How to Build Experiences for Your Higher Education Marketing Funnel

University marketing is often the most difficult marketing job, characterized by multi-year buying cycles and disconnected processes across departments. However, some of the difficulty can be self-inflicted due to ineffective marketing funnels. This webinar offers a framework to overcome these challenges by focusing on the complete student journey, from awareness to alumni. Discover how creating a great experience for prospects and students becomes your university’s competitive advantage.

By the end of this webinar, you’ll be able to:

• Define funnel experiences based on how your university supports student motivations, behaviors, and goals.
• Gain insights into the unique challenges of university marketing, including multi-year cycles, diverse touchpoints, and departmental silos.
• Learn to overcome departmental silos by establishing a single, campus-wide framework for seamless transitions and improved data sharing.
• Identify and track meaningful performance metrics tied to each phase.
• Develop a strategic approach for getting started, including reviewing funnels, researching student needs, and fostering cross-departmental collaboration.

Transcript

Rebecca: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. We will be getting started here in about a minute or so. While we wait, go ahead and write in the chat where you’re joining from. You can also connect with each other, put in your LinkedIn like I see a couple of you are doing, and then we will go ahead and get started here in about 30 seconds.

Rebecca: I would say not to be super exact, but also to be super exact, very precise. Awesome. I want to make sure you all are logging in and having enough time to jump between sessions before we get started.

Rebecca: All right, I’m going to go ahead and get started. Hello everyone. We hope you enjoyed the wonderful opening keynote that we just had. My name is Rebecca Ackerman, and I’m an event Production manager here at the American Marketing Association. I’m pleased to welcome you to this morning’s session, "How to Build Experiences for Your Higher Ed Marketing Funnel," brought to you by Mighty Citizen.

Rebecca: Before our session today, I’d like to go over a few of the features you can interact with during the session. On the right side of your screen you can see a chat box and a Q and a box. Please add in questions for the live Q and A at the end. And of course, please participate in. Please keep participating in the chat as well.

Rebecca: And with that, I’m excited to welcome today’s speaker, Mike Steckle, the MLIS Vice President of UX and Research at Mighty Citizen. Welcome, Mike.

Mike: Thank you so much, Rebecca. Good morning, everybody. I’m going to talk about how to build experiences for your higher ed marketing funnel.

Mike: But first, a little bit about Mighty Citizen. So Mighty Citizen has been helping mission-driven organizations improve and increase their impact through strategy and creative and digital transformation for 25 years. A good long time. We focus on educational institutions, associations, nonprofits, government agencies with branding, marketing and all kinds of digital services. And I am Mike Steckle, the Vice President of User Experience and Research here at Mighty Citizen.

Mike: There’s my LinkedIn if you want to reach out. I really would love to hear from you. You. So today we’re going to cover what is the right marketing funnel for universities. We’re going to define funnel experiences.

Mike: We’re going to take a quick tour of a full university funnel and we’re going to dive deep into the interest phase of the funnel. But first, I’d like to start by taking you to an upside-down world, something out of a dystopian Franz Kafka novel. I’m going to describe a product that you’re forced to sell, and nobody tells you how to sell it. They only tell you that you’re a salesperson and you’re asked to sell something mysterious. And the challenges you face in the sale are enormous.

Mike: First, your prospective customer will take years to decide whether or not to buy from you. You believe you’re selling to an individual customer, but it turns out you’re actually selling to two customers at once. And these customers often disagree with each other about a lot of things, but especially about the thing you’re trying to sell. And part of your sale takes place offline, outside of the Internet. But you also have to sell your product online.

Mike: In fact, you have to pull a Tom Cruise from Minority Report and manage a ton of digital selling points all at once. And each time you collect a new piece of information, it’s placed in a different location. And they’re rarely, if ever, brought together. So you have no idea of the big picture or really even the small picture. And by the way, you also have to sell the product while having an additional full-time job.

Mike: And the people who are assigned to help you sell the product, they almost never meet with each other, and they almost never meet with you. And after maybe years of trying to sell to your two customers together, they make their decision whether to buy or not under extreme stress. And in the end, the customer’s decision to buy is all or nothing. If they don’t buy from you now, there’s almost zero percent chance they’ll ever buy from you. You really only get one shot.

Mike: So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Or maybe a better metaphor is spinning plates. If any one of them falls, you may lose the entire sale. Surprise. Of course, we’re talking about college education.

