SPEAKER_00
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 and higher ed is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_01
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I'm Troy Singer. And I'm Bart Kaler.

And today I'm excited about our conversation because I've heard and I know Fernando a little bit, but now I understand what everyone raves about him. It's good stuff. Yes, and the work that he does.

Today we are talking to Fernando Bergas, Korea. He is the Chief Digital and Media Officer at Ology. And as an important, he takes us down the road of leveraging curiosity and an innovative thinking within higher ed marketing.

I'm excited to have this because this is right up Bart's alley. And I think the conversation that was created amongst the three of us, many will benefit from.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it was a great conversation. I mean, I love the fact that Ology does a lot of work in enrollment marketing, much like I do. And it's just, it's always refreshing to talk with, talk shop with other people that are doing the same thing.

And I think that Fernando kind of talks a lot about some innovative ways that they're kind of approaching enrollment campaigns and the way that they're leaning into segmentation and personalization. And so it's a great conversation. I think you'll learn a lot and you might want to take some notes.

So really good advice here today.

SPEAKER_01
He definitely shares a lot and we are grateful for that. And here's that conversation with Fernando. We are so happy and flattered to have Fernando from Ology, which will introduce those of you who may not know who Ology is in a second.

But in order to get to know Fernando a little bit better, I was hoping we could ask him to share something that he may have learned recently that he thinks would be interesting enough to share with our audience today. This was the brain record of

SPEAKER_03
the week to figure out of all the things that I dive into holes for. What am I going to talk about? And frankly, I couldn't find a better thing than this recent book that I'm looking at that just explored the idea of being biased toward action and focusing on the real world examples of the research that you do. And so I've been obsessed with the story of the United Steel Corporation, so very relevant, very new.

But just how important that moment was in history and understanding about the people involved and understanding that Charles Schwab should not have been involved in any way, but he helped the broker this world changing event between Carnegie and J.K. Morgan. But the whole time it was just centered around this idea of just doing things and making decisions quickly and then learning from that. And so I'm going to lean on that train.

I'm going to lean on the train of being a biased toward action person and how much fun that can be when you have the freedom to explore the mistakes that come with it. I've not read that book,

SPEAKER_02
but I have watched a documentary on that and that's a fascinating story. So it really is. Yes,

SPEAKER_01
I'll send it your way after this. That'd be great. What is the name of the book and do you know the

SPEAKER_03
author of it? It's a Napoleon Hill book and the book is a compilation of different stories that's called Think and Grow Rich, but the whole book was actually recommended by my professional coach withology and vested and Andy kept going on and on about this whole biased toward action thing that he saw in me and how quickly I want to understand what happened, move on and make the decision. And so the book is just a lot of different stories that compile that. But this one particular one has just taken me to pause on the rest of the book and then go dive so deep into every piece of those relationships, how that negotiation happened.

You know, transactions on napkins even back in 1901. So it's a beautiful story. It's I highly recommend the book.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you, Fernando. And I think that's going to be very much aligned with how people get to know you through our conversation because I think you are that person anyway. And everyone's going to see that as we go through our conversation.

You've agreed to talk to us today about leveraging curiosity and innovative thinking and higher ed marketing. So if you would, if you could please introduce everyone to you and the role that you have at ology. Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm Fernando

SPEAKER_03
Bergas, Gloria. I was born and raised in Argentina. My family immigrated to Ohio directly.

There were no in-betweens in 1999. So most of my life has now been in the US. But I did not have the opportunity to attend higher education at the time.

And so my journey into this world has been a little bit different. But I think it's made it a really unique path within ology. For those that don't know, ology has been around for about 30, 60 years.

We were created as a branding agency. And most recently, we became an employee-owned company that is focused and built for education. And so within ology, my role is of Chief Digital and Media Officer.

On a day-to-day basis, I am trying to advance our overall offer. But my focus is really on understanding how we can lean away from simple lead gen types of tactics and really get this industry into understanding how right fit and personalized messaging can change the way that they recruit and obviously retain

SPEAKER_01
students, which is the most important part. Thank you. And you have a reputation of being a dynamic leader.

