SPEAKER_03
You're listening to the Higher Ed Marketer, the podcast for marketing professionals in higher education. Join us every week as we talk to the industry's greatest minds in student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where marketing in higher ed is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_00
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I am Troy Singer. He is Bart Koehler.

And today, we talked to Luke Phillips, who is the executive director of marketing at Pepperdine University. And as I try to think of a title or a topic that I would describe this episode that you're getting ready to listen to, I think overall would be practical tips for enrollment marketing. But if I'm being authentic, it's this guy gives you a week's worth of information in 25 minutes.

And I love the way he does it. It is one of the most dense amounts of information that we have gotten in a short amount of time. And if I were you, I would get out your pen and paper right now.

And he does it in a very enjoyable and energetic way. Yeah, he is. Luke's great.

And he's, he

SPEAKER_02
mentions at the beginning, he's been a longtime listener to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. And he brought his A game. I mean, he was like, Hey, if I were somebody in the shoes of higher ed marketers, this is what I would want to know.

And he does a great job. And as Troy mentioned, it's a lot of really pragmatic, practical advice in a, in a very dense package. And so, yeah, you might want to, you might want to bookmark this episode and be sure to, you know, download the show notes and the, and the, and go to the website for the transcript.

SPEAKER_00
There's some really, really good information here. Here is Luke Phillips of Pepperdine University. Luke, you are a friend of the show.

So I know, you know, what we're going to do from the very beginning, if you would please share something that you've learned recently that you would deem

SPEAKER_01
fun or interesting to share. Yes, happy to do that. And just want to quickly say, hey again to you, Troy and Bart.

And thank you again for having me. I am a fan of the show. Like you said, I've been sort of a fan since you first started.

So looking forward to the conversation today. And yeah, there is something recently I learned it actually has to do with time zones. So I'm actually from North Carolina.

And they went to college in Florida, spent about 10 years in California. Now I'm in Arizona. And some may know that Arizona doesn't observe, you know, daylight savings time, which I thought was kind of an interesting thing.

So there's, we always are on the same time. So half the year we're like mountain time, technically half the year Pacific time. And I just assumed there have to be other states that do this too.

But after looking it up, you know, found out no, it's just a, just a stunt. And the interesting fact though that I learned, I thought, well, why is this because I'm having to adjust my calendars with my colleagues who are in California and found out that it really just has to do with that kind of extreme heat we get out here in Arizona, especially in the summer. And if we were to spring forward, you'd still have like daylight and extreme heat at like 9pm.

So I imagine that would, you know, cause a lot of difficulty putting kids to bed and all the others. So interesting how Arizona kind of does things

SPEAKER_00
their own way. Thank you. I certainly find it interesting because I knew Arizona didn't change, but never knew the reason why.

So thank you, Luke. And Luke would love for you to share a little bit about Pepperdine University, which is a wonderful institution that you serve.

SPEAKER_01
Yes, it is. It's a wonderful place. And, you know, founded by George Pepperdine way back in 1937.

And he just, I think, had a wonderful vision to create a university committed to both academic excellence, but also Christian values. And some people don't know this, but it was actually started in Los Angeles near downtown and then later moved to Malibu around the 1970s. And that's what everybody thinks of when you hear Pepperdine is the Malibu beautiful, highly rated campus and everything.

And now it's grown to over 10,000 students between the Ceever undergraduate right there based out of Malibu and then the four graduate schools with campuses all over Southern California. We have campus in Washington DC and then a significant international footprint now as well. And then my role is in marketing and admissions and things related to growth, growth of enrollment.

And I spend, I've spent most of my time within the graduate school of education and psychology, which has recently become actually the largest of the five schools. So I do a lot of collaborative and consultative type of work with other schools

SPEAKER_00
as well. Thank you, Luke. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on the podcast to speak to some of the growth and success that you've had in growing.

And I think that the numbers are near correct. When you first started maybe a couple of years ago, the enrollment for your part of the graduate school was around 1500, but now it's grown to over 4,000. So Bart and I was like, well, we would really like to tap into your wisdom and find out some of the reasons.

