SPEAKER_01
The Higher Ed Marketer podcast is sponsored by the ZME App, enabling colleges and universities to engage interested students before they even apply.
SPEAKER_00
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_01
Welcome to another edition of the Higher Ed Marketer podcast where, each week, we interview Higher Ed Marketers that we admire for the benefit and the betterment of the entire Higher Ed Marketing community. Today, Bart, we get to talk to one of the leading influencers and minds in Higher Ed Marketing, I should say, in marketing overall, Jay Baer. If you haven't heard that name, it's a name that you should know and should follow because he is a best-selling author and just someone that gives great content around effective marketing.
SPEAKER_03
I got introduced to Jay through one of his books called Utility. Probably about nearly 10 years ago, I think it came out in 2013. It really is one of those things.
You all know that when you read a book and it really changes the way that you think about things, it opens your eyes to a lot of things. That's what Jay's book did to me. Really influenced my thoughts about content marketing.
I could probably even say that the genesis of the Higher Ed Marketer happened then because I realized that there's questions that people have, there's things that they're searching for, and what we need to do is provide that. That's part of why we do the Higher Ed Marketer, is to provide those answers that you might be seeking and you might not even know those questions yet. Bringing on people like Jay to do that, he's been a leading thinker in this.
He's been in the space for years. I got introduced to him through Ethan Braden, who's another one of our guests who've been on the podcast a couple of times. I really like everything that Jay talks about.
I really like too the fact that Jay has his foot in both Higher Ed Marketing, but he does a lot of work in corporate too. I remember early in my career, I was doing work with higher education schools, but I was also doing work with Motorola and RCA and consumer brands. You learn a lot about just the way marketing works and how to apply that back and forth, and so I think Jay brings that expertise as well.
SPEAKER_01
You'll be a fan after this episode if you aren't a fan already of Jay. Here's our conversation with Jay Baer. We are so excited to welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast Jay Baer, which a lot of you know is a author of six books of best sellers, also a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and MC, but a lot of us know him as the business leader.
He is the founder of Convince and Convert, which is a content marketing consulting and social media strategy company. Jay, thank you so much for joining the Higher Ed Marketer podcast.
SPEAKER_02
Troy Bart, fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me. Excited to be on the show.
SPEAKER_01
If you could, for those that might not be familiar with Convince and Convert, could you let us know what the company does, especially around higher ed marketing?
SPEAKER_02
Sure, you bet. We're a 15-year-old consultancy with strategists located across the United States. We help mid-sized and large organizations do better digital marketing and better overall customer experience.
I have lots of clients in higher ed for whom we help them with social media, content marketing, sort of pan digital strategy, digital transformation, customer experience, essentially taking what they're doing and making it better. We're not a tactical front line agency in the classic sense. We're not going to design your Facebook ads, for example, but we'll tell you what you should be doing in paid advertising strategically.
That's great.
SPEAKER_03
Troy, I just wanted to jump in and I'm so excited to have Jay on here. I think I was introduced to Jay's work in 2013 when he launched his book Utility. It's one that I really framed the way that I looked at digital marketing and content marketing.
I've had a lot of people see my slides where I've quoted Jay in those. I've always been struck with the idea that the key, and I really believe this truly, the key to really successful content marketing is being able to answer the questions that your prospective students want and what they're seeking for. That goes all the way across so many things.
I really think that when we get into talking about social media strategy, that's really where a lot of things start. Isn't it, Jay? We've really got to be able to understand where the mindset is of our prospective students and what's going on.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it's tricky because the goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business or higher ed because of social media. Sometimes those work a little bit at cross purposes.
I would argue that higher ed organizations have as difficult of a strategic assignment as any kind of organization with regards to social media because there are so many strategic mouths to feed. You've got an enrollment goal, you've got an overall branding goal, maybe you've got an athletics goal, you've got a student services and student life goal, and then you've got individual units and departments, humanities and everything else. There's just a lot of people wanting to use social media for a lot of different things.
