Jenny Petty (University of Montana) on Higher Ed Marketing in a Consumer's World

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Jenny Petty to discuss marketing tactics that becoming obsolete and how to remove friction to create a better modern student experience. 

Transcript

(00:00) Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. 

On today’s episode, we speak with Jenny Petty, who is Vice President of Marketing Communications at the University of Montana. Jenny and podcast host Amrit Ahluwalia discuss marketing tactics that becoming obsolete and how to remove friction to create a better modern student experience.

(00:02) Amrit Ahluwalia: Jenny Petty, welcome to the Illumination podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time out.

(00:06) Jenny Petty: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.

(00:09) Amrit Ahluwalia: So we're talking a little bit about transformation and change in the marketing space. And I'm curious, you know, as you think back on the last decade or so as a higher ed marketer and as you know, a marketer in general, I suppose, what have been some of the most dramatic changes that you've seen shape or change the way that we conduct marketing in this space?

(00:32) Jenny Petty: You know, I'd go back even further and say the last 20 years have just been a really wild ride when we think about the marketing technology space. And what comes to mind for me is thinking about how we've changed our tactics and strategies to fit the changing digital landscape. So I think of like the rise of inbound marketing, which HubSpot really coined the phrase of that. But really that's that idea, that organic inbound versus your traditional outbound. And even thinking about how those tactics have changed as search engine rules have changed, policies have changed. 

What I'm seeing now, right, is there's this move for consumers becoming more and more educated about privacy concerns. And so we're seeing the digital landscape shift there too. And our tactics and our strategy have to shift along with that. And so I'm seeing the rise of things like personalization on websites. Obviously our social media landscape is changing rapidly and it feels like the end of an era. But when I think about, you know, how much has changed, what I've been, what I'm kind of blown away is to think about just how adaptable marketers and higher ed marketers have been in thinking about how to change with the, the landscape that consumers set for us.

(01:48) Amrit Ahluwalia: You know, I want to pick up on your point about inbound marketing, because it's not super common in the post-secondary space to leverage a lot of inbound techniques and tactics. I mean, generally speaking, we operate in an industry that is pretty traditional and, and the marketing tactics have, have remained relatively similar. You know, we have we send out guidebooks, we do a lot of mailers, we do a lot of, you know, we're starting to see increasing creativity around freemium products. But you know, solid inbound marketing isn't that common, which makes your start in the post-secondary space as a content marketer. Very interesting.

(02:28) Jenny Petty: It's such a missed opportunity in the post-secondary market. Yeah. Because what are we, you know, these units, like the sector that I lead was a university relations department, what did they do? They did storytelling for the university. I think post-secondary has had a hard time shifting the mindset of like, we're still doing content marketing, we just have to use it in a different way. And so I think a lot about what we're trying to do here is take long form content, which we create a lot of, and then, you know, cut that up, splice it, make it into different pieces that can be used in an inbound program. I think, you know, post-secondary, especially as we think about how the marketing in higher ed has changed and become more focused on enrollment rather than like brand awareness over the last decade, there's, building an inbound marketing program takes time. It takes patience and it's not as simple as the traditional tactics of like name buying and then, you know, doing direct mail or email marketing or things like that. Content marketing takes time to strategize and then it takes time to see the results because you have to let that organic traffic be your guide. So I think there's, there's a lot of missed opportunity in secondary education to use post-secondary education to use inbound.

(03:41) Amrit Ahluwalia: Absolutely. I'm curious, like, I mean, from your perspective, does some of that stem from a conceptual discomfort with marketing in general?

(03:53) Jenny Petty: I believe yes. That's a really nice kind way of saying it. I think in higher ed I have colleagues who work for presidents where they're not allowed to say the word brand and this is almost 2023. Yeah. So I think yes, there is a discomfort with the idea of marketing or this idea that maybe at some of our institutions we're better than that. We don't need that kind of thing. And I think there's also this really quickly changing landscape that really started during covid when we started seeing test optional become more of a thing where some of the tactics that we've relied on for the last decade are going to become obsolete. And so I think inbound is the answer to that. But convincing your campus, you know, god bless the CMO who's going to convince their enrollment people to stop buying names. It's not an and/or it's a both. And so, the proof is in the pudding too, right? Like you have to build the inbound program to show the results. So it's a chicken the egg a lot of the time.