And in our previous conversation, you really emphasize that you stress or emphasize strategic thinking in a higher view versus really getting into the weeds and being more tactical for a large growth. And would love for you to unpack that for us and the listeners. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'd love to do that.

SPEAKER_01
And you're right. We started off probably about 2017. This graduate school had about 1500 students.

And then it started to really grow. And then I joined toward 2019 going into the enrollment for Fall 2020. And it just it really started to take off quite a bit around that time.

Got into the 2000 and then 2500 and 3000 and now over 4000 students. A lot of that growth did come from our online psychology, which is managed by an OPM, you know, separate partner. So a lot of especially in the clinical psychology side, where we are the number one school in the country in terms of number of students taking programs with us.

But the on ground side saw a lot of growth as well. But we maxed out capacity seven of our 17 on ground programs in 2021 were maxed out. And so but to your question, I'd say it did have to do with that online and some of that growth, but also just really wonderful leaders, a good Dean, associate Dean's program chairs who were receptive to the idea of like you said, that strategic thinking and not just thinking about how do we package up these programs in their existing form in front of the right people at the right places in the right times.

But how do we look at the product itself and think about what other products are out there that may be needed in the marketplace and then look at the career trends and how can we think of ourselves as as not just having students as our end user, but it's really those employers who have needs and they need students who are trained and prepared for the fields are going to go into so no real silver bullet, but really thinking strategically like that at the very beginning using a lot of research market research and then executing really well in terms of both marketing and our admission strategies, you know, kind of down the funnel to

SPEAKER_02
I think that's such a great point, Luke. And I really like the fact that you're really stressing that idea of being strategic. You mentioned, you know, OPM partners, a lot of people have those different kinds of partners and I think too many times the leadership of the institutions kind of think, oh, it's just a set up and forget it.

And, you know, we've got somebody else doing that. You got somebody working on that. But I think that the fact that you're kind of bringing up is that you really have to be strategic about it.

You have to really think through that. And I really loved your comment about being that the hard work of doing the research, understanding it. I mean, certainly with a school like, you know, a graduate program in psychology, we know that with mental health kind of being something that a lot of people are talking about, you know, it's in the news after the pandemic and the COVID that we're kind of seeing the results of that.

And especially with a lot of the challenges in our schools and things, that is a growing area. And you guys have been very strategic in that. And I really think that, you know, being able to really do the research and figuring it out.

So help me understand a little bit about how you're doing that. I mean, you're actually doing the work of the research, but what tactically does that look like? I mean, what are some of the exercises that you and your team

SPEAKER_01
are doing? I love how you say that sometimes we think it's set it and forget it because that definitely resonates in my experience, but it's not. And it's not that for any part of what we do. It's not to set it.

It's always new things. And it's certainly not to forget it because we're always adjusting the things we have and iterating and trying to make it better. But to answer your question around specifics around research, yeah, we really want to understand the deep data around our market and what's going on with our students.

And so we obviously gather all the enrollment statistics, enrollment over time, new student versus returning, and admissions yields all down the funnel. I also look at the industry because that's what really tells us what are the places in the industry where we need to move and to be present. And we want to understand salary and education levels, projected job growth, the education levels that are required.

If no part of that industry wants a master's degree, maybe we don't need to be offering a master's, for example, or doctorate. Grad, the companies where graduates end up being employed and the percentage of those who are going on to get employment really helps in the industry analysis. And then looking deeply at market.

So that's a lot of the iPad data is a really great resource. And the National Center for Education Statistics, to be able to say, here's those market dynamics, the size over time, how marketable is this program as well. I like to look at total completions per year versus total programs in the market and how those kind of changed over time.

Another category would be competitive. So we do a really deep dive on our, on the those who are in that landscape and what's their units and length and cost. And even to the detail of color coding, the course listings to say, how are we offering, what are our courses we're offering, and how many are we offering on that topic compared to what everyone else is offering? Are there any courses we have that no one else is doing? And why do we have that that course? And then another one that's really big is the target market.