You only have so many accounts and figuring out what goes on the main account and what goes on the individual accounts and how they intersect and what gets elevated to the mothership. It's just a challenge, which is why Convicts to Convert works with so many major higher ed organizations to try and solve that challenge. There's no right answer.
It does depend on campus and the culture of each organization a little bit, but it's not an easy problem to solve.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. Full transparency, Jay and I met through Ethan Braden, who's been on the podcast a couple times. He's a friend of the higher ed marketer.
At Purdue, I know that they've leveraged a lot of your expertise in the work of Convicts and Convert. I think that one of the things you just said that reminded me of a conversation we have with Brian Kinney, who's the CMO at Harvard Business School. We had him on the podcast a few episodes ago.
He's been in, he's sat in the CMO seat in a lot of different industries and he's convinced that higher ed is one of the most difficult industries to do marketing. Primarily for what you just said, there's so many mouths to feed. There's so many constituent groups that really, when you think about it, how many other firms have to market to the wide swath of all the generations in certain ways that higher ed does.
SPEAKER_02
No question. It's such a good point and really salient today. When you're trying to communicate to, say a faculty member, versus a alum, versus a parent of a current student, versus an existing student, versus a prospective student, those are five colossally different personas.
We're lucky at Convert and Convert because we do a lot of higher ed strategy, but also a lot of strategy in other industries. Travel and tourism, technology, financial services, and on and on and on. I will tell you, Cisco, for example, is a large client of ours.
Cisco has a lot of different client types. It's a giant global company. Those client types and those audiences are far more similar than what you would find in any modestly sized higher ed organization.
You can't really have a strategy. You've got a whole bunch of other strategies. Many specific strategies that work together is really the approach.
I think you mentioned Ethan from Purdue. They've done a nice job figuring that out, that there is a master strategy and then specific strategies and operations plans for each key unit and even for each key theme or differentiator that Purdue has.
SPEAKER_03
I like how you articulated that because I think that that's one of the keys, especially when we're talking about social media. You've got so many different audiences to begin with. Then you have the preferred channels that those audiences like to consume their social media.
I was doing a presentation recently to a group of colleges and leaders. I was pointing out a slide that I had done in 2016 and I said, you know, my daughter, she's 12, she's into this new social media called Musically. You need to be paying attention to because I don't know enough about it, but she's really into it and her friends are into it.
Well, guess what? It's called TikTok today. It's one of those things that I have so many higher ed marketers that tell me, boy, I just can't keep up. I often say, what are you doing per the segment and are you doing those well? Because there's no sense of you getting into TikTok if you're not even doing Facebook well for your alumni.
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, but you may put different people on each of those channels for different purposes. You're right though.
I mean, marketing has a very difficult challenge and really has since the invention of the internet in that the tactics and the cadence of marketing changes perhaps more than any other element of the enterprise. You never have a quarter, much less a year, much less five years. We're just doing the same thing again.
Like never. It's constant optimization and reinvention. I will tell you, some people are totally wired for that gig and other people just aren't.
It doesn't make them bad marketers and it certainly doesn't make them bad people, but it does make them perhaps ill-suited for modern marketing. Because I can tell you, I've been doing this now for 30 years. I started in the internet business when domain names were free and I can tell you it's not going to get easier.
It's not like, oh, but you know what, in 2025 we're going to stop having new stuff to worry about. Nope, it's just going to get harder. And I love your TikTok example because TikTok is working the exact same pattern that every other social network has worked.
It starts with the youth and then it bronze its appeal to other people. To wit, gentlemen. I am a tequila teacher.
I'm a certified tequila sommelier and I've recently started a TikTok tequila teaching channel, tequila J-Bear. I just put out a TikTok video 10 days ago, 875,000 views on TikTok, me talking to a camera about tequila. Right? I mean, it's crazy.
