a mailer, right? You can browse on that mailer, but like, if there's information lacking in that mailer, you can maybe go back to Google and search for it. But there's, there's value in having that human relationship with people, especially at a high consideration purchase, like, uh, choosing, you know, the next four years of your life broadly.

[00:22:37] I think that's where chat helps out. But I think more specifically tied back to website optimization, as marketers, we often lack. Information about what's happening inside of these processes. Whether we've just run this big, big digital campaign and we're just looking at numbers, or we are like exploring this funnel process we just talked about.

[00:22:56] And I think that it behooves us to build some [00:23:00] consensus inside our organization to find staffing, to spend a little bit of time there and run some experiments and get in there and, and you know, like understand the folks that are on our admission site, but maybe not submitting RFIs. Cuz we know when we look at our analytics, there's a lot of people who don't do that.

[00:23:15] Let's try to understand what's going on there. A little bit more rather than just, you know, throwing stuff at the wall. So I I, I really look at live chat as a, from a website optimization standpoint, as like a, here's a great tool to start having conversations with people that are like in the process that I'm trying to optimize so that I can understand how to optimize that process.

[00:23:37] And then secondarily, sometimes chat can be worth it to go optimize that process. So, for example, like we talked about Oregon and their housing process, like we have. You know, many universities using us in ad, in admissions, for example, like, uh, you know, pre-application, pre R five, just, you know, in many cases there are some blockers or some objections, some questions that people have before they [00:24:00] fill out those forms and.

[00:24:01] You know, depending on your economics, like it can make sense to invest, you know, human, your welcome center there, your, uh, admission staff there, you know, every applicant has a, has a value to you. Those are all 

[00:24:12] Allison Turcio: things we all want, right? We, we all wanna build trust with our audience. We want to be able to keep a human approach in, in how our marketer, or at least I hope that's all what we're all doing, everyone.

[00:24:26] Um, we want qualitative data that tells us what our audience is thinking and, and what their process is like. And we wanna be student-centered, right? So what, so why are we not all doing live chat? Well, 

[00:24:38] Ben Congleton: I think it's, I think it's a really interesting question. I've seen, for example, there are, uh, some pushes to just view pure bots, right?

[00:24:46] So, um, the, the idea like I can just put a bot here and it will replace that human interaction. And oftentimes I would say folks aren't even looking at the conversations the bot is having. They're just knowing that that is out there. [00:25:00] Existing. And so it's not really seen as like an insight machine. It's, it's seen as more of like, oh, this will reduce our customer service costs.

[00:25:06] So I think there is, uh, kind of the operational idea like, oh, I can just put this thing here and it'll reduce operational costs. Let's ignore the insights. I think part of the reason that higher marketers may not be looking at live chat as a channel ties back to some of these expertise questions ties back to the fact that, you know, the areas where most higher ed marketers are most comfortable, as in traditional marketing.

[00:25:30] In person marketing, not as much in website optimization, not as much in kind of, uh, kind of the e-commerce optimization. So you could imagine, like if you were to look at e-commerce 10 years ago, you would see, well, how come, how come there's not live chat on any of these e-commerce websites? And where is Chat being used?

[00:25:47] It was mostly being used in customer service for like Comcast, right? And then over time, because it was a cost, it was a way of reducing cost. But over time, and what we've noticed is that most e-commerce sites now have live chat on them. [00:26:00] And, um, most places where you're making considered sale, uh, Will have like reasonably educated staff involved.

[00:26:07] So if you were to look at like, maybe like the first adopters of Live Chat, it's been like the online, like online learning centers. These are the people that have adopted live chat just right off the bat. Cuz they, a lot of their marketing teams came from other digital marketing, uh, the other digital marketing world.

[00:26:23] And they just knew, okay, hey, like talking to my prospects, talking to my specs, with students, answering their questions, uh, works. Um, and I think that in. Higher ed, broadly, there's more hesitancy. Where is the staffing gonna come from? Who's gonna, who's gonna do this? What if there's a problem, uh, et cetera.

[00:26:45] And, and a little bit less of like a, Hey, let's run an experiment. Let's see what happens. Mindset. Um, I, I have found that like, Most of the universities that we work with, you know, have a champion inside their organization that [00:27:00] says something like, Hey, my generation's not picking up the phone anymore and we're not sending email anymore.

[00:27:06] Why can't I chat on our website when I have a question about my housing? Why can't I chat when I have a question about my admissions? And it takes a champion like that to kind of move things up through the organization to get something to happen. And then sometimes you get, like I would call it, uh, long-term strategic thinking, beep of enrollment, who can just look at the world and say like, you know what?

[00:27:27] Our traditional channels of communication are not the same as they were 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago. We need to meet our students and our faculty and our staff where they are. Let's, let's start adopting some tech like this. Well, cuz 

[00:27:44] Allison Turcio: it's not just marketers, it would be really new for, right?

[00:27:47] It's the admissions team, perhaps the financial aid team. You know, it really runs the gamut. And if you're doing it on the front end, you really, they're, you're creating an expectation that as a current student, [00:28:00] you're going to be able to get your questions answered this way too, and, and be able to navigate your student experience this way, don't you think?