So we want to know the detail of those students and what's the drivers, quantitative, qualitative age, at this, the gender, location maps, new student surveys to gather more information from them, and then deep diving on kind of really the digital atmosphere and what's happening in digital and getting a good sense of that. That's kind of like the standard things we always do. But I've found having done research for numerous programs, it's never the same.

And it's kind of, you know, something fun that I enjoy. And it always is a little bit different. You know, looking at, for example, our master's in teaching is going to have single subject and multiple subject and special education and people looking at becoming a high school teacher or something.

Whereas our other programs are going to be a little more straightforward. But yeah,

SPEAKER_02
those are some of the things we typically look at. You covered a lot there. I wanted to kind of make sure that we pause for a second because again, you and I've talked before and I always bring it up to a lot of our guests is that we've got a very wide range of listeners on the show.

And so, you know, we've got, you know, we've got, you know, folks like Pepperdine, we've got folks like, you know, Big R1 schools that are, their marketing teams are listening and, and they're thinking, yeah, I can go to institutional research and have them pull some data for me and I can look at that or I can call our partner XYZ consultants and they can run that for us and, you know, we can write them a check at the end. And then the other little tiny schools are like, Hey, it's just me and the frog in my pocket to quote Tim Fuller. He likes that phrase.

How in the world would I do that kind of research? I don't have the budget. I don't have the staff. But a lot of what you said is just kind of publicly available research.

I mean, iPads is a government, you know, Department of Education website you can go to, you can get some of your research there. You talked about some national statistics, clearing houses and places like that. This is public data.

It's, it's a lot of web searches. It's a lot of just, you know, and those surveys, I mean, it doesn't take much to put a survey monkey survey together to, you know, survey some of your current students doing some, you know, admitted student research. There's tools and techniques that you can do.

And so, you know, if you were like on a desert island, Luke, and you were like, I'm going to have to pull some of this together. What are some of those places that you might tell somebody that, Hey, if you can't do everything, at least go to these three places and pull some of this. Wonderful question.

Yeah,

SPEAKER_01
there are so many places and there's no special thing we subscribe to at all to gather it. You know, we were able to get this all with publicly available information. So for example, all of industry analysis are things like Board of Labor Statistics and salary.

com. If you want to salary and Board of Labor Statistics will give you like projected job growth and things like that. The surveys for incoming new students are great.

Great to ask questions like how did you first hear about us? What are of these different factors? Which of these were most important in your decision to be with us? I also like to do surveys for those who were accepted but do not end up continuing. They choose a different school. So we ask questions, you know, thank you for letting us know that now we'd love for you to fill out the survey.

Tell us why. What are what were these factors for you to the iPad and National Center of Education Statistics data is a little harder to learn, but it is publicly available and just watching a few YouTube videos on that. There are great people out there in the higher ed industry who have already walked through how to do that and pull that data, especially on completions per year.

That's really helpful. Competitive analysis, you really can use the internet and look at the websites of the schools that you're hearing about. And if for example, that one survey where they say, here's where I went instead, now you know who some of those, you know, competitors are just from that and what you're hearing on the phone.

You don't need to go Yeah, your students and and target market. I think a good place to begin is what I'd call kind of an internal analysis. You know, it's very likely that the students what they look like now is what they're most likely to continue to look like.

And I always say it's easier and more cost effective to go from 80 to 90% than to go from zero to 10. So start with what's your 80% what are the students looking like now and gather their feeder school information through the transcripts is a good place to gather that. And then another quick tip I'll give it I have found that graduate assistants really help.

So just getting as much graduate assistant talk to your financial aid people and they usually can give you one or two assistants and if they're master or doctoral students, they're going to be wonderful at gathering data. And it will be a win win for

SPEAKER_02
everybody because they're getting that experience too. That's great. I really love how you talked about that.

And and I guess the next thing to that as we kind of finish up this part of the conversation, I'm guessing to that once you do all that that that gathering of the research, you're kind of distilling that down into some key bullet points for your strategy. I mean, you're not just kind of plopping a three ring binder on the table in the marketing team meeting. You've kind of summarized into kind of, hey, these are some of the strategies that we're going to build based on that research.