Crazy.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And we had Rob Clark on a couple of weeks ago. He's a former director of admissions at one of the schools that I'm affiliated with and that's how we met.
He since left, his son is 7-1 and so he's a junior in high school and so he's working toward D-1 type of scholarships. But they started a TikTok account called the Tall Family. And they've had over a billion views and he talked about how enrollment and higher ed marketers need to approach this.
And I just want to run it past you. He said, we've got to stop acting like this is the alumni magazine and reviewing everything and getting approvals. You have to basically just kind of work, get the students involved and just start doing it on a daily basis and that's the only way you're going to gain followers.
And I had this conversation last week on a campus and the marketing team was like, well, this is the rules. We're going to do one TikTok per week, one by the admissions team and one by the marketing team. And I'm like, you're never going to get any followers that way because it doesn't fit the model of traditional marketing brand approval in a large organization.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. When you think about content, there's a couple of different approaches. There's the filmmaker approach.
We're going to make a movie and that movie is going to have talented actors and it's going to have a professional director and we're probably going to have a lighting crew and a microphone and maybe even like a table of free food just off camera. It's a production. Then you've got sort of the documentary style, which is we're just walking around the camera and we'll fix it in edit and TikTok very much rewards the latter, not the former.
In fact, most people who overproduce and sort of try to make their TikToks quote unquote professional, it usually doesn't work as well as if it is a little more run and gun. There's a level of authenticity there, which frankly used to be the case when Instagram first came out was certainly the case when Vine first came out. So a lot of these Neo platforms because they start younger tend to tune their algorithm around kind of unofficial style content.
And then as you get bigger and you've got more ad dollars from larger brands at play, sometimes they start to tilt it back the other way towards a little bit more structured content. We'll see what happens with TikTok. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
That's a good point. I think the challenge that your company addresses is alignment between enrollment and either corporate operations or with, no, sorry.
SPEAKER_03
Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01
Jay, another challenge that convinced and convert addresses is alignment between enrollment and also marketing or corporate organization. I'd like to know if you could kind of explain the challenges that you address and how you fix them for organizations.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I mean, one of the challenges that we see constantly when we work with higher ed is that in many cases, the enrollment marketing function and the enrollment marketing team is kind of isolated. They oftentimes have their own assignment, their own metrics, their own budget, and that's not necessarily integrated into the enterprise.
There are some obvious inefficiencies to doing marketing that way, but the bigger challenge is that in many cases, enrollment marketing is writing checks that the operations of the university can't cash. So they're saying, this is what it's like to be a student here and please fill out this very complicated application that doesn't work on a mobile phone. And then somebody decides, okay, yeah, I'm interested and then they come for a tour, but the tour doesn't really say the things that they heard in the enrollment marketing and then they show up on campus.
They decide to matriculate and it's a different set of circumstances as well. So in business, we wouldn't do it that way, right? In a non-higher ed world, you would never do it that way. You would have a unified customer journey map that says, all right, what messages do we say about our business at the awareness phase? What messages do we say at the interest phase? What messages do we say at the conversion phase? What messages do we say at the advocacy phase? Those are aligned so that we're always telling a similar story and we're changing that story based on funnel stage.
In higher ed, so often the story changes based on department and that causes some confusion and frankly some dissatisfaction amongst students and parents later down in the process. So aligning that and trying to get everybody second out of the same hymenal is one of the things that we've done a lot at Convince and Convert.
SPEAKER_03
Can you say to Jay that based on that, I've often, and I know there's different modes of thinking about this and honestly, I think in the 30 years that I've worked in the higher ed space, I've seen a big shift in 30 years ago, you'd get a lot of cold stairs if you use the word customer or sales or anything that had to do. It was kind of like taboo to talk about the business of higher education. I see that changing but I see that in some schools like I'm going to use Ethan at Purdue.