And one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on the podcast is to dive into that wisdom a little bit outside of ology and maybe give some of our listeners an introduction to you, an introduction to ology, and maybe a lot of takeaways that they can implement within their institutions. The first topic that we agreed to talk about is the importance of curiosity within professional growth and innovation. And I will say, I love the first conversation we had with you, and I'm going to tee up and kind of step aside because you and Bart went on and on, and I was very much amazed.

So if I may ask you, looking into your past of how is curiosity-driven you to explore and integrate new technologies into your work and on behalf of ology to the benefit of the

SPEAKER_03
institutions that you serve? Sure. Yeah. On a personal level, it's just been a lifelong journey for me because I think non-traditional education being available to me, then everything became a classroom and I had to take something away from each of those. So I started in the technology world really early on.

At first it was getting into websites and templates that we could sell, and then I got incredibly lucky and found mentors that started to shift me and shape me a little bit into what they believed was there, and then it was a natural pairing with ology. Ology was founded by a creative led entrepreneur, and so curiosity was just part of our individual, but then collective DNA, and so it's ingrained in everything that we do at ology, and so it's a really natural fit for me because I'm not having to live outside of my reality and my existence in order to provide value to it. So when we talked in the previous conversation and even now as you reframe it, how does that then move into integrating new technologies into our work? I keep going back to this idea that because we're an independent company, because we were created within curiosity, we're not really constrained by a lot of red tape.

It just doesn't exist, and so the integrations and experiments that we go on, they don't feel like mountains to us. It just becomes part of the everyday work, and I think that's what's been the difference of how we're able to quickly integrate and do new things and

SPEAKER_02
elaborate on them when we know more. Yeah, I think that you mentioned a word earlier when you kind of set that up is that ology was started with an entrepreneurial creative, and I think those two words together start to define a little bit about what you've done because I'm an entrepreneur and I'm also a creative, and you talk about when you started your career with websites and templates and inspecting code to look to see how people did the HTML back in the day or CSS. I mean, that's a lot of my story, and while I did have the blessing of being a higher ed, being able to attend a college, I was a first generation student.

So in a lot of ways, I'm driven by the same types of things where, wow, what's this look like? And I never thought I could go to college, and then I figured out how to do that, so maybe I can figure out how to do other things. And so I think that there's that level of curiosity that is so critical. And I think that as I was presenting the other day at a school, and I was kind of setting up a little bit of my history, just to kind of say that I've kind of recognized these things when the web came on.

In 1994, I did my first website, so I was kind of on the bleeding edge of that. And then social media, they were calling Web 2.0, and I'm like, hey, this is going to be something.

And people are like, ah, it's nobody wants to go to my space. I'm like, ah, you don't know. And now I'm feeling the same way about AI.

And so I'm sure that you and I, we've seen the waterfront with our careers with all these different technology changes, and you probably more than I have. But I mean, do you get that similar feeling today with a lot of things that are going on? And I guess as a follow up question to that is, how do you prepare your team to kind of embrace those types of things to kind of, you probably are excited about it. I know I'm excited about it.

But then how do I surround those around me to be excited about it so that we can move forward as a team? So tell me about that.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question that that we talk about internally a lot too, because the way that some of the news about innovative AI technology is delivered, obviously, because it's driven ultimately by clicks and attention can give you this feeling of like looming out of your control, you know, things. And what we constantly talk about is the fact that an AI can only learn what is inputted into the systems. And so as long as we are the ones driving that conveyor belt, we can leverage it to become an incredibly powerful tool, or we can use it to make funny photos.

And right now, I think a lot of the focus is on how to play with it. And I am excited about the opportunity of implementing it into error creating work so that we can learn from it. So it doesn't, it doesn't scare me in the same way that it could scare some folks.

And again, I think that's just based on the information you seek. But it's exciting. It's just as exciting as social.