Tell me how that process works. Yes, great point. And absolutely

SPEAKER_01
because if you did pop that three ring binder down, you know, it's not going to be looked at or nothing's going to happen. So you have to have strategies around how you now present that the key findings. And so it does end up being a 60 to 100 page, you know, slide deck.

But and on each one, I have a really key insights pulled out. So I do call out boxes and things like that. I like to do summary slides to say, if you don't want to look at the whole competitive analysis, here's the competitive analysis summary, you know, and then target market, here's a slide in one slide with icons and other things to make it interesting.

I'll say, here's what that looks like. Here's the demographic geographic, and you can do creative things like infographics and things to be able to display that information better. I also like to do kind of a I really like the SWOT analysis.

I know that's kind of a standard in marketing that you kind of strength weakness. But after you've done all that research, you can really boil it down to what are our strengths based on all the things we've learned and our weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And that tends to be a one that tends to be well received.

And if and if I'm telling a leader, what slide of this whole deck should you focus on, that's usually one I'll point to, I'll say, here's the page number, go to that one page, look at the strengths we have and our opportunities, and they're all laid out in like bullet point form right there. But that is a really great question. And it's not enough just to do the research, you have to be able to find the insights and and what's going to be most actionable.

And you got to understand your sequence of moves in terms of what are we going to start first, because there's a lot to do here, you know, a lot of things that will come away with and what are at your institution, some things are going to be more difficult to deploy than another institution. So what are the things that are the lowest hanging fruit for us and our situation and move from there?

SPEAKER_00
That's great. Thank you. Luke, I think you started talking about deploying and I think that would be the point when marketing starts working with admissions and maybe it's happened before that point.

But if you can kind of take us there and the mindset of the partnership between marketing, who is getting all of the top of the funnel students and now bringing it to admission,

SPEAKER_01
can you show us how that works at Pepperdine? Absolutely. And that is a really important topic because a lot of institutions, you know, marketing has always been sort of separate a lot of times, you know, they are doing their own thing and admissions are doing their own thing, but it's really this sort of three-legged race. You're all in this together and I've had this wonderful privilege.

I don't know how I've been so fortunate, but everywhere I've ever been, I've been able to oversee both. And in the last at least three institutions I've been at, and it really has made a difference and been a real advantage. So for those who don't have that opportunity, being really closely connected with regular meetings and being best friends, you know, with the admissions director is going to be really critical.

So that's the first part. And then the way I think of it is in terms of both kind of funnel communications and also funnel initiatives. So now we've got all these leads, hopefully, for marketing.

How do we get those leads to move in, to be in the seat on the first day of class? And what are all those steps we need to move them through in between from lead to contact it on the phone or voice to voice or an info session or something from that to start it up to submit it up to completed all the required things and accept it and matriculated and enrolled. And so the funnel communications, I put a really heavy emphasis there on speed to lead, you know, getting outbound dials and text messages and chat and whatever form of communication you can. And then of course, when you're looking at international students, you got WeChat, WhatsApp, and all the other types of apps you need to be involved in.

But that speed to lead and then the rewarming. So those who have gone aged who never got contact, how do you rewarm those and have a good strategy for that? And then down the funnel. So like our admissions team, we go our standard is 21 days.

If someone's an active student who hasn't said they're not interested yet, they get a call and we call it the trifecta call voicemail with email and text message every about 21 days, we find four weeks, four weeks is kind of long, two weeks is a little aggressive, we give it about that time. And every enrollment counselor, a Roman officer is scheduling that next call while you're on the last call. So let's go ahead and plan.

We've talked about you're going to get your transcripts in. And let's let's do that. I also would say, not just contact, but there's a lot of other funnel initiatives, whether it's the software you're using, your scholarshiping strategies, your deadline setting, you know, I like to say earlier students are more students.

So if we can get students in with good value, we'd like to do a good application, you know, scholarship if you apply by this state, and those kinds of things. So value plus urgency always equals conversion. And the more value and the more urgency, the more conversion is what I found.