There's chief marketing officers sitting at the table, they are at the top of the table and they are driving a lot of what's going on. Other institutions that I work with though, a lot of times faculty are driving that and there's a lot of tension, a lot of challenges going on because I mean I talked to a marketer the other day that said, hey, I just got word that we have a new program that they want filled for fall and I have to market and fill it for the next three months and I don't even know if it's marketable. I don't know if there's a desire in the marketplace for this particular program.
How are you working with your clients about that? Is that something you're experiencing and how do you help the marketing officers realize that they've got to have a seat there and they've got to have a voice?
SPEAKER_02
At some level we assist with that kind of change management and in fact there's a number of large institutions where we've been really intimately involved in, I don't want to say centralizing marketing because sometimes that takes on a negative connotation inside higher ed but from a functional standpoint that's a little bit of how it goes. Somebody is a CMO and we can decide what the unified strategy is and then here's what the department strategy is. We've done a lot of that work with Arizona State for example and in other organizations that have a little bit more of a business style command and control structure and then we've also worked with lots and lots of higher ed that has more of the traditional decentralized marketing approach that you just mentioned Bart.
When we are in the decentralized approach, oftentimes we advocate for a little bit more of a centralized way of doing things but typically that is a provost and president level decision that supersedes our ability as consultants to effectuate change. When we have a decentralized system, the best thing you can do in my estimation is to really lean into centers of excellence to say look we've got a whole bunch of talented marketers on staff in a bunch of different units on campus. Let's make sure that if somebody learns something everybody learns something.
So a lot of knowledge transfer, a lot of weekly meetings and a lot of cases my team will actually create the agendas and run the meetings and say hey this week we're going to do a whole session for every marketer on campus about video SEO or whatever the topic is so that everybody kind of levels up because if you don't have a structure where there's managers and directors and VPs etc. where the knowledge transfer happens waterfile style, you have to have a scenario where the knowledge transfer happens horizontally like river style and that's the best way you can still execute marketing if somebody says hey congratulations you've got two months to fill a program you've never heard of.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah exactly, exactly I think that there's a lot of common challenges whether it's a very small school or whether it's a large D1 school there's challenges that we all share that's part of the reason why we're doing this podcast so I'm happy that you're here. Troy?
SPEAKER_01
Similarly you're helping universities understand the communication modalities and how they can best utilize and communicate within them. Can you explain how you help universities with that?
SPEAKER_02
When I say modality what I actually mean is the format of the communication. Is it text, is it audio, is it video, is it a puppet show, is it a cookie gram, there's a lot of ways to communicate these days. Hire Red has historically of course been I don't want to say addicted to but certainly a proponent of written communication and there's certainly nothing wrong with that but probably more than any time maybe in recorded history we have broader differences in modality preference than we maybe ever have.
It is very very true that younger people prefer not reading in many cases. I'll tell you a story about that. So when my son who's now a junior at Indiana University when he still lived at home it's pretty common that we'd be having breakfast in the morning at the breakfast bar there.
I'd be on my phone and he'd be on his phone and I'd look over and we'd both be on ESPN.com or both big sports fans and we'd be on the exact same article except I'd be reading the article and he'd be watching the video because as many people know it's very common on a site like that that they put a video on top and then the full text underneath and I would be reading it because I am an old and he would be watching the video because he is a young. Now that is an oversimplification of reality but not very much.
The New York Times did a study last year where they interviewed like 2,000 college students about their modality preferences and my favorite quote in the whole study was from a college student who said, every time I get an email I feel like I'm being stabbed. It's just something else for me to do. Yet, how often does higher ed rely on email as like the exclusive means of student communication and it is not at all atypical and you gentlemen both know this as do many of your listeners that the only reason these students are checking email is because the university might send them something.
My son Ethan has like 4,300 unread emails. I just saw his phone he came over for dinner last night and I'm like 4,300 unread emails. Who are these from? He's like, I don't know.
