SPEAKER_02
And as these social media platforms are developing today and students are building whole fan bases, whole communities out there, that's a great opportunity to engage them and really utilize what they've built for your benefit.

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 are looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_00
Welcome to The Higher Ed Marketer podcast where each week, Mark Kaler and I interview higher ed marketers that we like and admire. Today is no exception. We are interviewing Lee Wilhite of Biola University about their success in influencer marketing within higher ed.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, Troy, this is a great conversation. And I think that the whole idea of influencer marketing, whether you're talking about social media, whether you're talking about leveraging some of your alumni, whether you're talking about peer to peer type of communications, I think that it's a really important aspect of The Higher Ed Marketers toolbox that needs to be leveraged. Sometimes we forget about it.

Sometimes we're so focused on view books and travel pieces and website and social media and all those are important. But then sometimes I think we miss some of the more specialty tools that can really make a big difference. Campus visits and the way that the campus is and this idea of influencer marketing.

And Lee does a great job in his role as vice president of enrollment and marketing and communications at Biola. He really has put together a plan and he comes out of a marketing background outside of higher ed, which I think sometimes people go back and forth. Is that a benefit? Is it a challenge to learn everything about higher ed? From my background outside of higher ed, I think it's an asset.

When you can bring in a lot of ideas from outside of higher ed, sometimes you can do things a little bit differently. And I think that's being proved out at Biola. So really looking forward to sharing this conversation with everyone.

I think Lee does a great job of articulating all of that.

SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Bart. Here is Lee Wilheight. It is our pleasure to welcome Lee Wilheight to the higher ed marketer podcast.

Lee, thank you so much for agreeing to have a wonderful conversation today. It's great to be with you today, Troy. Thank you.

And just between me, you, Bart, and a few hundred of our faithful listeners, if you could give us a little taste of who you are and your role at Biola.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thank you. I serve as vice president of enrollment, marketing, and communications at Biola. I've been there almost seven years now when I joined the university.

I was asked to head up our communications and marketing team. And about three and a half years into that journey, our enrollment management vice president retired and our president decided to combine both the enrollment management and the communication marketing functions together. And so I'm now three plus years into that role of leading the team of enrollment marketing communications.

Didn't come out of higher ed, Troy. I worked in a marketing agency for about 14 years before I came into higher ed. So I had to do quite a bit of learning and listening and seeing where to make the impact that I wanted to make.

But it's been a great experience so far. I have a great team here and really benefited from your podcast and look forward to our time today.

SPEAKER_03
Great. Thanks, Lee. It's an honor to have you here.

I know we've met a few times and it's always good to have someone on the podcast that I'm familiar with the school. I remember, I want to talk a little bit about influencer marketing today and kind of your journey as Biola University ended that. I remember just a couple references to that.

At a CCCU conference, there was a team from Biola that talked about leveraging influencer marketing in Instagram and I thought that was a very good presentation. And then I remember doing some work with NACAP back in the early teens, 2013 probably. And they were working on their book that they put out every year for Christian high schools and just represents all the Christian colleges and universities.

And I remember one of the elements within that book and I was working on the website for Chant Thompson at the time. And it had a picture of Zach King and had a testimonial of him from his experience at Biola. And I remember my teenage kids were walking through the room when I was working on that project and I was like, they were like, how do you know who that is, Dad? And it's like, it's Zach King.

It says here on there, well, how do you know him? I'm like, well, I don't know him. He's a student. No, he's not.

He's this guy on the internet who does these cool magic tricks. And so I got educated by my kids on who Zach King was, but obviously he's a very successful internet marketer. Everybody can look him up if they're not familiar with who he is, but he is Biola grad.

And I was really impressed when I saw Biola lean into that and have him do a video for enrollment marketing and things like that. And certainly it was a fun video with Dr. Corey. So tell me a little bit about this. I mean, not only have I seen guys leaning into the influencer marketing, for some reason, Biola seems to be in the right places at the right time.

I saw a viral video of Justin Bieber and serenading Dr. Corey at the Beverly Hills Hotel. And so it seems like there's a lot of that around Biola.

And not all of that is prescribed, but just tell me a little bit about how you guys have kind of leaned into some of that.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, Zach King has been a fan favorite for us here at Biola. He's a great alum. He's done some wonderful videos and promotional things for us.

And God's really blessed the work that he's done. It's exciting to see the impact he's making today. And he's been a great voice, a great endorser of Biola over the years.

And yeah, you mentioned Dr. Corey and Justin Bieber. Maybe it's our proximity bar.

We're located, of course, here in Southern California. We're not far from Hollywood. And I can tell you that that moment wasn't scripted.

That was something that just kind of happened in the moment. But it was a great, great moment indeed. So yeah, we have learned over the years.