Mike: This is why we think university marketing might be the most difficult marketing job of all. I mean, what other market has a multiple-year buying cycle with purchases taking years to land? Multiple contacts might feel like a single buyer, but there’s often an invisible team. Multiple online plus offline touch points. Multiple departments with varying degrees of engagement need up-to-date marketing resources for specific audiences.

Mike: Application, admission, and enrollment are often on different systems. Long-term data is needed to inform admissions and alumni relations, and it’s winner-take-all. But what if some of this difficulty is actually self-inflicted? We add unnecessary difficulty by thinking about our marketing funnels ineffectively. So let me know in the chat if your team uses a marketing funnel to plan and coordinate your efforts.

Mike: And maybe Rebecca, throw out a little bit here and there as the answers come in.

Rebecca: Yep, looks like we’ve got a. Yes. Ish.

Mike: Ish.

Rebecca: A couple.

Mike: This is perfect.

Rebecca: So we’ve gotten some sortas. We’ve gotten some ers, some. Some nos, some no issues.

Mike: I want to hear a lot more about your sortas if we have time at the end.

Mike: So the right foot funnel has two key things. One, it’s complete. Marcom folks should think about the full funnel and not just the early stages. And it’s defined by unique student experience. Each phase in the funnel is a unique experience when it’s defined from the perspective of the student or parent and not from the perspective of the university staff or org chart.

Mike: So let’s dig into this. The right funnel starts with a full picture of the student’s journey. So many funnels today only cover the initial stages of the process, maybe awareness, consideration, inquiry, and then application. But this is really only a portion of the full experience and likely the parts that the marketing and comms team are directly responsible for. And then from here new teams and different processes, maybe different ways of thinking take over.

Mike: And the result is the person who attends your university is treated like there are several different people along the way. And this ends up feeling disconnected and cobbled together. And it likely raises costs and decreases effectiveness. So in this example, the labels of the phases are really proxies for the department and the experience becomes defined by your university org chart instead of what the student is trying to accomplish. It’s really a classic blind man and the elephant example where we’re focusing on the parts that are maybe right in front of us and it causes us to lose sight of the big picture.

Mike: So this is an example of a full experience funnel in eight phases. Everyone across campus should be working from this. I know it’s really small, you’ll get the slides after. But today, marketing people may not think past the application stage. And then the teams responsible for onboarding and when students are actively on campus, they may not talk to staff outside of their group.

Mike: Alumni and development teams may function completely independently and may not even know the names of the other teams that are part of the real funnel. And there are real consequences to this way of doing things. Over time, different teams start to work in different systems. They have uncoordinated goals and eventually start functioning like independent companies. So different technical systems might emerge.

Mike: We at Mighty Citizen have seen examples where there are many different event systems across campus, for instance, or there are different voice and tone guidelines for different parts of the process. This creates a lot of chaos and instead we want you to think about the whole system as a single funnel that all staff reports that all staff supports rather. So a complete funnel includes one campus-wide framework that helps teams overcome silos. It has a seamless transition as students move more deeply into the funnel. It has a clear path from awareness all the way through to alumni or donors.

Mike: And it’s an easier way for teams to share data across their teams and then report clear metrics up to leadership. So down with silos.

Mike: So I’ve been talking a little bit about defining the funnel experiences. Let’s back up and define what we mean by an experience. So an experience is how your organization supports my motivations or behaviors, goals as I complete the tasks that I need to complete. And so an org chart-centric experience becomes weighed down by the needs of the departments, and it becomes disconnected from the student’s journey. So this is how we’re wanting you to think about experiences instead.

Mike: When actions and goals that students take change, they move to a new phase of the funnel. So let’s talk about this at a real high level. There are times along the way when a prospective student is asking themselves a big question, am I a good fit here? So below that question is a lot of sub-questions that prospective students are also asking that are related to that question, like what is campus life? Like, how much does it cost?

Mike: What degree programs do they offer? All of these questions you can learn from spending time with users through interviews or surveys to help them understand what is this collection of questions that they have as they’re trying to answer this big question, am I a good fit here? And so the experience is defined by this primary question. And then the quality of the experience is how well you answer these questions with the interactions that your students are having with you. So, the big picture, each stage of the funnel has a vision, which is a high-level picture of this phase working at its best.