(05:04) Amrit Ahluwalia: Well, I'm curious about, you know, some of these tactics, because we're in a very traditional space. We tend to be change inverse, but it's very difficult for marketers to be change inverse as a concept. So I'm curious about, you know, some of the traditional marketing tactics and strategies you mentioned, list buying that really need to be either adapted or abandoned as we kind of shift into serving this population of modern learners that behave and think like customers that have more choice than ever before.

(05:36) Jenny Petty: Yeah. And I think more so than ever before, consumers in the education space are expecting experiences and process that align with what they're experiencing in other purchasing journeys. And so we've got to adapt the way we think about what we do, how we operate, the way we sell ourselves to align with what, what those consumers are experiencing. When a consumer can go to Netflix and Netflix can tell them, you know, here's movies that you're interested in, but they come to a higher ed website and they can't even figure out what programs are offered, there's a disconnect there and it causes friction. And what we want to do as marketers is remove that friction. 

I think the other thing that we've got to be really cautious about in our industry, especially when we talk about enrollment marketing, is the idea of vanity metrics. So you know, thinking about this really quickly changing landscape of higher ed, we started to become really reliant on Facebook, Instagram, other social channels to help drive our funnel, to help fill our funnel, to help give us metrics on, you know, where our audiences were and what they were doing.

I don't think we can rely on those channels as much as we used to be able to. And I think that's going to become rapidly become even more so in the next couple of years. And so what are we doing right now to get ready for that instead of waiting until it becomes totally obsolete?

(07:05) Amrit Ahluwalia: That's interesting. I'm curious, like as we shift, because you know, there all these different factors are in play, right? We're, we're serving students who think and act like consumers we're, we have more information at our disposal than we've really ever had before. When it comes to engaging consumers, they have the ability to educate themselves and actually create a zero moment of truth more than they've ever really had in the past. So we're serving this different audience and we also as marketers, have a different purpose in the post-secondary space. Now, it's not so much to your point about brand management, it's not so much about, you know, the number of times that marketers would talk about putting packages together for other university presidents so that in the rankings they'd know and recognize each different institution. Like then now it really is about ensuring that that enrollment is, is meeting institutional standards and needs. How does that change the way that you and your team are going about the, the profession of marketing when the role of the marketer is transforming from being one that's more oriented to the brand, to one that's really more oriented to the student?

(08:12) Jenny Petty: Yeah, and I would go further, I would say, you know, the brand is still really important, but I'd say what I'm noticing is that there's an alignment with strategy in ways that maybe there hasn't been before on campuses. And I think that was something that Covid helped for many marketing communications offices in the post-secondary space is Covid gave folks in my kind of job and others that are communicators or marketers a chance to show how they could align on strategically with the institution. And, and it was more important than ever during Covid to communicate clearly, to keep people engaged, to drive community. And I think those things became evident during covid. But now what we're fighting against as we come out of the pandemic is that we don't want to go back to being the Kinkos on the campus. 

We don't want to just design, we don't want people to come to us with prescribed tactics. Like we want to be that strategic partner. And I'm seeing and hearing this from my colleagues across the country, it's just an ongoing education that has to happen on our campuses of how to work with each other. Because what I tell my staff is that when I think about the students is like we have to understand and protect our constituents and the work that we do and marketers are poised really, really well to be that, that wealth of information on campuses. We just want to lean more into that and do that.

(09:51) Amrit Ahluwalia: So when you think about some of the challenges that are going to shape higher ed marketing certainly today what are some of the things that are top of mind for you? What are you keeping an eye on? What are you, what's keeping you up at night? Like how, you know, what are some of the things that marketers should be aware of?