It's as exciting as the new types of social media and the new types of social media usage that we see. And I just think being in the car, not in the driver's seat necessarily, but just being in the car is an

SPEAKER_02
exciting time. But sometimes you want to lean over and grab the wheel. I know I do.

So always every day. But it goes back to what you said at the very beginning with the book. I mean, it's just the idea of, you know, cultivating that idea of, you know, being willing to kind of fail forward, if you will.

I mean, it's like, you know what, there is no game plan on this. I mean, I talked to a lot of people, they're like, Hey, what book should I be reading Bart about? Genre of AI? What classes should I attend? I'm like, they don't exist. I mean, you literally have to go out there and play with them.

And I think that that is kind of like that attitude of, you know, being able to just kind of move forward and figure it out after you fall and realize, okay, I'm not going to do that again and just keep moving forward. So I love that one. One thing I do think that happens though, and I'm going to kind of tee up another thought for you is because you and I are often and people like us at Troy's like this, I mean, a lot of people who are kind of embracing these new ideas and kind of learning on the fly.

Sometimes though, when, you know, and I'm going to, I'm going to use kind of faculty as an example, because, you know, these are people that have really worked hard to earn terminal degrees, they've been disciplined, they've done a lot of things, they have, you know, results to show for it. Sometimes when I kind of stand up in front of a, you know, a room full of PhDs, and I'm trying to, you know, pretend or, you know, I'm often considered a little bit of an expert in AI, generative AI, because I've been playing with it, and I'm six months ahead of everybody else. I kind of have this whole idea is, am I really qualified to be doing this? I mean, I get this imposter syndrome ideas.

And I don't know if you sense that sometimes or if you deal with that sometimes, but as professionals, I feel like I've got to make sure that I can present, you know, confidently. And even though I know that we might fail forward to know that this is the right path to go. But man, sometimes that still nips in my butt behind just like, Hey, you know, what are you doing here? And so tell me about that.

How's that working with you and your professional journey? I think that's an interesting thought,

SPEAKER_03
especially in this industry, because oftentimes when we do present or I'm doing a podium or a conference, I do wonder if my introduction, which is, you know, I'm not from here, I didn't go to college here, I am listening to me. And so I think the way that I deal with it is I lean into it, right? If I am transparent about who I am, then I can't feel like an imposter in what I'm talking about, right? But I think in general, it's just if I don't consider myself the expert and I'm not done, then there's still room for me to learn more. So I admire a lot of the people that we end up working with and speaking to at these, you know, conference of events, because what you've already done at once.

So there's no way that that one degree or that discipline that took you to achieve what you've done is just gone now. I think it's just retapping into it. And I think what you're doing and what I like to do and even the conversations that Troy and I were having the last time we met at AMA was if we can reignite that fire and somebody to go learn a new thing, I think that's a pretty powerful and really cool initiative for us to take on.

I think it's just getting in front of it. And before you feel like an imposter, I just want to be a part of that

SPEAKER_02
conversation, right? Yeah. And I think you're right. And I think that I think most people have that feeling.

Even people who have those terminal degrees, even people who are the experts and the world changes so quickly. And I think it's difficult for anybody to stay, you know, in front of everything. I mean, this is a collaborative world.

I mean, there are no people that can be the experts that can do it by themselves. I mean, it takes teams, it takes collaboration, it takes partnerships between, you know, places like ology or Kehler solutions with the institutions and the universities. I mean, it's a level of trust that needs to go into that.

And I think the trust only comes from vulnerability too. So I appreciate you kind of being vulnerable with me and kind of talking through that because I think that that's something we all kind of deal

SPEAKER_03
with whether we are admitting it or not. I think the vulnerability is really where it nips it completely. In a lot of the work that we've done, we may not be the experts of it at the beginning.

And our Gen Z and Gen Alpha booklets that have made their way all over the industry, we're really proud of that work. But when we embarked on that work, we were not Gen Z or Gen Alpha experts, we were marketers trying to learn something, right? So we led with learning. And then from there, the outcome has been this really big collaborative effort that we all use now.

