SPEAKER_00
I really encourage the listeners to see the future as a blank slate and see filling that blank slate as something that feeds the soul rather than something that drains energy.
SPEAKER_01
You're listening to The Higher Ed Marketer, a podcast geared towards marketing professionals in higher education. This show will tackle all sorts of questions related to student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and so much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.
Let's get into the show.
SPEAKER_03
Welcome to episode two of The Higher Ed Marketer Podcast. I'm Troy Singer and here today with the co-host of the show, Bart Kaler. How's it going, Bart?
SPEAKER_02
It's going well. Thanks, Troy. It's exciting to be here on episode two, really looking forward to
SPEAKER_03
our interview today. Yes, as am I. We all have had to pivot and adjust all across our lives with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, we're going to talk about how that has affected our professional lives and the marketing that we do with today's guest. Tell us a little bit about that, Bart.
SPEAKER_02
Sure. We're going to be talking with Jamie Hunt. She's the new chief marketing officer at Miami University of Ohio.
She's going to tell us a little bit about what it was like personally and professionally having to pivot in the middle of the pandemic and how that affected her life as well as her role as a chief marketing officer. I think it's always interesting going into a new role like that and some of the ideas that she has, I think, are great. So, I'm really excited to share this with everyone.
Awesome. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_03
We are very excited to introduce Jamie Hunt, chief marketing officer at Miami University of Ohio.
SPEAKER_00
Welcome, Jamie. Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Well, we're happy to have you.
SPEAKER_03
Jamie, before we dive into the professional part, we'd love to know if you can share one or two personal passions that you have that we may not be able to see in your LinkedIn profile.
SPEAKER_00
Sure. So, I have a ton of hobbies that keep me busy when I'm not working. I sew, I paint, I write.
I have told people that if I'm not creating, I might as well be dead. So, I'm always trying to create. I'm also super interested in turtles and tortoises, which is an interesting, strange hobby.
When I retire, I want to have a tortoise ranch. So, right now, I just have my little friend, Clementine, who's next to me, but she promises to be joined by many other tortoises in the years to come.
SPEAKER_03
Well, that is wonderful. And you have recently moved to the southwestern Ohio area. So, could you share something, maybe a favorite thing that you've discovered since you've moved here?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. So, when I moved to southwest Ohio, I had never set foot in Ohio before. I actually moved to Ohio sight unseen because of the pandemic.
And I had no idea what it was going to, the landscape was going to be like, what it would feel like in this region. And I was so excited to find all the trails that there are around here. Miami University has 17 miles of trails on campus.
And then there's a ton of state parks and city parks and county parks and awesome, awesome trails and landscapes, really beautiful with the rolling hills and the river bluffs and all of that. So, I was pleasantly
SPEAKER_03
surprised at how beautiful this part of the world is. Yes. And it'll keep you hiking and running for years to come. Thank you for sharing a little bit more about your personal experiences.
Bart?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thanks, Troy. And Jamie, I was just going to get started on our conversation here. When I reviewed your LinkedIn profile, one thing that stood out was when you started your new role there at Miami University.
It was September of 2020. You've already kind of referenced the idea that, you know, showing up in Ohio side unseen because of the pandemic. Tell us about what that transition was like.
What was that like, you know, personally, just kind of setting into that new role?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I really underestimated how challenging it would be to move during a pandemic. My husband and I took the lockdowns really seriously in the spring. And so, we hadn't set foot inside of a store or interacted with any human not part of our household between March and July.
So, when I was offered the job and we put our house on the market, suddenly we had to have strangers in our house. We had to go to Lowe's to do some home improvement projects. And that was sort of daunting and anxiety producing for us after all those months of not engaging with people.
We ultimately decided to drive straight from Winston Salem to Oxford with just one stop to pick up some food through a drive through because we were so anxious about the travel. And we ended up arriving here at 11 o'clock at night. So, I was still sight unseen technically until the next morning.
I lived here for about, you know, 10 hours before I got to see what it looked like here. But it was worth it. The biggest challenge honestly was not being able to say goodbye to my friends and colleagues in person.
There are people that I had not seen since we left in March, not having any idea that we would still be in this situation and not being able to hug them or say goodbye to them in person. That still kind of breaks my heart that the last time I saw them, I didn't know was going to be
SPEAKER_02
the last time I saw them. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that that was hard. And I mean, the pandemic, I don't think any of us estimated what it would be like.
You know, I think that the idea of the toll on even mental health sometimes I think is underestimated on what this has been so far. So, I'm curious, I appreciate you sharing personally first and foremost, but I'm also curious just professionally. I mean, I know that anytime any of us move from one school to another or we, changing our career path, that certainly puts some challenge in just in a normal time.
But I was just curious, how did that work during the pandemic? I mean, you're going into a professional new area, you're a chief marketing officer at a major school, and you've got a team that you're going to be working with and you're in the middle of the pandemic. What was that like?