(10:09) Jenny Petty: I don't even want to talk about the enrollment cliff because goodness, we've been talking about that for a long time. But I am seeing a shift of reframing about, you know, talking about the enrollment cliff and starting to think about this other wealth of students and adult learners and, and non-traditional learners that we haven't been focused on. And so I think reframing our mindsets around the enrollment cliff is going to be really pivotal and important as we help our institutions drive strategy. Like I said, social media is really top of mind because what's going on with Twitter right now I think we are seeing the end of this era that started, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, which is crazy when you think about that. But we've got to be ready to think about, you know, people are still, they want community. How are we becoming the bridges to that community when we might not have these tools that we've used for so long?

(11:07) Amrit Ahluwalia: You know what's interesting you think about the idea of this reframing the enrollment cliff, because I understood, don't get me wrong. I'm not going to come off as ignorant here hopefully and say I don't understand why people are scared of it. But by the same token, you know, we are, we're living in an environment where post-secondary institutions have been challenged on relevance, have been challenged on accessibility to, to broad audiences for decades, centuries, as an industry. And this is really an opportunity that's going to force post-secondary institutions to think in very different terms about the kind of learners they can serve and how to serve them. So to your point, you know, you mentioned adult learners, there's traditionally underserved demographics, there's folks with some college, but no degree. There's a number of audiences that the post-secondary institution, especially as a public institution does have the opportunity to serve. You mentioned website personalization. I'm curious about some of the tactics you and your team are leveraging to make sure that every audience that could be served by your institution sees themselves at your institution.

(12:11) Jenny Petty: That's such a good question. You know, one area that we are hyper focused on right now is our digital presence. So we are actually building prospective student microsite essentially. So like a lot of dot EDUs, our primary higher ed website for our institution is, has grown to be 44,000 pages, 600 CMS users. It's just something that I've seen happen over and over again. And so while we know we have to come up with a better web governance strategy there, what we did was we're like, well, okay, we've got to fix this perspective, student experience, user experience. And so we're standing up a website, a microsite that is catering to a variety of different students and will lean heavily on personalization as we build out that functionality. Plug, it's through modern campus. So we're very excited to be partnering with them on this. But it's not just as simple as the first time freshman anymore. We have to create an experience that can speak to them and deliver the type of content that they're looking for and the type of information that they're looking for. And that comes back to the inbound piece, right? Like inbound marketing at its very core was about trying to take care of the consumer. And so that's what we're going to try to do with this site too.

(13:31) Amrit Ahluwalia: It's kind of neat when you think about that. Like, there's a part of me that kind of loves the direction we're going as an industry, right? It's like from the evolution perspective, our focus for years has been on defining and executing this concept of student centricity in an environment that's inherently institution centric. And it's great to see that that philosophy doesn't just have to live in the way that classes are taught or in the way that support services work or in the way different departments orient themselves. It can come down to something like how we practice marketing, ensuring that each learner really feels taken care of, because that's really the first interaction that individual's going to have with an institution.

(14:10) Jenny Petty: I love that you said institution centricity, you know, versus student centricity. That's something that we just recently, we launched a revitalized brand platform in positioning last spring, and we chose a really unique old approach to that. And it was because that's what the students told us, resonated with them. And I think on a lot of campuses what happens is the brand becomes a mirror to the institution rather than aspirational and reflecting not only authentically who they are, but who they could be. And so we saw that pretty clearly, and I don't think that's often a place where people think of marketing being student-centric, but we're trying to do that here.

(14:50) Amrit Ahluwalia: Well because in so many ways, like whether it's creating that environment that a student feels comfortable, whether it's helping them see opportunities or engagements that are going to be relevant to them, there are so many ways for marketing to be student-centric. And I think the problem is that we oversimplify marketing when we think about what it's for, right? We kind of think about it as, you know, we've all heard that, oh well, you know, that student, it's all the marketing fluff. That's why they're interested. And you're like, well, no, we're showing them the, the career outcomes that from different programs. Like the programming is the meat fine, but without visibility into what it's for that student's never going to register.

(15:31) It is interesting. So when you think about the role of marketing over the next five to 10 years, I mean, you've already spoken about the, the broad shift you've already seen marketing undergo over the last two years, and with an enrollment cliff on the way can only assume that that role continues to grow. How do you see marketing evolving over the next decade? What are some of the big changes we should keep an eye out for?