SPEAKER_01
Fernando, I would like to take our conversation to a little bit more of a tactical level and talk about personalization and precision in marketing. And I'm sure that you have conversations on a daily basis in relationship to target audiences and best utilizing data. I would really love to get into a conversation with you about the role of audience segmentation in creating more effective marketing strategies to help the institutions that we are working with be much more effective.

So can you kind of go into some of the things that you are recommending and working with the institutions that you're serving on how they can better utilize their data and have better outcomes within the enrollment process and marketing and enrollment process?

SPEAKER_03
It's incredibly essential and elementary, but you have to have the right tools in place before it, right? So I think that the overall themes that I'll touch on are really important. But I think a lot of the partnerships and the people that you work with are equally as important, right? As you know, we leverage a lot of our partnership and technology with Ring, and Ring has allowed us to use a platform that segments and provides feedback on data that I wouldn't be able to do some of the things that we're doing with. So for us, the segmentation, of course, yeah, it's a huge deal.

And I think all of these partnerships matter. And if anything comes out of this conversation outside of the fact that all of us want to work together to make this industry work better, then it's a big important conversation. But the tactical importance of it not being all that different is, you know, first, the segmentation is going to allow us to have a personalized approach to speak directly to that prospect or that group, their preferences, their pain points.

And so by default, that is going to improve the engagement rates that we're looking for. But what it really impacts then is how do then do we allocate resources? How do we know where the dollars and minutes should be spent first? And I think that's where a lot of, you know, institutions begin to have decision paralysis, right? All these markets, all these different audiences, all these different opportunities. And then it just got away from you.

So that segmentation, I think, allows you a lot of freedom by creating some constraints to work with them. And then, you know, the last piece of it that we talked about the last time we chatted was once you understand that and you create a better product or you innovate on what the 2024 and beyond version of higher ed needs to look like. And so that segmentation first impacted the funnel, but it ultimately can impact the entire institution and what the institution needs to

SPEAKER_02
evolve to be. Yeah, I think that's a really important point because I think sometimes we get caught up as marketers on thinking about the top of the funnel with the personas and the segmentation, but that can be just as effective in retention. It can be just as effective in even an advancement.

I mean, as we look at alumni and being able to understand, you know, just the generational differences now more than ever, I think it would be even more difficult as a higher ed marketer who does both enrollment and advancement marketing because, you know, we've got coming on with a generation alpha, you've got about five or six different generations that you're needing to talk to, and they're vastly different in the way that, you know, either digital natives or totally digitally immersed, which I think is what I would consider, you know, generation alpha. I heard somebody the other day say that they're a teacher and the students often will call them mommy or mama, but this past week they called them Alexa. And I'm like, you know, just that mistake of calling somebody the name of a, you know, a tool, you know, a voice assistant, that's a different generation.

So being able to carry those personas, very able to carry those segmentations through all of our, not only just marketing, but in the way that we approach teaching, I think is going to be critical in those times. So when we talk about that, tell me a little bit about then going back to the marketing, how do we use those segmentations to kind of really enhance the way that we can do content? I mean, you know, we're a lot of people are still trying to do content the way they did in, you know, the late nineties where insert name here and insert, you know, variable of city here. But I think that there's a lot more opportunities available to us now.

And I'm just curious how you're approaching that.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, we've done it in a few different ways that that evolved in unique, but also true to what the institution could do, right? I think it's really important to always understand that what is unique and works for one institution may not work for another. In general, the segmentation and personalization of the messaging is going to cut through clutter. We were in a conversation with a client who has a teen that is now going and going through the acceptance process and their college journey.

And she just sort of panned her camera down to show us a stack of different emails and postcards and things that have all come from numbers of institutions. And every single one of them looked the exact same. Every single one of them featured the same three things, right? Colorful campus, happy group of students walking, and then the same type of logo.

And it just felt really difficult for us who are in this world every day to understand who was who. And you can only imagine what that did for their teen, where it was probably just shoved up to the siding in God. The benefit that higher ed has in general, when we're talking at least in the first party data, part of the funnel, these prospects and their families are already giving you a massive amount of information.