I don't check my email. I'm like, we got to understand that we can't create content only in the formats that we prefer. We have to create content in the formats that our audience prefers and sometimes that means you've got to take the same message, the same story and make it in a bunch of different ways.
You've got to take the same message about your alumni association and what happens when you graduate and you're first part of the alumni association. That's an important piece of communication. Do that in text but also do it in audio as a series of podcasts and also do it as a series of videos and also do it in direct mail.
Do it all the different ways. There's no right answer. The right answer is making sure you create everything in the format that people actually want.
SPEAKER_01
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SPEAKER_03
I like that because I think that not only do we need to recommend or not only do we need to do recognize but also basically allow them to have the choice and preference of how they do that. I love so many times when somebody says what's your preferred way of communicating? Do you want to have a text? Do you want an email? Do you want to have a phone call? Well, certain times I'll want to text. Other times I might want a phone call.
When old, it doesn't matter. We have our own preferences and I think that it's time that we really start to honor everybody's preferences especially since there's so many ways and as you said there's not a right or wrong way to do it but it's just a matter of the more we can do that, we talk so much about personalization. Troy and I have talked about that a lot.
I'm sure you guys talk about that too Jay and the importance of especially for traditional undergrad but even really anybody. Everybody likes to feel personalized and they like to feel recognized. One of that personalization is not only serving up content that we know is going to be relevant to them but doing it through modality is going to be relevant to them as well.
SPEAKER_02
Absolutely. Personalization is relevance and relevance is respect and when you offer that respect it becomes more useful and you gain more attention. It's a simple formula but harder to do sometimes day to day.
SPEAKER_03
I would agree with that. I think that's an excellent point.
SPEAKER_01
Along that thinking of personalization I know that your company also helps schools with market research and personal development and the customer journey mapping and I believe the persona development. How do you help them research that and develop it and then let them know how to best communicate with those personas?
SPEAKER_02
It's very common Troy in marketing and comms especially in higher ed to think of our constituencies based on age cohort. Very common for foundations and alumni associations. You've got the current student cohort, you've got the recent grad cohort, you've got the kind of mid-career cohort, the late-career cohort, the retired cohort.
You think all right let's look at the audience horizontally based on how old they are and presumably their life stage. Well it turns out that that doesn't actually work psychologically. It's much better off to understand what the motivations and relationship is between that alum and the university or college.
That relationship as it turns out based on lots of research we've done from many campuses that relationship is often based on where they live, what they did in school when they were there, how many friends they had when they went to school, what activities they were in. It's not so much well if they're 50 then they should really be a great candidate for a donation. It's based more so on where they're really active when they're on campus when they were there etc.
So that kind of research which is based very much on attitudinal conditions create richer more useful personas than just based on age.
SPEAKER_03
I love that and that conversation came up with a couple of clients last week with the idea that we've got to necessarily look at. We were talking about how to gather outcomes, stories that we want to tell people. I think that sometimes we forget as higher ed marketers that really those outcomes are going to be based on the affinities that they had.
More than likely if they had a professor that was really a mentor to them and a friend and they've continued that relationship through that person is going to know a lot more than the official alumni office would. A student is going to just be communicating on Facebook or through email or through texting or whatever it is with their mentor and with those professors and those relationships that they had in that affinity group whether it was a department or a theater group or a choral group or whatever it was those relationships are there. And so I think it's so important that as higher ed marketers we understand through the personas that you just described but also to find out where does that knowledge live and it usually is going to live deeper down in those affinity groups than it would in any kind of official database.
And what we've got to do is figure out how to harvest it out of those places and start leveraging it and collecting it and managing it in a way that we can then start to tell those stories.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, start managing that data and collecting it while they're on campus as undergrads. So often we start to collect the data once they leave campus, once they've graduated. And start doing surveys, alumni surveys, etc.