(15:52) Jenny Petty: You know, I think especially in post-secondary institutions, what I feel at the University of Montana is that we're on a cusp of redefining what the marketing function is. So yes, we do promotion, yes, we design content strategy. Yes, we're doing the media relations and the external relations as well as, you know, the government relations. We're doing all of those things. But what I'm starting to see is there's this connective tissue that's building between our unit and other units on campus. And so we're starting to think about things like the brand experience. So, you know, in every instance when anyone in our life cycle, you know, from a perspective student to an alumni experiences, the University of Montana is our brand coming through in a consistent way. Starting to think about, you know, the function that marketing plays in community building and helping people find belonging. We're starting to think about, you know, we're working really closely with enrollment mark management as always, and thinking about how we support them better in academic program marketing and things like that. So I think it's a, an exciting time. It can be a frustrating time to be in marketing in higher ed because of the Kinko's legacy, but we are, I think, on the cusp of redefining what the function is. And the truth is like the function is more like, you know, representing and assisting with all constituents rather than just one single audience.

(17:18) Amrit Ahluwalia: Well it's an interesting point. Like, I'm curious, how does marketing play a role in driving sort of broader efforts to attract and retain students? Because you know, if we think about the two major gaps that we're seeing for post-secondary institutions today, it's not enough students coming in the door and then when they do the completion rate is not necessarily where we want it to be. So how does marketing start to impact that those efforts?

(17:44) Jenny Petty: You know, I think about retention marketing in the way that many companies would think about keeping a great customer. So I think where we can help is in helping to uncover the user experience where there's friction in the user experience, and then using the tools in our, you know, basket to help solve for that. And it could be as simple as, I've heard a statistic that the number one reason why freshman leave is because of a lack of belonging. Feeling like they don't belong on a campus. You know, can we help our colleagues in student success or campus life think about, you know, how to remove the friction and, and find ways to drive that. Can we work with student success on things like communicating, you know, registrations and, and things like that. There's just a lot that I think the skillset in marketing communications can, can assist on our campuses because what are we good at? We're good at communicating in a way that evokes emotion and sometimes that's lacking when everything feels transactional, somebody forgets why they've made the decision to come here. We have to remind them of that. And that doesn't stop once they register for their first classes.

(18:55) Amrit Ahluwalia: Absolutely. You know, I want to dive into that a little bit deeper because there's an interesting sort of friction at play here. It's on the one hand, when we think about marketing best practice, they tend to come from the commerce world, the business space. But there's a misalignment between the mission and focus of a revenue generating business and a nonprofit public post-secondary institution. So how do you define the best practices and the approaches that you'll draw from the business world when it comes to marketing best practice? And where does that effort to leverage those best practices stop? Like, what's the limit?

(19:36) Jenny Petty: You know, I feel like that's such an interesting question because when I think about where I find inspiration of what translates well to higher ed, it's things like the hospitality industry, things like health, healthcare, right? Yeah. Like when you think about how you need to move somebody through a healthcare system similar you know, I think looking to who's doing innovative work online, our digital experiences, I don't delineate, I don't think they're going to be a place where we're pushing too far. If the consumer world is changing and our consumers are expecting a certain user experience or ease of use or things like that, we've got to match that in the higher ed space. Yeah. Now, I think there are definitely marketing practices like we're going to be wary of from using, from the business world something that just wouldn't be a good fit either culturally for our campuses or that don't serve the mission of our institutions.

And so, you know, I think about even the way we recruit students here 42% I think of our students are first generation. You know, we could go out and we could purchase lists of really wealthy kids, but our mission is to be you know, our president uses the words inclusive prosperity. So we are here to serve any and all. And so even our recruitment strategy is aligned that way. So it's just a matter of fit, right? There's probably going to be institutions where some of the business strategies fit better, but for culture and for the brand of the University of Montana, I want to make sure we just keep aligned with that.