Mike: A business outcome. This is a defining metric that you report up to leadership, a UX goal and progress metrics. So this is really what experience do we have to create so that we achieve the vision? We move that business outcome metric forward and then progress metrics help us see are we getting closer? We’ll look at an example of this in a minute.

Mike: It also includes an action path, the action that this phase is driving the user to take. So everything we do in this phase is helping the user take a specific action. And then, finally, a research method. So this is a plan for identifying the right research that’s necessary for each phase. So we’re going to look a little bit at some point of the funnels, just to.

Mike: Just to bring this home. So this is an overview of the phases. I know it’s really hard to read, but again, you’ll get the slides afterwards. So if you squint a little, you’ll be able to see that each phase is defined by a different action path and a different question from the perspective of the student. So for the awareness phase, the primary question is, I’m curious about where I might go to university.

Mike: How do I know your school exists? So there are a lot of activities we do to try to help people become aware of us, but the action path is just getting someone to a web page, a landing page, or something like that. It’s really just get them there. So your primary business outcome would be the number of new site visitors. If you’re getting a lot of new site visitors, you probably have a pretty good awareness phase.

Mike: But you know what’s also a unique experience for users? The process of completing the application. This is totally unique from the other parts of the funnel from a student perspective, and it’s incredibly important to get this right. Are you seeing people stop somewhere along the process of completing the form? Have you tested that form with users?

Mike: If your experience for completing the form isn’t great, you might lose that student altogether. So another quick poll for the chat. Which parts of the funnel do you feel are most challenging? So I know some of you had sortas in there. Rebecca, maybe let me know a couple things as they roll.

Mike: Anything.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re gonna. There we go. We’ve got Inquiry to App start being on the same page with other decision makers. App completions between Inquiry to App App start to completion onboarding linkages between each phase cause bottlenecking.

Mike: These are great answers. Oh, this is. We’re all set up for where. Where we’re going here. So we’ve defined the experiences that make up the funnel and it sounds like there’s a lot of overlap with the ones you’re defining.

Mike: So we want to talk a little bit about how you create an experience that helps users complete the action path and drive that business outcome. So, an example funnel experience. We’re going to pull all these pieces together. So we’re going to talk about the interest phase. The interest phase is defined as maybe I’ll check this university out.

Mike: Am I a good fit here? So as a user, something is giving me some hope and I’ve gone to your website or landing page or somehow interacted with you. So we have achieved that action of visiting the website, which is again your version might be a little bit different, but the action path for the interest phase is going from website visit to lead generation. So the business outcome is an increase in leads and once they’ve created a lead, they move on to the next phase, which is consideration. And their actions there are completely different.

Mike: So this is really important.

Mike: What are the qualities that make up a great interest phase? We want to identify, say 3 to 5 for each phase of the funnel. Just this is part of that vision. What does it mean when this is working really well? So in this case, we’ve talked to a lot of students and staff over the years.

Mike: This is where we’re proposing in interest phase. It’s easy for prospects to take the action. So sign up for a visit, request information, ask an admissions question. The website and social presence generate enough curiosity for prospects to want to check out more information. The reasons to engage or create a lead are consistently presented in a meaningful and valuable way to prospects.

Mike: And prospects maintain or grow their interest during the decision-making time frame instead of losing interest. So if you have these four qualities, you probably have a pretty good interest phase at play. I’m going to talk in detail about this first one. It’s easy for prospects to take action. So if we want to create a lead, we need to make the process easy.

Mike: That’s the experience needed. So how do we know we’re creating the right experience to drive that outcome? Well, creating the lead must feel valuable to the person. So we have to understand their motivations and meet those motivations so that it feels worth giving you my information. But it also has to be easy to find the form and it has to be easy to complete the form.

Mike: All of those things are just part of that experience that will drive the outcomes we want. So are we getting more traffic to the pages that have the lead forms? If we’re getting more people to the page, we should be seeing progress toward our goal of creating a lead. So this is what we mean by the progress metrics. If these are going in the right direction, you’re probably on the right track.

Mike: But if you’re seeing coming, if you’re seeing people, visit the page but not create a lead. This tells you that there’s some disconnect and it tells you exactly where the friction is. And then once you understand that, you can look at your research methods to fix the problem. So we want to identify a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods for research. We like to talk about them kind of being like two pedals on a bicycle.