, etc. Instead of doing more undergrad surveys, they start to build that profile which then can be used later. And especially now in this era of third party data going away and we're going to have to really rely on our own collected first and zero party data, the time to start learning more about your eventual alums is the second they set foot on campus for the first time, the day they come on the tour for the first time.
What question did they ask on the tour of the tour guide? That should be in the database. Just now I understand that requires a lot of centralized operations that a lot of campuses just aren't ready to do yet, but that's the direction we're headed for sure. Those who have the best data will win, period.
I don't care what business you're in, does it matter if it's higher ed or you're selling cars or you're selling jewelry or selling hamburgers? Whoever knows the most will sell the most, period. I agree with that.
SPEAKER_03
I think it's a great way to put it. And I did a blog post a couple years ago that was about kind of the life cycle of a relationship of a higher ed to a student. And I started out with the prospect phase.
I think I figured out 52 different points that they would be, different persona points that they might be, all the way to a major donor who has their name on a large building on campus. We have to be able to measure that and keep track of that and keep that relationship continuing to grow all the way through. Not every student is going to be a major donor that's going to have their name on the building.
We know that. But we do have the ability to keep that relationship going. And I love that idea that you have of just being able to figure out that and collect that and quantify and analyze and organize that into data.
And their tools are out there. It's just the discipline and the centrality of being able to do that.
SPEAKER_02
Took the word right out of my mouth that technology is there right now, today. It's not a big deal. It's not our moon launch or anything crazy.
It's totally there. It's just getting the people aligned. It's so much harder than getting the technology in place.
SPEAKER_01
As we bring the episode to a close, Jay, we'd like to know if there would be a final thought or an impactful piece of advice that you could offer our listeners that they could utilize either right away or within the next week or so.
SPEAKER_02
I'll give you two. One on the strategy side, I would say it can be really frustrating for higher ed marketers because there's always a very, very long list of things that they could or should or want to do. And usually the list is longer than their ability to execute on the list.
And that creates a lot of, I think, dissatisfaction and just at some level unhappiness amongst marketers in higher ed. And so what I would tell folks out there is you can't boil the ocean. You've got to set out to do a few things better every 90 days and eventually you'll be on top of it.
When you look at the whole list, it seems too daunting. So you've got to focus on a few things and execute on those. And that's one of the things that our friend, Ethan at Purdue, has been so good at.
Say, hey, let's not keep all the things in mind. That's his job at the CMO. Let's execute on a few very specific things, get those done and then move on to the next two or three things.
It's a much better way to go about it. The second thing I would say on a more tactical side is to understand that sometimes to get your core messaging seen, you have to wrap it up in messaging that's not as core. So for example, we're working with a higher ed institution.
I won't name which one. And their president said, we're doing all this great work in research. How come when we put messages out in social media about that, it doesn't go anywhere? Well, because it is great work, but it's not terribly interesting to everybody.
It's a little bit dry. And so what we explained to this president was what I call the candy candy vegetables philosophy, candy, candy vegetables works like this. You put something out in social media that most people are going to like.
It's a it's a nostalgia post or it's something from the mascot or it's something that's a little more universally beloved. It's a campus building. It's a cheese steak restaurant near campus.
Something like that. It's a trivia question about something on campus that gets the algorithm excited about your content. Then you put out another piece of candy, which gets the algorithm even more excited about your content.
And then you have swoop in there with the vegetables and you get a little extra cut from the algorithm because you've given them candy before. So this idea of candy, candy vegetables, we've actually tested many, many times scientifically and it really, really works. Sometimes it's difficult to get some people in the administration to understand that like, hey, it's not frivolity, it's marketing and sort of understanding the difference.
There's some, it requires some conversations sometime, but it really works.
SPEAKER_01
Thank you very much, Jay. Thank you so much for the wisdom that you've shoved into the half an hour that we've had with you. If someone would like to contact you, I usually ask this question, but you're truly a person that could just answer it and say, Google me.