(21:16) Amrit Ahluwalia: Makes sense. Now, I'm going to pivot us slightly because those of you who are longtime listeners of the elimination podcast will notice that you can hear Jenny probably more clearly than you can hear many of our guests. And that's because Jenny uses a professional mic because in addition to her role as VP marketing communications at the University of Montana for the last two years or so, she's been running a podcast called The Servant Marketer. And it's a fascinating podcast. I first found out about it when I worked with your now colleague, Stephanie Geyer. So I just wanted to give you some space to talk a little bit about why you launched the Servant Marketer podcast, some of the more interesting topics you think you guys have covered. The floor is yours, like, please. And by the way, if this conversation today has interested you at all as a listener of Illumination, I would absolutely recommend you check out the servant marketer.

(22:10) Jenny Petty: Oh my gosh, thank you so much. That's so that means so much to me to hear that from you and, and your experience as a listener. So the servant marketer started as my capstone project when I was doing my master's at Gonzaga University. So I did my master's in organizational leadership with a focus on servant leadership. And there came a time I had been on their campus, I did a hybrid program, which was fascinating, talking about what learners need today. It was, they designed a program that was absolutely life-changing for me and also was possible for being with three kids and a full-time job. So started as my, my capstone project. And what I wanted to do was examine the crossroads of servant leadership in the marketing profession and from two kind of different angles. One, how does marketing harm or help society? Because I believe it can do both. And then the second piece is really helping marketers and leaders become better leaders and become, if servant leadership is something that speaks to them, then I want to deliver content that helps them think about their work in a new way. So I did 23 episodes in the first season, and then I got this job. And so I've been on a little bit of a hiatus, but in January I've got 10 episodes coming.

(23:28) And the next season is it's based on the 10 characteristics of servant leadership. So Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term se servant leadership was a Quaker man who had worked at, at and t's whole life. He wrote about servant leadership in his retirement. And then when he passed away, there were several scholars who collected all of his work and they discerned these 10 characteristics. And so each episode in the next season focuses on things like empathy, listening, commitment to the growth of people. I just recorded an episode on Friday about foresight and strategy, which was so great. And so I'm excited to bring it back. And then we'll see, we'll see where we go from there. I love doing it. It brings me a lot of joy to connect with people and, and it itches that scratch for me. I still am just so curious about the way that marketers can learn to serve.

(24:22) Amrit Ahluwalia: Absolutely. Well, and I'm curious about that and I recognize full well that we're coming up on the end of our half hour here, but what are some of the, the key takeaways that you feel marketers can really pick up from servant leadership principles?

(24:34) Jenny Petty: Yeah, so, you know, there was a couple of things that rose to the surface when I recorded those first 23 episodes. You know, one of them, which is very much rooted in, in the idea of servant leadership is this awareness, oh self-awareness and as well as awareness around our ourselves. So thinking through some tools that can help us, you know, be more curious about things, slow down our reaction, decision making time, that was something that, that was, that rose to the top. Another thing was, you know, we are so creative and I love creativity, everyone is creative, but in marketing communications shops, it's just so amazing to see the work that's done, but we have to be really responsible with that creativity. Like, we can come up with really wild ideas that we have to make sure that it's serving our audiences and serving society.

Another one that came up was diversity, equity, and inclusion. And so, you know, I had a great interview, I think in the first season where Barney Abramson talked about, you know, you know, when, when a company is shifting all of a sudden to make their ads more diverse and it comes across, you know, it's very, very transparent in the way that it's done. And so being more cognizant of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and making it just part of our normal work rather than something that we do during special celebratory months or after an incident has happened. Those three themes were, were big ones. I mean, there's just more I'd like to, I'd like to write a book. So I've got to figure out how to carve out time to do that. But excited to see what else comes to the surface in the next season.

(26:12) Amrit Ahluwalia: I'm looking forward to it. And you know, this episode will be coming out in January, 2023 as well. So, you know, I'm assuming there'll be at least one episode live by the time we're, we're live. So again, check it out. But you know, to Jenny's point, there are 20 some episodes already available on any sort of podcast platform. So there should be plenty to scratch that itch in the interim. Jenny, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me here today. And thanks for taking the time out to share your thoughts. I so appreciate it. 

Voiceover: This podcast is made possible by a partnership between Modern Campus and The EvoLLLution. The Modern Campus engagement platform, powered solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result innovative institutions can create learner to earner life cycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency. To learn more and to find out how to modernize your campus, visit moderncampus.com. That's moderncampus.com.