The programs are interested in, the extracurriculars are interested in. And so to not take that into account, I think is a disservice. I agree with that because I know even in my own

SPEAKER_02
personal experience as a father, Butler University, and we had Christopher LeFri on the podcast early on, as part of their intake on the Common App, they asked you have pets. What are your pets' names? And then they used that information that they gathered, that marketing data, even you can call it a piece of data. But then they turned that into ways to creatively and emotively market to the students because my dog and my cat got a welcome letter from Blue the mascot of Butler University, congratulating their human on being accepted.

I mean, that was probably the tipping point for my son to go to that school. And so that's the importance of being able to gather the right first party data. And sorry to interrupt you, I'm always excited about that because I think we sometimes miss the opportunity that there are ways for us to gather even more intelligence that we can then leverage.

SPEAKER_03
Absolutely. Yeah. We, I think it was last year, the year before that, we were working with Hartwick College in there and only onto New York. And we wanted to get them away from being location based, right? Because some of their older material focused a lot on New York.

But it's not the New York City that a prospective student may have thought about. So we leaned into completely different things that they had. And we had a really complete data set that described segments of students who were interested in nursing programs, who were also into intramural sports.

And so we created an entire marketing funnel that when we were talking about life on campus, then we featured students playing intramural sports, we feature students in athletic gear, etc. And when we got to the part of the funnel where we needed to talk about being the right fit, then all of the ads and the personalized messaging that they saw was around their nursing program, the job placements, the opportunities of that program. And conversions, engagement, and just affinity in general increased dramatically for that.

Because we were saying, Hey, we heard you. This is the information you gave us. Look what we can give you in return.

Versus if you know, with your son's, what's the name of your dog, but then the email or the letter that I send you just says, welcome to the college and mentions none of it, right? You begin to just lose that affinity for that offer. Yeah, I think that's

SPEAKER_02
important to focus on because I mean, you've got to use what you ask for. But then you also have to, you know, I mean, it takes extra work. I mean, I don't want anybody to listen to this podcast and think, Oh, yeah, that sounds easy.

It takes a lot of work to get to that level of personalization, but it is worth it because your yield is going to go up tremendously when you're at that level of personalization, especially if you're including mom and dad in that.

SPEAKER_01
Fernando, I believe that when we talk about personalization, there's a lot of extra work that can go into it and maybe even extra expense. And we'd love to ask you how you kind of prove that right to the customer or maybe how you what you're doing to measure or maybe doing to optimize those marketing efforts for better outcomes. Can you give us a sense of how that is done with some of the schools that you're working with? Yeah, absolutely.

The advantage

SPEAKER_03
within higher ed is that almost every single institution we've ever worked with already has a CRM that they have invested in. And they have a team, whether it's three or 30 or 300 people that are dedicated to this effort. And so we don't necessarily focus immediately on a expense and infrastructure.

We're not telling you that if you bring on a team of 20, you will in five years be able to do XYZ. So for us, we focus on four different budgets. The first is to always start with tracking everything that can be tracked 24-7 and make it available to our clients live.

And we use a reporting platform for that, that every single partner, every single internal thing we do is there. And so that transparency, I think, is the first key. Because when six or so years ago, when I joinedology and started learning about higher ed, one of the first things that struck me was the lack of reporting transparency that in any other industry would have been immediately declined as an offer.

And so the tracking being transparent allows the institution and the internal stakeholders to start to understand the value of what they're getting. And then the reporting being more than just here's how many impressions and clicks we got, but really telling the story of what that means, which assets perform best on what devices to what person in the household. Those are the threads that begin to build that trust with our clients.

And that's what one of the things that we have taken really personally is how do we turn and humanize that data so that we can do something with it, which turns into your point of optimization. Optimize what's right. Not everything has to be changed every three months just because the schedule says that it should, right? If something is working tremendously, lean into it more.

And then the fourth bucket is where I live in that none of this is permanent. You have to be okay with that client. We have to be okay with it.