And this probably isn't new for a lot of your listeners. But these upcoming generations and how they look at corporate brands, university brands, some of these institutional kind of messaging and things that's out there, these are things that traditionally we've been trying to promote. Those messages we've been trying to really carry the overall kind of institutional message across and more and more students, especially in these younger generations, are looking for more peer input.

They're looking for maybe it's our shopping habits. We go to Amazon and we're looking at those customer views. We're trying to see more of a first person kind of assessment of how people are experiencing a product or service or those kinds of things.

And we just saw an opportunity years ago of the power of a student to student communication stream. And so when you look at someone like Zach, who everyone kind of relate to, and then you look at some of our students enrolled at Biola today, it's that peer to peer reflection, first hand account of their experience at Biola. The trust level is higher.

Somehow it feels to cut through some of the corporate speak or university speak, if you will, and it really does connect people more to peer level. And I think it's a more of a trusted relationship, if you will. So we have been about that for a number of years.

In 2017, we started what we call our student influencer program here, where we literally went out and scoured some of the social media platforms and following of some of our enrolled students here at Biola. Many of them have thousands and thousands of followers for different reasons. They've kind of built their own communities, if you will.

And we thought, hey, wouldn't this be a great opportunity to leverage and utilize some of these students that have a passion for Biola, but also have a passion for some of the varied things that they're about as well. So some number of years ago, we came up with this idea. And so we put some criteria to the table.

We wanted to have some students that had at least a few thousand followers that they had kind of grown up. That was important was we wanted to make sure they had a positive reputation, if you will, that aligned closely with our value system. Of course, we want that missional alignment as much as possible.

That's important, especially if they're advocating on your behalf as a student. We were looking for students that were advocating for diversity and inclusion and wanting to make sure that they had a broad reach in terms of their influence. And then, of course, they were involved in the Biola culture and all that we were bringing.

And so we looked at some of those criteria points. We found some student influencers that fit that bill. We reached out to them and talked to them about this idea.

And they loved it. They loved it. These students, they were given the opportunity to step into kind of a relationship with Biola that way, to help us with some of our promotion and advertising, if you will, marketing and so forth.

But we allowed them to do it within the context of what they had built within their own followers. And I think that was the key. To come in and say, well, we've got all of these points as a university we want you to make, we gave them some guidelines, some kind of a framework there, but we really gave them the latitude to kind of express their firsthand account of their Biola experience based on how they typically built their followership for their respective platform.

So it's been a great undertaking for us.

SPEAKER_03
Well, I love that because it kind of touches on a number of things that I'm seeing kind of the trends in higher ed marketing, the idea of authenticity. I mean, whether you want to call that a trend or not, you kind of referenced it earlier in the conversation was the idea that we've been so used to being corporate speak and maybe kind of the official line. I mean, even to the degree of when we do a video, we need to make sure it's polished and broadcast quality and all those types of things.

Well, the communications and marketing has really changed over the last several years. And I think the pandemic kind of accentuated and actually increased the authenticity where sometimes now I think Generation Z especially becomes suspect if things are too polished, if they're too perfect and if it's too right. And so I think that allowing your student ambassadors and your student influencers to have some leeway to have the ability to be authentic, to be personal, to be able to connect with those other students in a way.

I mean, just look at the explosion of TikTok. I mean, the idea of that platform is really all about authenticity, real. You know, it's a lot of it is just kind of on the spur of the moment type of thing.

And so I think that that really hits well with that. And so Troy, I know you had a couple of questions about some other things that Biola was using with that.

SPEAKER_00
Yes, I was curious about their use of the platform that enables the student or peer to peer connection and communication. If you could kind of first let us know how you were introduced to the platform, how you utilize it and the thought process that went into using Zimi.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thank you, Troy. Yeah, Zimi is a social app that we discovered a couple of years ago. We launched this for our student community.

It's specifically oriented towards prospective students that are on this college search journey. And they're really trying to understand what a college is all about. You know, you can read the website, you can read the printed material, you can get kind of data points from different family members and friends and people like that that might have attended the school.

But there's nothing that's that replaces that idea of stepping in and stepping in a conversation into community with others that are living that experience. And so we identified this platform Zimi, launched it two years ago, really is a place for us to engage prospective students in relevant topics regarding campus life and student wellness and student resourcing and students were introducing themselves and saying, hey, I'm from the Bay Area. Is anyone else applying to Biola from the area? Where are you from? All of a sudden connections are being formed, you know, there's community being built.

And then, you know, we interject in that and we do some promotion of some events or some things coming up like that or some topical kinds of things we'll introduce and address or respond to some of the chatter that's out there. It's been a great platform for us just to engage these prospective students in hopes that as they discern that college search journey, they're going to have a better understanding of what Biola is all about. And then as they come to visit campus and so forth, they're going to have a better picture of what an enrolled student life would be at Biola.