SPEAKER_00
That was also challenging. I'm not going to lie. It's hard.
You don't realize when you start a job, how often you poke your head into somebody's office and ask questions and learn more about, what do I do about this? What do I do about that? And there was no ability to do that. I was working in the office suite with one other member of my staff. So, and I tried not to bother them too much, but I had a ton of questions.
And it's really a new challenge to lead a team you've never met in a pandemic. All of the issues that come along with that, that through a virtual means. So, just having meetings with people via Zoom and having all team meetings via Zoom.
And then sort of layered on top of that was, it was September. So, the academic year was just starting and all of the issues that come up at the beginning of the academic year in general, and then all of the issues that come up when you're bringing 13,000 college students to campus during a pandemic just hit. I told people I had a 30 minute honeymoon because at 8.
30 on my first day, I was just diving straight into that COVID situation on our campus. But I've had to make sure that my staff still understands that I have an open door policy and that open door looks like slack. It looks like, you know, making a phone call and getting on my calendar to have a conversation, have the some of that face, virtual face to face interaction.
And making sure that people understand that I'm still, well, I guess I'm not still, making sure that people understand that I'm available to them. I'm a resource to them. I'm present.
And I want to interact with them. And having that relationship with them, despite the pandemic has been really important. Right. Right. From what you
SPEAKER_03
described, obviously, things were different than when you prepped and when you were interviewing. So, could you give us one or two examples of how you had to change your expectations? Yeah. So,
SPEAKER_00
I was interviewing in June and July. And at the time, everybody was thinking we were going to be back to full in-person classes in the fall. And the institution I was coming from was opening a little bit earlier than Miami was opening.
But we kind of thought we were going to be more back into the swing of things than we were. Miami ended up having a five-week delay where they had five weeks of online classes. So, that kind of gave me an opportunity to get to know the lay of the land a little bit before students came.
They started moving in about two weeks late. But I don't think anybody expected the scope and scale of how the pandemic would influence higher education. I personally didn't predict that we were going to have as many students who wanted to be back and as many students who really didn't want to be back.
It was sort of like a 50-50 mix of what students and parents wanted. And that divide has been really challenging to navigate, I think,
SPEAKER_02
for most of us in higher education. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. I mean, a lot of the clients that I work with, it is kind of a little bit of a segmentation on either side where you've got a lot of students who are just committed to fully wanting to get back to a full on-college experience, as maybe they knew a year ago.
And then you've got a lot that are just very hesitant. And parents are hesitant. And there's a wide range there.
So, tell me a little bit about as you got started there in September. I mean, obviously, interviewing and prepping, you had maybe a certain type of vision and probably a vision that you even cast during your interviews about what the marketing vision would be for Miami of Ohio going forward. But tell me, I mean, once you got in there in September and you're adjusting to Slack and not having that chance to have everyone in a team, one-room meeting, things that we're used to, certainly, you had to start to change a little bit of how you were looking at that vision, at least the tactical execution of that vision as it related during the pandemic.
So, how did some of that change or maybe tell me a little bit about what is that marketing vision going forward and how has
SPEAKER_00
the pandemic impacted that? Yeah. So, prior to the pandemic, Miami was poised to allow a new brand platform. When my predecessor left and COVID-19 hit, that effort was put on pause.
And now that I'm on board, I decided to kind of continue that pause to give us an opportunity to do a little bit more brand research. We really want to understand how our pandemic response has impacted our current brand perception. But we also need to know how the pandemic has changed people's mindsets about what is important to them about the college experience, what concerns they have about the college experience and all of that.
So, we're doing some additional brand research and are going to tweak our platform accordingly before we roll that out to the community and beyond. That said, we've tried to be pretty innovative with our marketing tactics this fall. There's a lot of changes that have happened because you can't bring students physically to campus for large group tours or for big events.
And that's been really essential to the Miami experience. It's a residential campus and it's all about that student interaction and that student experience. And we can't have admissions counselors on the road and there's no college fairs occurring.
But we have to get in front of students and the ways that we have done them have had to change because we have students who have Zoom fatigue. So, it's not necessarily that we want to suddenly fill the rest of their days up with more Zoom meetings. So, we've done some AI retargeting.
We've done some connected TV. We've done some TikTok advertising. We're looking into some influencer marketing to just try to get in front of them in new ways.
And I think it's really working as an institution and probably everybody right now is having to rely more on marketing than the quote-unquote sales side of things because we can't get on the road. We can't get people to our campuses. And so, I think we've done a really good job of supplementing what we have done in years past and it's showing.
We have, our applications are up about 9% right now, which is really good. We've had some slow declines in applications over the past few years. Nothing to be super concerned about.
But to have that large of an increase at this point in the middle of a pandemic is something that we're really happy
SPEAKER_02
about. That's great. And I'm sure that most of what you talked about there is the traditional undergrad.