All of G, every other partner has to be okay with it. If we are not open to the idea of all of this working today, failing tomorrow, and us having to change, then I don't think that we win. But because we're open to that and we lean everything back into tracking what we're doing, we continue to adapt and succeed in that world.

I love something

SPEAKER_02
that you just said there, Fernando. And the idea was humanize the data because I think that sometimes we get so wrapped up in the data, whether we've got our, we sometimes feel like, oh, it's data. So we've got to have the captain on it in the enrollment team, or we've got to have somebody from IR on it because it's data.

And I think that's important. I mean, there's some analysis that needs to happen. But at the same time, if we just check boxes to say, yep, we looked at the data and, yep, we, you know, tweaked a couple of the dials on what we're doing.

If we're not taking that data and then really looking at it from a humanization standpoint to say, okay, why are we looking at the different devices? Why are we looking at the different ways that these are being delivered? What does that tell us about the students, about the parents, about the, about the audience? And then what are we going to do with that? I just think that that word humanize is a great word that we need to start using when we're talking about data, because I think a lot of us are data driven, which is a good thing. A lot of us are really love digging into the data. But if all we're doing is just kind of digging into the data and not humanizing it, I think we're missing a great opportunity.

SPEAKER_01
Fernando, we all work within higher ed. And one of the first challenges that we are faced with is budget. So we'd like to know how you would recommend either, I'll just ask, how do you navigate budget constraints to deliver more impactful marketing campaigns for the institutions

SPEAKER_03
you work with? This is always the tough, but necessary conversation, right? The first thing for us, again, leaning on my personal, but also our shared cultural transparency is to help our clients understand where their dollars and minutes should be spent. Because stretching out a limited budget over a 12 month campaign may not be the best fit, in most cases, it isn't. But if we're able to lay out channels and tactics that align with their enrollment calendar, if we focus the most dollars into a yield season so that we can convert more students, that's a better use of money.

The challenge is it doesn't sound as compelling as company XYZ coming in and saying all channels all year, everybody will see you everywhere, but they'll see you once on one's device, maybe once every two weeks. And that same impression will be sold to 100 different vendors, right? So for us, it's starting out with markets and seasonality. Where do you want to be? And where do you recruit most of your students from? And that's where the first dollars and the first minutes go to.

And then from there, if we're able to create more room, then we begin to expand. But typically, I would say with about 50% of the clients that we work with, we do start on a single activation and that may be yield or it may be awareness or it may be somewhere in the middle. But from that going into year two, now we're doing yield, but we're also doing application.

And then into year three, they've grown to be able to do all three. But we have to just be realistic about where the first dollars and minutes have to be spent.

SPEAKER_02
I love the way that you're organizing that. It goes a little bit with, you know, along the way that I think I just finished a book, Chasing Mission Fit. And so the idea of really being able to look at the watering holes, understand where your students are, where your mission fit students are.

And I think that, you know, I love the fact that you're kind of outlining some of that. I mean, you know, depending on the budget, there's a way to kind of broaden that, the conversion, the awareness. There's different ways to play with those levers.

But I think at the end of the day, if you don't know exactly who you're going after and the target that you're working toward, that's going to help you define the channels that you're going to go after. It's going to help you define where to invest that money because, I mean, we don't have unlimited budgets. And I think that I think that's an important way to kind of begin to focus that.

Is that kind of the way that you,

SPEAKER_03
you know, navigate that with your clients as well? We try to first set the tone that we have enough experience to understand which of these tactics and channels are going to work best for them. But without representing any type of proprietary nothing secret sauce doesn't exist, there are human conversations like this one. And I can just tell you, based on this budget and where you are in the country and the types of numbers that you're looking for, we would do best in a three month sprint than we would in a 12 month, you know, completely optimized campaign.