So it's been a great undertaking for us. We're just a couple of years in, but we've got thousands of students that are in this space. And, you know, you go into these things thinking, well, we'll use it this way, but, you know, unbeknownst to us, you know, we're learning even more students are finding roommates through this platform.

They're figuring out like, you know, which hall, which dorm should I try to get into? You know, all those other kinds of things. What's that campus food really like at Biola, you know, some of those things? So, you know, it's truth and advertising. It's the lived experience, you know, through the student life comes through those kind of platforms.

But it's been a great app for us.

SPEAKER_03
That's great. And it reminds me of, I think in the early 2000s, I was working with a couple schools. And, you know, that was when Facebook was just coming out.

I mean, it was kind of all the rage for what would be the TikTok crowd today. You know, now that grandma and mom and dad are on Facebook, it's not as popular for the younger Gen Z. But, you know, early on, I remember working with some schools.

And we had this idea of, hey, let's set up just a class of 2012, you know, Facebook group. You know, let's see if anybody would be interested as a freshman, as an incoming student. And the same thing was happening there.

It's like, you know, boy, they build these relationships. They're starting to, you know, build roommates and get these things going. And, you know, obviously social media platforms like Facebook and then, you know, everything kind of shifts.

And so it's harder to kind of keep your finger on that pulse. Whereas using an app like Ximi, I think, is kind of, that's the purpose. The students understand that.

That's why they go to that app. And it's a way that they can then better engage with the school. So I think that's really great.

We had another peer-to-peer app, you know, person on a couple weeks ago, Diego from Unibuddy. And, you know, it's the same thing. If somebody wants to learn more about those apps, you know, we can listen to that episode.

And we might see if we can get somebody from Ximi on sometime as well. But I think that's a really good way because, again, it goes back to what we talked about earlier, the authenticity, the realness. I'm not having to talk to the official channels of the school.

I'm actually able to talk to other people, other students, and kind of get their experiences. So I think that's a really great way to go. Tell me, has it really kind of, how has the pandemic impacted all this social influencers and even like the Ximi? Have you seen it increased or decreased based on the pandemic?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's a great question, Bart. And I, you know, here in Los Angeles County, which is where we're based out of, we had even some of the more stricter, even, you know, guidelines for us here. You know, there's 800,000 college kids in LA County alone, largest county in the state of, or in the United States.

And so, you know, we had some really challenging times. We weren't an open campus last year. We were fully remote.

And when you look at that remote status, that's where platforms like Ximi become so important because we're fostering community, student to student, peer to peer. We're injecting, we're giving some helpful insights and tips and instruction and things like that along the way. But I mean, it's creating this place that students can continue to hang out.

They can ask honest questions. They can get some real firsthand accounts and experiences from people. So really critical.

We had, you know, like many, maybe of your listeners, you know, you had to reimagine so much this last year in terms of how to recruit students and admit students and all of that. But even the student lived experience on campus was so different, you know. And so here we are trying to utilize platforms like this.

We're thankful that we introduced it when we did and we had a good year and a half under our belt before the pandemic hit because it really helped us kind of weather that, whether that challenging season that we're not out of yet.

SPEAKER_03
So that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, another community that I think is important, I mean, we talk about peer to peer as being so important and influencers.

Well, number one influencer by far and all the research that you read is mom. And so we talk about parents. Tell me a little bit about what Biola is doing as far as parent comm flows because, I mean, you don't necessarily have a ZME, but you've got to still also do, hey, what do other parents think how are other parents, you know, engaging? So tell me about that.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thanks for asking that part. You know, one of the things we know from this, from the younger generations, they're not actually looking through email, you know, we can send a lot of communication out that way on behalf of the university and they're not getting it. I've got all three of our kids at Biola this year and, you know, I have a chance to kind of, hey, did you get that email from the school? No, no, I didn't look.

Well, it's there. You know, pull it up kind of a thing. And so, you know, guilty as charged, even, even my own kids don't look at the email, you know, like they should.

And so, you know, it drives the more text platforms, it drives the social platforms we're talking about other ways to get the communication out. But to your point, Bart, we're just seeing more and more the importance of engaging mom and dad in the communication with these students. So in the case for, you know, here at Biola, we've got a separate parent communication track that runs right along parallel to a lot of the student communication that we're getting out to our prospective students.

And, you know, it's interesting, it was just a couple of weeks ago, we gathered with admissions counselors here in Southern California and other Christian universities that are here. And we have a number here in the Southern California area. We're just, you know, checking in as we do periodically with them, how are you doing? How are your schools doing? What are your numbers looking like? What are fall applications looking like? What are you hearing from your high schools that you're, you know, working with? And there were some really good insights that came out of this.