So let's do this quickly. And let's do this in a seamless way. And the last thing I guess I'll say there's there's endless there endless things, thousands of things you can be doing for funnel initiatives, but trying to remove those barriers that are in there, because you might not need a 600 word essay to be able to evaluate a student's ability to be a successful student.

And then trying to get acceptance review, don't make them wait two or three months to get their decision. Let's make that decision as fast as we possibly can, and eliminate unnecessary, you know, faculty meetings and discussions and some bringing career services and some bringing a committee to determine all these things. And what we do is we say the enrollment officer is the leader, they make that decision.

And if they need to escalate to the program chair, they can. And then some programs we do have interviews, but trying to make it easy for students and

SPEAKER_02
remove those barriers are really important too. Okay, well, I'm going to say right now that we need to do a mic drop here, because I mean, for the last five minutes is like mic drop, we're done. I mean, it's incredible.

And I just want to point out a few things I was trying to keep up. But I mean, right now listener, I would pause and rewind it five minutes and listen to everything that Luke just said, because he gave you gold. And I really love the fact that I mean, you just kind of outlined so many key points of the journey and the funnel.

And I love your really practical advice, like the idea of 21 days. I mean, you had the trifecta of the call voicemail, the text in the email, do that every 21 days to keep them on the line and keep them keep them moving down the funnel. I love that.

I love your idea of value plus conversion. I mean, you know, actually, it was

SPEAKER_01
the, what, how did you say that value plus value plus urgency equals conversion. And then I add on the more of each of those, the more conversions to value plus urgency. So we talk a lot about

SPEAKER_02
using psychology and marketing. So you know, the fear of missing out the urgency, there's all kinds of different things that you can use for that. But the idea that you've got to do that with value, you've got to have a reason for that.

And you've got to be you've got to be honest and and authentic about that. I mean, we're not doing urgency, just, you know, call now, you know, the old, you know, in the middle of the night, infomercials, we actually trying to do it for the for the reason that it's important that somebody moves to the next step of their of their funnel in their education. So value plus urgency equals conversion.

And the more you do of both, the more you're going to get. It's it's great. And I love the idea of removing the barriers and eliminating the delays.

I mean, there's just so many good things in there. And Luke, I really, I really do appreciate that. Because I mean, that is kind of a, there is just so much in those things that if just if, if you as a listener, if you took that back to your team, and you just implemented a couple of those, you're going to see changes happening in your in your com flow, and in your marketing, and what's going on.

I think that's just such pragmatic and practical advice. So when you when you think that through Luke, I mean, obviously, that's what you've been doing for the past few years, why you've been seeing that growth. And is that is that part of why you've gotten a little bit more, you know, more runway to do more things? Because I mean, that seems to be kind of a little bit, it's not the secrets to success, but it is a big formula

SPEAKER_01
of success. Would you how do you impact that? Yes, I think so. I think when we start doing these things, and you have have some success at it, and then you do have to be conscious and careful.

Because not every program is like this, there's a lot of programs would get way more applicants than we could ever be able to sit, you know, but most programs and this will be the thing of the next five, 10 years. Most programs are going to be in a competitive environment, and you've got to do everything you can. And you have to really remove those barriers.

I love what you said about the psychology of it. You know, that's why we do things early, because if you can get in the mindset, oh, I'm already accepted here, and I'm getting that scholarship, and to be able to go tell people and say that and consider yourself in where you're not looking anywhere else now. So there is a lot of the psychology, but we also want to be mindful of always say we want to grow, strengthen and diversify our enrollment.

So yeah, we're looking to strengthen the enrollment as well, looking to bring different perspectives into those classrooms that will help strengthen the classroom as well. But to answer your question, yeah, I think after doing this for so many years and seeing success, yeah, it's opened up opportunity. And when you bring data and these things too, it makes the conversation so much easier to talk to a program leader or a dean.

When you come with experience and the data like that, I just find that that they're much more open. And I'll say that's one of the ways we've really been able to grow is, like I said, it's not just about taking the product in its existing form of being able to go to leadership and say, how can we improve this? We need to look at curriculum, faculty, student experience, career services, the rankings we have, because all those things are going to make a really big difference. Avid the locations, like we've done as well is another really big one.