[00:28:07] Ben Congleton: It may not be quite as important to the organization to hit that, like right off the get-go, if that makes any sense. I think that from an organization standpoint, uh, the thing that will probably retain students more than anything else is like the relationships they make inside the, inside the institution, their friends, their coursework, their uh, perception of success and a little bit less about like whether they can chat to it with a question.

[00:28:31] But I do think that like, uh, Operationally, it's a great efficiency gain for the organization to be able to, especially when you have folks that are wanting to work remote or folks that are like not wanting to come into their office as much and still provide a high level of service. Like for example, uh, Berkeley's one of our customers and Berkeley uses Olark.

[00:28:54] Inside their ed tech department, which means that if, you know, if a, if a staff or faculty or [00:29:00] student is ha is like, you know, setting up their, their it inside their, their classroom, they need help. They can, you know, ask questions over or, um, and so, and they also use it for HR as well. So if like you have a staff question.

[00:29:11] So I think like there's a definite operational benefit of using chat all over the place. But I think that there's like some really good strategic benefits of using it inside of marketing and I think that the. The key thing that I think is important to think about is like the strategic use of it as a communication tool as opposed to like, Hey, we just need this thing.

[00:29:33] It's more like, how do we use this to help accomplish the goal that we set ourselves, that we agreed on? It was one of our top goals at the beginning, and then what are we looking to accomplish from that? What will success look like, et cetera. And, and I, and I understand that like, uh, You know, there's a lot of work to be done.

[00:29:51] There's a lot of like, you know, everyone is at a very stage of marketing maturity or operations and data maturity. I think the neat thing about chat [00:30:00] is you can deploy it before you're, before you're at some of those maturity levels and you can kind of plug it in. So for example, I was talking to someone who was, uh, in the middle of a big Salesforce CRM integration, and obviously this is like a.

[00:30:14] You know, vision creation moment in their organization. Cause you have a lot of stakeholders coming in. You're designing business processes, you're thinking about the stuff that process we all know is gonna take years and it sometimes isn't successful. So if you predicate The's, say chat on that migration happening.

[00:30:35] You're, it's gonna be three years before you know whether you can, like what's happening with the students inside the funnel that are like not on your admissions page. That probably has absolutely nothing to do with whether you have a CRM or not. Like it's like CMS are great for internal operational improvements.

[00:30:53] They're great for modeling funnels, they're great for all sorts of great reporting, but I think intuitively we know that. [00:31:00] The, the, I don't know, like the basic principles we're talking about, like the, the first principles of the situation is, um, we're trying to build trust. Folks have questions. Uh, it's a very cons, high consideration decision.

[00:31:12] And if we can be there to help build those relationships early on and turn 'em into deep relationships, we can provide a great service to people. And I think that's, you know, marketing is about doing that at scale. And making decisions about where we strategically should strategically allocate resources along that journey, uh, and, and building.

[00:31:32] Uh, and a lot of higher ed marketing is, is about building strong relationships with your like fellow stakeholders, like your director, admissions, your VPs, getting people to sort of buy into this, this idea that, hey, you know, the welcome center, the housing process, like these are all things that feed into that enrollment yield picture.

[00:31:51] And I think that if we work together on this, we can make, we can move some numbers and let's start by looking at the numbers and pick the pieces where we wanna focus. Ben, 

[00:31:58] Allison Turcio: I'm pretty sure we [00:32:00] circled around back to what my first question was, which was all about user experience and engagement. So we ended up back there whether, whether that's where you wanted to be or not.

[00:32:10] Ben Congleton: I mean, I think it all comes back to that, but I've seen, but if you, when you, when you talk about user experience engagement without setting the goal. Yeah. And you make your goal, user experience and engagement. It's so hard to make decisions. 

[00:32:24] Allison Turcio: So is that the one thing you want everyone listening to take away from this conversation?

[00:32:28] You've got to start with the goal. 

[00:32:31] Ben Congleton: Yeah. Get alignment on a goal. If you, if you don't, if you can't get alignment on a goal. Everything else is gonna be so hard, and we know it's so hard. Many cases, but like an ordered list. This is number one. This is number two, because if you can come back to that when making some of these other decisions down the line.

[00:32:51] Your life will be so much easier. The second takeaway I probably would have is that getting metrics in place against that goal is a great place to start because [00:33:00] without metrics, you really have no idea whether you're making progress or not. And then from that I would say testing is a really good way to unblock, chatbox me a great way of digging into the funnel to learn more about what's going on, uh, deploy them strategically.

[00:33:14] And that, you know, the web and in person are not really that different. I mean, we're really just trying to build relationships and create trust and uh, and I think if we look at that through everything, through that lens against that goal, uh, it gives us pretty good guidance when we're making decisions.

[00:33:29] We can't 

[00:33:29] Allison Turcio: let it just be an online brochure. No. Alright, everyone, thank you so much for listening. Ben, thanks for joining me. 

[00:33:40] Ben Congleton: This is super fun, Alison, thank you so 

[00:33:41] Allison Turcio: much. If you found this information valuable, please subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with a friend or colleague, maybe one that you wanna talk to about setting goals for your website.

[00:33:51] Site who might find this useful?

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