And I think that we've changed a lot of those conversations with our clients to where it is not a, what could you do for X number of dollars? But it's, we want to do this, how do we best do the most of that? And I think that's what's created really neat relationships that we have now where they grow organically, but we don't push them to go beyond where they need to be today.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I love that. And I think that what you're doing there is, is you're kind of swimming upstream for where the rest of the, you know, the market might be, I mean, everybody would love to do a 12 month campaign to, you know, do what I mean, they just want to keep doing it all the time. You're kind of being a little bit innovative in the way you're approaching that in the way that, Hey, we're going to, we're going to do a three month sprint based on our experience, based on the fact that we are hired at experts as opposed to, you know, the local cable company or local radio station that just wants to kind of fill their, their budgets up, but help me as you kind of think through that innovation of even in that example, what are other innovative practices that you're kind of helping your partners, you know, embrace? Because I think that, you know, we, like we talked at the very beginning of the show, this idea of curiosity, this idea of new opportunities out there, that is coupled with innovation and innovative practices.

I mean, how are you helping your schools to kind of stand out in this crowded market? I mean, it's not just crowded with other schools, it's crowded with just attention. I mean, this is a very noisy world that we live in. And so many times we, we are competing more against all the other noise than we are other institutions.

So

SPEAKER_03
how are you kind of approaching that? We like to start that with a reset of expectations, which may not be super innovative, but it is incredibly necessary. And we like to tell our clients every time that before this ology strategy benefits the institution, it's going to benefit the students and their families. That to us is the promise of higher ed.

That benefit to the institution is essentially a byproduct of honoring that. And then that helps us open up into getting into these creative and more innovative and sometimes just having fun with it. But three really quick examples of just of recent work that we've been doing.

Grinnell College is a huge partner of ours and they have been not only a partner to me personally on allowing me to take them on a million different little experiments and some of them worked, some of them didn't, but I always love the innovation that they allowed us to foster when we wanted to segment their messaging pillars. And the big three messages of Grinnell at the time were, one, you have worldwide opportunities. Yes, the college is in the middle of Iowa, but its reach is global.

The second was the career outcomes and how unique they are, super in aliens. But then the third was the opportunity of graduating without debt. And in one strategy, we put all of those forward.

And yes, they all play really well. But if we just change those a little bit, and parents within the household were targeted with the message that was around graduating without debt. And they saw the messages that were around these innovative and sometimes uniquely strange career outcomes that fit the child that they know at home.

And in that prospect is seeing messaging that is around the world opportunities, the beautiful campus, the growth that they will experience. We created a conversation at a dinner table without ever being there. And that to me was innovative in the sense that we did not pull out every message at all people at once, separately in the whole.

SPEAKER_02
It goes back to the segmentation that we've been talking about knowing how to speak to the

SPEAKER_03
audiences at the right time at the right place. Yeah. So within segmentation, there's also a lot of room for being inclusive and things that you haven't been doing before. Our partners in William Patterson in New Jersey, they're very proud of being a Hispanic serving institution.

And that was a attractive to me immediately because it was a newer concept. But then we really wanted to lean into it, right? So what are we doing to do this? And so in one of our latest campaigns, that is the concept of willpower, we did an entire thread that was the overall campaign. And then we did the exact same campaign completely in Spanish and different dialects that were regional to their area.

So where we would lead into some partnerships with broadcast and radio locally, we did the same thing in the Spanish market. And so they are running a concurrent campaign that is targeting both sides of their student base without having to change what the messaging would be. So we're saying the messaging is powerful, but look how much more powerful it is as it comes in the native language of the folks that are going to be seeing this at home.

And so those are big and innovative in the message. But there's also opportunities to have fun with it. Elmhurst, who we're working with now is taking a test drive with us on some Reddit ads.

And Reddit has not been historically used in higher education. And there's been a lot of conversation about whether or not we should be. But what we've learned specifically with some grad programs is that within Reddit, you have a lot of professionals that are grads that are going there to seek advice and information from other people who are going through that same program.

And so what better way for us to be available in a place that isn't that crowded with other institutions that are in higher ed because they're afraid of it. And so to us, I think the innovation is A comes out of really great partners and clients that trust us. But we don't just look at everything from what's worked in higher ed.