Mike: They work really well together. So in the case before, if people are coming clicking to the page with the lead form, but not creating the lead, you can usability test your form, usability test your page. You need to understand where that friction is. And once you identify that research method, it’s easy for you to go back and solve that problem. So then you can bring it all your experience need your UX goal, your progress metric, and your research method.

Mike: And you might remember we had identified several qualities for the interest phase that we just looked at one of them. But if you build this out for each of those qualities, you end up with a really good overview of what a great interest phase will look like and you should be driving those leads. And then if you do it for all of the phases that are in your funnel, you end up with a really comprehensive understanding of your full funnel with goals, research methods, and metrics for the whole student experience.

Mike: So I want to talk a little bit about performance measurement. So having a complete view of this student path helps you identify which funnels are performing well and which are underperforming. Since you’ve defined the action path and the elements of a good experience, you really already have the tools to you need to diagnose and fix any problems or any issues. And so when you run into issues, what you need to do is already mapped out. You want to talk to students, you want to check your progress metrics, you want to use your research approaches.

Mike: And then focusing on this single action path and key metrics helps you report meaningful data back to leadership. This could work really well as a dashboard, for instance, and it avoids presenting data points to leadership that are just not relevant. So we’re getting 100,000 visits a month. That doesn’t really tell us much about what’s happening in the funnel. It doesn’t really move anything forward.

Mike: So an additional word about metrics. What is the time on page for those pages in the interest phase? What is the bounce rate? Once you start thinking in real experiences, you can see that a lot of these metrics that are predefined in your analytics tools are not very helpful in determining if your funnel is working as it should. Focusing on experiences makes it easier to distinguish between metrics that are really driving progress and ones that are just not relevant.

Mike: So defining the right experience helps you identify the right metrics. You need to analyze your situation. And the right experience is defined from a mix of business goals and external audience research.

Mike: And so how do universities coordinate across silos? Well, by defining what a great experience looks like for a University working together to create the right experience for each phase, researching what your audience need at each point. And we strongly recommend cross departmental committees to meet and review experiences and metrics and then reporting on the right metrics to the executive team. And so you may be wondering, just how do we even get started on this? Well, you can start by reviewing the funnels that are included in these slides and start to establish a vision or theory about how something like this might work for your university research students and prospective students.

Mike: We really want to stress this. Be sure you have a deep understanding of their needs and behaviors as they go through the process. You really need this foundation to be effective. And then talk about your vision and your research with other campus staff who are working on different parts of the funnels, just about how you can coordinate better. This is my hypothesis that the main thing holding university marketing back is a lack of a cohesive vision for how we move forward.

Mike: How do we overcome these silos and increase effectiveness? How do we get past these difficulties? We open the talk with we’re hoping this framework provides that vision. And I really want you to remember this, that the experience you’re creating for your students is your competitive advantage. So your experience is your advantage.

Mike: Think of providing a great experience for your prospects and students as your university’s competitive advantage. Make it great.

Mike: This is how you stand out from a crowded university landscape. Now, I’m really aware that making some of the changes I’m talking about here is difficult and it’s a slow process. But I just hope that this framework at least provides a vision of how things could be different and how your university could be stronger during what’s frankly a difficult time for higher education. So thank you very much. Before we roll over to questions, we’ve created a tool that helps you measure your marketing.

Mike: It’s called the Mighty GPS. It’s a self-assessment to measure your team’s marketing maturity.

Mike: You see the URL right there at the bottom? You can answer some questions and you’ll get an overall marketing maturity score that’s particular to you. And it goes across six categories to identify areas of strength and areas for improvement. So you end up with a customized report and some ideas for next steps. It can be super helpful.

Mike: You can also visit Whitney in our virtual booth and if you scan the QR code, you can download a bunch of resources, templates, webinars, best, best practices, and then again, my LinkedIn’s at the bottom. All right, Rebecca, do we have any questions?

Rebecca: We do. Before we jump into that, we had a couple of people ask about the presentation. Once we receive it, it’ll be loaded into this system.

Rebecca: This goes for all the sessions. Each session page where you joined will have a button underneath the Q and a button that you see, it says resources that will only load once the slides are imported, but that’s where you can find the slides. So just so you know, for now, for the future, that’s where they’ll be. So hopefully that clears that up.

Rebecca: Got a couple questions about that. So now let’s dive into your questions.