And a lot of it ties to the pandemic that we were just talking about. You know, these high school seniors this year have been through a couple of really challenging years at high school. They've been in a remote learning environment, many of them.

They have not had the kind of face time with high school guidance counselors that they needed. We're discovering that a lot of these high school seniors this fall are not adequately prepared. They're not, they're overwhelmed.

This idea that now I've got to apply for schools, I'm not quite sure how to really do this. They haven't really been maybe guided through that high school, you know, consideration journey, if you will, you know, on at their high schools, it's all been, it's been remote for so much. So you look at that, you look at things like universities implementing a test optional, you know, approach here across, really across the country.

That's, that's confusing for some of these students. It's like, well, should I should I get the test anyway? Is it going to increase my chances? Is it not, you know, how, how real, you know, how much are they really factoring that in or not? Those are questions. And then of course, when you just think of the uncertainty that all of our families have really been through the last year and a half with job loss and with health concerns and, and, you know, just the continual changes there, it just feels like a very uncertain time for a lot of high school seniors right now.

So the point I'm driving towards is that even more important, even more important that you're engaging mom, you're engaging dad in this college application process. We're, we're finding ourselves doing many more educational kind of conversations around, you know, filling out the FAFSA or what does college look like, especially for first gen families that don't have a history of this. So, so there's a lot of education we're doing.

We have a, we have a high school class that's, that's right now I don't think is maybe has the kind of readiness or even equipping or feeling a sense of ability to kind of enter into that college application journey. There's, we're seeing a lot of lags, a lot of schools here in SoCal at least are seeing a lot of lags and applications this fall. This pandemic is still, you know, the tail of this thing continues on.

And so all the more important that we engage, you know, parents in this journey. That's great.

SPEAKER_03
That's really, really good. Troy.

SPEAKER_00
Lee, as we close the episode, would like to know if there is an additional idea or thought that you could share that would either be implemented immediately by a peer or something that you've come across that you feel worthy to share.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I was, I was thinking back to three words of advice I got years ago from, from a mentor of mine and it was this, build on success, build on success and this idea that start, start with something, start small, start with maybe one student influencer that, that you can identify within your student body, talk with them about the idea of influencing, you know, their communities with that, get them started on that, build upon that. You know, we started with just, you know, three and a year and we've grown it to five and seven a semester now where we've got students that are taking that, that kind of role with us.

And so I would just say start small, build on success. That will drive momentum. That will win a fan base.

That will earn you more budget. That will earn you, you know, greater, you know, appreciation and trust for what you're implementing there. And so I would, I would encourage the listeners today, if you're not doing it, think about the importance of peer to peer communication in a more significant way.

And as these social media platforms are developing today and students are building whole fan bases, whole communities out there, that's a great opportunity to engage them and really utilize what they've built for your benefit. Build on success.

SPEAKER_01
Thanks. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_00
And thank you so much for bringing your wisdom, your authenticity, and also your energy, which I can feel and I can't wait for the listeners to experience this episode. If someone would like to reach out to you and contact you for any reason, what would be the best way for them to do so?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, they can always reach me by email. That's Lee.Wilheight.

That's L-E-E.W-I-L-H-I-T-E at Biola, B-I-O-L-A.EDU. Lee.Wilheight at Biola.EDU.

SPEAKER_00
We appreciate you, Lee. Thank you. Thank you, Troy.

SPEAKER_02
Appreciate you and Bart as well. And it's been great being with you today. Thanks for the good work you're doing.

SPEAKER_00
Our pleasure. Bart, any final words from you today?

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I just wanted to kind of, I really appreciate Lee's final word. They're with Build on Success. I think he really pointed out some really good things.

And again, so many times we talk about these big concepts. Somebody probably did a search or you clicked on the title of this episode. It had something to do with social influencers and you needed to learn more about it.

And I think that Lee did a great job of kind of laying that out and how Biola is doing that. And you might be a smaller school than Biola. You might be a bigger school than Biola, but you might be trying to figure out how can I do this? And I really liked Lee's last comment there, Build on Success.

Try only just one, maybe. Just try to figure out how to do that. Take a look at, if you can't afford Zemi or you can't afford Unibody or something like that, figure out how you can at least create a student ambassador team.

You've already got some students that might be giving tours. Maybe part of that is that they offer their texts, their cell phone to students to be able to text them with any questions. Figure out what would fit for you with these concepts.

And I think that might be a good way to start. And as Lee said, when you build on success and you maybe you gain a few more students next year because of that or 15 or 20, well, your budget's going to change a little bit. And maybe you can do other things as well.

So I think those are just a few thoughts that I have for Troy.

SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Bart. Everyone, that winds up another episode. The Higher Ed Marketer Podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency, and by Think Patented, a marketing execution company specializing in printing, mailing, and other digital marketing assets.

On behalf of my co-host, Bart Kailer, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01
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