We actually want to do the opposite of that. And when we see brands that are exploring other channels that we may not be, then the curiosity comes into play. And it's why? Why are they investing their dollars there? And we're not.

And then when we find it to make sense, we jump in. And thankfully, a lot of our clients have learned that when working with ology, you're going to take some jumps that may seem a little uncomfortable. But then the case studies and the work that comes after it is always worth it.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I love that. With my background in kind of a corporate world, you know, with a lot of different things. I mean, that that's where I lean.

I'll often tell schools, don't look at the other schools. Let's look at what people that are targeting who our audiences are, what are they doing? Because they're spending a lot of money on their research. And we can kind of learn from that.

So I, I love that. Yeah, absolutely. Really good point.

Fernando, thank you for being so

SPEAKER_01
willing to offer these tactics, these philosophies, this free advice to our listeners that are lucky enough to listen to it. We'd like to close with asking you if there would be an additional thought or maybe idea that you feel that would be relevant and if implemented, could benefit an

SPEAKER_03
institution immediately. I think it wraps up what we've talked about, right? But it's trusting that a multi-effort approach is going to work. You have to focus on messaging and personalization and user journeys that work.

And then all of that is going to encourage connections after the CRM conversion. The reason it can be impacted immediately is because you're already equipped with all the tools, you're already doing all of these things. They're just being done in silos and segments.

So just opening the conversation of how that multi-effort approach can work is immediately impactful, but it's also just completely world changing to the way that these institutions are going to be able to recruit and retain students going forward. Thank you. Fernando Burgas, Korea,

SPEAKER_01
Chief Digital and Media Officer at Ology. Thank you so much for everything that you've offered. If you would please though, what is the best way that someone can reach you if they would like to get more information about your Ology? Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for having me. This has

SPEAKER_03
been really fun. Obviously, because I have a lot of last names, Fernando Burgas, Korea, at Ology was too hard. So we've changed it.

It's just fbcatology.com. So fbismboycismcatatology.com

SPEAKER_01
is how you reach me. Thank you. And I speak on behalf of Barth.

Yes, this has been a fun and I think more importantly, informative conversation for our listeners. And thank you so much for your generosity. Absolutely.

Happy to do it. Barth, do you have any final thoughts

SPEAKER_02
before we close the episode? Yeah, I just so enjoyed this conversation. I think it's always fun to talk shop a little bit. And I love what Ology's done.

I've always admired their work. And it's such a blessing to have not only had Bill on the episode before, but also now to have Fernando. It's been great.

And so a couple of things that I just want to point out, just the whole idea of really kind of leaning into your curiosity, you know, being willing. I know sometimes higher ed is not as as leaning into curiosity and failing forward is sometimes not a natural part of what higher ed is all about. But I think in your marketing departments, you can do that.

And you can, you know, feel safe to do that with and just have those conversations. I love the comment there at the end of just starting to have conversations. I mean, you have to, you have to kind of get out there and try some different things.

And especially in this world, looking at some of the segmentations, looking at how you can personalize, looking at the ways that you can kind of lean into these opportunities to really kind of go after those, those mission fit students and being able to, you know, embrace some innovation and out of the box thinking, maybe. I think that's a really good, good way to look at it. And it's just been such a great pleasure to have this conversation today.

So thank you again. I appreciate it. Likewise.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for

SPEAKER_01
having me. Thank you, Bart. And again, thank you both.

Also a special thanks to Rob Conlon and the entire team at Westport Studios for their invaluable support on a weekly basis. The higher ed marketer podcast is brought to you by Kailer Solutions, a leading agency in education, marketing and branding. And by Ring Digital, the experts in ad targeting, known for significantly boosting response and yield rates by precisely delivering ads directly to the handheld and household devices of those on your physical enrollment funnel and fundraising mailing lists.

On behalf of Bart Kailer and myself, Troy Singer, thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00
You've been listening to the higher ed marketer to ensure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player. The higher ed marketer is a production of Kailer Solutions and Ring Digital in partnership with Westport Studios.

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