Mike: All right.

Rebecca: All right, so the first question is, you said marketers often do not funnel past the application stage. Is this due to decentralization across universities?

Mike: I think it is. I think it’s you. It’s the elephant problem. We get stuck in our little world and, you know, it might have to do with how people are evaluated in, in their job performance, which would probably may have to change in order to meet the needs of this funnel. But yeah, I do think that if we think about the whole person’s journey, that will be more effective at each part along the way.

Rebecca: All right, the next question is, what are your thoughts on the best way to integrate program-driven, slash specific marketing into overall university marketing?

Mike: I’m not totally sure I get the question, like, what’s the distinction between program marketing and overall university marketing? But at a high level, I can say regardless, it’s focus on the experiences of the people that you’re trying to reach. So if you have a particular, say, subset, I don’t know if you might be talking about graduate schools or something, it’s a little bit different. It’s kind of a different process. But the main idea is the same that understand the needs and desires of who you’re reaching out to and make all of your communications relevant and help them navigate a very complex process which is getting to your campus.

Rebecca: All right, the next question is, what’s a good example of a value add or even a giveaway that encourages students to move from awareness to filling out a lead form?

Mike: Oh, that’s a great question. This is a really good opportunity for you to focus in on your value proposition. Like, if you’re getting the right people in, you can reinforce your value proposition with something that’s unique to filling that gap. Because really what you want is lead generation that is the right kind of student.

Mike: You need to be real clear about who you’re trying to reach, what kind of student, and then you want to build on something that they find valuable. And this is also something you can research. Like you can get students and talk to them about what they would want to get. Merch, we have found, is for some reason, super something. People love a t-shirt, a hat.

Mike: Just from our experience, people love that kind of thing. So that’s, that’s one idea. And it locks them a little bit into that decision-making process. You know, they might become a little more of a fan of yours.

Rebecca: I was just having a discussion with a friend about how much I loved free shirts in college.

Rebecca: So. Yeah, and I still have a lot of them, even from colleges I just visited, so.

Mike: But it’s a real chance to be creative. I mean, shirts are, are, can be creative, but you can also come up with some other little knick-knacky thing or a giveaway.

Rebecca: All right, the next question is this person was wondering why the good funnel that you showed doesn’t have a transition into a career as a stage.

Mike: Wow, that is a great question.

Mike: It’s funny, we were literally talking about this yesterday with some staff about that. I’ll have to think about that. I mean, it can happen anywhere along the way. So I guess it would be sort of after an active student and before alumni.

Mike: That’s so. So, you know, we talked early on that we’re basically putting together like a starter kit for this. If your school really focuses on that career element, which is a really good idea, maybe you want to add that in and you can talk about how campus staff help move students through that part. That’s a great idea. I have to think about maybe throwing that in the mix.

Mike: I love it.

Rebecca: I’m going to see if we can squeeze one question in before we have to wrap up. This question is what is your recommended software for tracking? Is Excel good enough or should they focus on an Airtable or something like that?

Mike: Well, the first thing I want to say about that is when you’re talking about your cross-campus committees and how important those are, one mistake people often make in marcom teams is not including your IT staff because your IT staff can also help you make some of those decisions.

Mike: The best example is something that works for a lot of people. So it depends on the size of your school. I would imagine Excel is probably not a good long-term investment, but it can be a good transition stage until you figure out how you might want to use the tool more specifically. But that’s a very particular decision to an individual campus that’s kind of hard to speak to more broadly.

Rebecca: All right, well, that looks like all the time that we have, so we wanted to wrap up here.

Rebecca: Thank you so much, Mike, for the wonderful presentation. And of course, thank you everyone for attending. This video will be available later today right in the platform under the Schedule tab and On Demand tab should appear. I also have it pinned in this chat, I believe. Yes, I have it pinned.

Rebecca: All sessions from today tomorrow will load into that page. So bookmark it, check it out, but just know that that’s where they will all live. AR system’s pretty takes a couple like two hours to load videos in. So just as a note, and now you can head to the Mighty Citizen booth and check out all the resources on their page. Don’t forget to tune back in at 11:35 am Central Time for Canto Session.

Rebecca: From Content Chaos to Scalable How LMU Transformed Their Creative Workflows. Thank you all so much, and see you soon.

Mike: Thank you. Rebecca.