What about some of the other audiences? I mean, certainly parents and current students, current parents, and maybe even to the degree of how development, marketing, and donor relations, and just community relations, how has that been affected as well? Well, it's been interesting.
SPEAKER_00
Our parent relations are really strong, I think, at Miami. We have someone who's dedicated to parent relations. We have a really active Facebook group for parents.
We have about 18,000 students and we have about 13,000 parents in that group. So that's a huge percentage of our students' parents are in there and they are active. It is dozens of posts a day, honestly.
And we're pushing out our messaging to them at the same time. We're pushing it to the students because we know they want to know. They have a lot of concerns.
Their concerns might be different than their students' concerns. And so, we want to make sure that they're seeing the information in addition to their students. We want to keep our board of trustees engaged in understanding what's going on.
We want to keep our alumni engaged, understanding our response to the pandemic and some of the social unrest that we had this summer, making sure that we're keeping everybody in the loop, connecting with our legislators, making sure they're aware of the decisions that we're making. We've had to be really nimble, just like I suspect almost everybody in higher ed has had to do with the governor making mandates or passing down regulations or things that he would like to see us do, making sure that we're communicating back to him that, yes, we're doing that. Those are important.
We understand it. But getting in front of those people, I think, has never been more important. Parent connection, previous to the pandemic, I think it would be a real challenge to build that on the fly at this point, but making sure that parents understand everything we're doing.
I don't think anything is more important right now. Beyond, of course, communicating with students, but making sure parents are in the loop and prospective parents so that they know what we're doing to keep kids safe and what we're doing to keep our campus healthy during this crisis.
SPEAKER_02
I think you're right on that. And I'll speak as a college parent myself. I've got a junior at Butler University here in Indiana and a freshman at Purdue University.
And even before the pandemic, I noticed that the more schools engaged with us, even in the process of looking for schools, my students looking for schools, the schools that were actually engaging with us as parents kind of floated to the top because those are the schools we were talking about because mom and I didn't get 50,000 emails from all the schools. We got one or two. And so I agree with you.
I think that making sure that parents are engaged in communications, whether it's during the pandemic
SPEAKER_00
or even outside the pandemic is so critical. Yeah, absolutely. We did a lot more print this year than we did in the past years because we wanted to make sure parents were seeing things and that's the best way is mail it to the house and have the parents able to get their hands on it.
I believe we either have recently sent a plan to send a piece that is directed directly to the parents so that they get an understanding of what's going on. There's no way to overstate how much influence a parent has on college choice. That's exactly right.
Jamie, you have shared so much
SPEAKER_03
with us today. And like we said at the beginning of the podcast, we'd like to at least have one or two great ideas that can be shared so others can benefit from it at schools that are listening to it. So is there anything that you haven't shared that is discovery or maybe just a pet idea that you
SPEAKER_00
could give to us here at the end? Yeah, absolutely. Everybody should start a tortoise ranch. That's my pet idea.
Wonderful. All right. I think now is really the time to start thinking outside of the box.
And I know that the stress of the pandemic is wearing on all of us and that generally means creativity suffers. We've been doing this for 10 months and we're tired and we're slogging through it. And it's all of us.
But I really encourage the listeners to see the future as a blank slate and see filling that blank slate as something that feeds the soul rather than something that drains energy. Right now, marketing has never been more important to meeting institutional goals. We are the front door and the sales team is having to do all kinds of new tactics that aren't as front and centers they've been in the past.
So we really need to be out front and doing creative, creative things. This is our time to shine. This is our time to show leadership, how much we can move the needle.
It's our time to show leadership, the value of marketing and how marketing can drive sales. And it's the time that we can show the ROI of our work. And so I think if there's something creative and innovative that you've wanted to try now is the time to do it.
I feel really lucky. The president here at Miami gave me a large sum of money and said, I don't care if you fail with things, just try something new and innovative, try something creative. And that's what we've done.
And we'll see if that pans out. He saw that this is the time to try things, to take bold steps. And I encourage listeners to do that too.
But I also encourage listeners to understand and realize that their teams and everybody that you're working with is also living with a lot of anxiety about what's going on in the world. We all have Zoom fatigue. We all have stress.
We've all grieving experiences that we've lost, weddings that we've missed, hugs that we haven't had, and lost family members and friends. And I think if we can give each other grace through this time and really understand that our audiences are feeling all of this too, and when we communicate with them, we need to be cognizant of that, I think that's really important.
SPEAKER_03
Wow, that's great. Jamie, thank you for such a beautiful and applicable response to that question. And I thank you for joining us and sharing all of your expertise today.
You definitely provided plenty of useful takeaways. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a great discussion.
I'm happy to be part of it. This episode of the Higher Ed Marketer podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency. And also by Think Patented, a marketing execution, printing and mailing provider of higher ed solutions.
On behalf of my co-host, Bart Kailer, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for tuning in.