Yeah, it seems like it's a very

SPEAKER_02
iterative process with everything that you're doing where you are looking at, you're looking at the product, you're looking at the promotion, you're looking at the way that you're presenting that you're looking at the processes that are going into it. So a lot of really, really good things there, Luke. I really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00
Luke, as we close our episode, we'd like to know if either A, if there is a piece of advice that you could give that could be quickly implemented by a marketing rep that's listening or two, if there's anything that we didn't touch on that you would like to offer before we end our show.

SPEAKER_01
What we've talked about is some of the biggest things in all of higher ed that across all of history have helped institutions to grow. I think the only things we haven't talked about are obviously new programs, how you determine those, because it's not always about just the programs you have, your retention that you have, your locations that you're going to have to add on, moving things online, those kinds of things. But yeah, we've really touched on most of it.

And I think if there's one takeaway, I'll give maybe an idea is that we've talked about a lot of outside the box thinking. So I would really encourage higher ed marketers to take time this afternoon or as soon as you're able to evaluate your efforts in a really holistic way, based on some of the things we've talked about, not just in terms, again, of how we package up our products in their current form the best we can, but instead, how do we partner with institutional leadership at the highest levels with a research informed approach to our educational offerings and in ways that are going to lead to that long term sustainability. Because if we don't think that way, the way enrollment, you know, trends are going is going to be more and more difficult as the years go on for every institution.

And I'll also add that that thinking you do will probably manifest itself differently, depending on your context and your level of authority and influence and those kinds of things. But I do think that no matter what role we all fill, there are always opportunities to think in new and different ways.

SPEAKER_00
Luke Phillips, Executive Director of Marketing at Pepperdine University, we are grateful for everything that you've brought and shared with us today. And for anyone listening that would like to contact you, what would be the best way for them to do so?

SPEAKER_01
My information is all there on the Pepperdine website, pepperdine.edu. You can search it there or feel free to find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with anyone there as well.

SPEAKER_00
Thank you, Luke. Bart, do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share before we

SPEAKER_02
leave? I do. And I just can't thank you enough, Luke, how excited I am about this episode. This was just a really, really good practical, this is kind of like the kind of episodes we dream about, you know, where there's just so much rich practical advice.

I was doing a quick Google, you know, look up here at the last minute, I was like, what are the elements from the periodical table that are the most dense? And I was like, I can't pronounce them, so I'm not going to even try. But that's kind of what it feels like is that we really kind of, you did a great job of packing in some really good ideas. And I think that just the idea, you gave some really practical advice about research and how even if you're on a marketing shoe, a streusetring budget for your marketing, for your research, there are ways that you can figure out how to do that.

And I think Luke gave you some good ideas and some good places to go. And then I think just your whole mic drop session about how to really work that com flow, the journey, mapping out the journey, taking some of the steps that Luke talked about with the 21 days, the different, you know, the idea of using value plus urgency equals conversion, go back, get through, then listen to that. That was about 1530 to 1930 in the podcast episode.

Really thought there was some really brilliant things in there, removing the barriers. And then I really liked that the whole idea, everything we've talked about today is just really strategic thinking. We started with the idea of, you know, a lot of people do this, you know, set it and forget it.

That this has been anything but that. This is strategic thinking from day one to the very end, and just reiterating, moving, editing, changing, you know, positioning. You're playing a game here.

It's kind of like a soccer match. You're constantly adjusting the game as you go along. And I think that Luke really brought his A game to this.

So thanks again, Luke. It's been a great conversation.

SPEAKER_01
Well, it's been an absolute privilege to be here. Thanks so much again for having me.

SPEAKER_00
We are grateful for you, Luke. And I'm always grateful for Bart. We're also very thankful for our sponsors, Kailer Solutions, a marketing and branding agency focusing on education, and bring digital consistently providing double digit increases in yield for institutions by directly connecting them to the devices of their valued enrollment funnel lists.

On behalf of Bart, Luke and myself, thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_03
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