But if someone really wanted to ask you a question and contact you personally, what would be the best direct way for them to do so?
SPEAKER_02
I'll give you two, Troy. I'm trying to over deliver here. First go to convince and convert.
com. Convince and convert.com. That's our main website with lots of resources for higher ed specifically and marketers in general. And then I have a newsletter, which ironically I put out via email.
Probably a terrible idea. It's called the bear facts comes out twice a month. There's marketing customer experience lessons, tequila reviews, podcast recommendations like this one book reviews.
It's the bear facts.com. B A E R sign up. I'd love to have you in the list.
SPEAKER_01
Everyone who is familiar with you is not surprised that you over deliver with everything you do. And thank you very much for being a guest on our podcast. Bart, any final thoughts from you?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I just want to kind of pull out a few things of that I really think was valuable in this. And I would encourage people to, you know, re listen to this. I mean, there's so many really good nuggets in here that that Jay gave us today and really appreciate that, Jay.
But a couple of things I just want to point out is that, you know, when you start looking at this and you start looking at social media, when you look at content, you've got to understand that there's, you know, yes, you can create that content, but several things that Jay said I want to really point out, there's three things. One is the modality, understanding, you know, the different ways of doing it. And I really love the comment that he made about the fact that, you know what, you might have that one message, but it might need to go and email texting, video, audio.
There might be several different ways of delivering that message. Don't rely on just one. Don't think that, oh, we, we told him.
Well, you told him, but you didn't tell them in their preference. And I think goes to the second thing of starting to really identify who are the personas that we're talking to, whether that's prospective students, the traditional undergrad, whether it's alumni, you know, moving beyond that, what Jay called the horizontal, you know, grouping of everything, but really kind of looking at that affinity grouping, really trying to kind of then identify those personas. And then that third item is just really starting to understand how you're going to do that and the ways you're going to do that.
I really particularly like that candy, candy, vegetable example where, you know, you've got to be able to do that. And that's, I mean, we talked about it being the algorithms and we talked about it with social media, but you know what, we all kind of like that. I mean, at the, at the end of the day, our brains are wired to kind of look at things that we really enjoy and then look at things that we really need to look at.
And that's why a lot of us suffer from some of the things we suffer from, whether it's, you know, not having the attention that we need to or, or whatever that might be. That's just the way that we're wired sometimes and being able to kind of understand that and work within that is really good. And so I'm just really grateful for, for Jay being on here today.
I would just also remind you, you know, as I mentioned before, I first learned about Jay and I've learned a lot from Jay through his books, but you know, a couple that I really, you know, three that I'm going to point out utility. Really good basics of content marketing and, and, and some of the social media elements hug your haters, you know, how to really kind of engage in relationships and how those things happen and, and how you, you know, how you respond to those things. And then the talk triggers, you know, complete guide to creating customers with word of mouth.
So we didn't really talk about that today, but I think that's another really big element, especially when you talk about prospective students and, and that generation Z. Um, I said, and, and as we talk about generation Alpha coming, I mean, you know, we've talked about that a few times. We had Mark McCrindle on a few episodes ago with the idea of, you know, he's the leading expert in the world on generation Alpha.
He talked to us about how that's going to be different from any other generation we're working with. And so start to educate yourself on that, understand that, because that's going to be a big part of this word of mouth marketing. Um, and, and, uh, and again, just thank you, Jay.
Really appreciate the time today.
SPEAKER_02
Um, my pleasure. Thanks to both of you and everybody listening. If my team and I can help you be delighted to do so.
Thanks so much.
SPEAKER_01
Our leading sponsor for the higher ed marketer podcast is Zemi, where students share stories and connect in exclusive college communities. Also by Kayla solutions and education marketing and branding agency. And finally by think patented, a marketing execution company, combining print technology and personalization for higher engagement for colleges and universities.
On behalf of Bart Kailer, my co-host, I'm Troy singer. Thank you for listening.
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