[Greatest Hits] TikTok to Town Hall: Jeff Harmon on Reinventing University Marketing

Speaker A: Welcome to Getting to aha, the podcast that delves into the power of AHA moments, also known as insights, and how they shape our lives. Insights not only help us to navigate the present, but also lay the groundwork for the future by eliminating the patterns and behaviors that guide our decisions. In every episode, host Darshan Mehta chats to a new guest, delving into the AHA moments that impacted their personal journey, how, and those that drove success in their professional life. After all, conversations are the path to insights.

Speaker B: I'd like to welcome Jeff Harmon. He is a seasoned marketing and communications executive with over 25 years in marketing communications in higher education and the private sector. He is the chief marketing and communications officer at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He has previously held key roles at, uh, institutions like University of Illinois, Arizona State University, University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, Southeast Missouri State University, and the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Jeff describes himself as a successful marketing communications leader with proven ability to increase revenue and profitability. He has industry experience in higher education, health and wellness, and software. Welcome, Jeff. Glad to have you on the show.

Speaker C: I'm glad to be here.

Speaker B: So let's start with your journey and what are the AHA moments that have, um, brought you to where you are now?

Speaker C: Sure. What's kind of funny, I guess my first AHA moment really was when I was getting my MBA at Arizona State. I'd been in those industries outside of higher ed up until that point. And after two years of back then going to class in person two nights a week for a couple hours, I really began to think, I really want to be a part of this higher education community. I think I enjoyed the conversations and the way we dissected research and were able to apply it to try to solve some real world challenges that we had with some businesses in the area in Arizona. And I, uh, think I want to continue this. So literally after living in Phoenix for 16 years, and my wife's from Phoenix, by the way, I'm from Illinois. I just searched online director of marketing for online education or something like that, and U of I popped up and I thought, there's a little aha, my alma mater. So I decided to apply and I got the job and next thing you know, we're in the snow. So it was a little bit of a. That may have been an AHA for my wife, actually really had a lot of fun there. And asu, ah, came back after me and was a better situation at the time and just a bigger idea. ASU Online has probably got, I'm guessing, 75,000 students now and we were just going to launch it and it took several years to actually get it going. But when I went through that process, here's another aha. Uh, that's not the one where you solve your marketing problem. Necessary. But at the time nonprofits were having a difficult time grasping how to do online the right way. So that goes just from product development all the way through the marketing and admissions funnel. You know we weren't open minded to have eight week courses yet and faculty weren't necessarily open minded in changing the way they do things in their instructional design to actually meet the customer demand. So after four years there I'm so glad it's successful now. But it took a long time of top down approach probably to get there. I ended up wanting to just run marcom for the entire university and at my next job. So that's what I went for. That's how I ended up at Fort Smith and then subsequently every other place I've been since. It's interesting. My favorite side of what I do is marketing. I loved getting to ROI and really trying to show attribution, especially uh, with digital marketing. But I also have the communication sides which is the PR and the crisis communications and all those sorts of things. It is a different thing to get into and sometimes forces you to do more delegation than you want to do and you love to have your hands on the data. It's like the scientist behind being taken out of the lab and now uh, running the company. So sometimes you have to think about those kinds of things when you're moving along your career. But I do love it and uh, like to contribute. I always feel like we're marketing a product where it's just a win win for the student. They won't leave with something worthless. Regardless of what some media may say. It's always a life changing four to six years or whatever when you do an undergrad at least I think so

Speaker B: how is higher education marketing changed in the last five years?

Speaker C: Oh in five years with TikTok has really been. I think that first there was Snapchat. We dealt with that a few years ago trying to figure out what to do. TikTok has certainly changed the game. And also me being 61 years old, I rely on some younger folks that really love TikTok, including my daughter right. Who's addicted to it. So she publishes on there too. But making sure we understand or we've learned a lot I guess about how the younger generations like the Gen Z like to consume information and it's not the way we consumed information or even really millennials perhaps. And it's gotta be quick and to the point or they're just moving on. And so I think that really initially kind of shocked a lot of us and probably not just in higher ed and marketing in general, trying to figure out how to harness that powerful tool and make sure we're very succinct and to the point it can get right inside of their mind and make them understand what we're trying to talk about quickly. And honestly, we're still working on that. I mean that has really been a little bit of a game changer figuring out that we understanding we really can't necessarily sell our product to people in TikTok, but we can get them listening to us in general in a very organic way and have our brand involved in some way. So we're still playing with that. The other thing is really the enrollment funnel, working with the admissions folks, trying to continually look at the metrics and understand along the funnel what is the most effective way to communicate. And it was one of the questions I was sent and ah, it's a very good question. I think that's changing every day. We can continue to try the whether it's the text, the email, the phone calls aren't working as well, people won't answer anymore. And then how are we hitting them up and how do we make sure the M message, they're even going to open the email. So the subject lines are very important. We're trying all kinds of things and of course going to conferences and trying to learn. But we really also try to learn from industry. So it's not always going to the higher ed MARCOM conference or the AMA Higher Ed symposium.

Speaker B: I love that.

Speaker C: But we also need to go look at what other industries are doing that have much bigger budgets than ours, which means they can experiment a lot more than we can and it helps us be more efficient, I think.

Speaker B: So you're talking about undergraduate or also graduate program? Are you doing both? Correct?

Speaker C: I would say more undergraduate right now is the one I think is more challenging, the graduate. It still has that sort of mechanism of faculty being involved in some way and doing a little bit of their own grassroots marketing. Us supporting that we don't spend as much budget on the grad school marketing efforts, but yet we still do very well with it. We, we're finding that we need to spend more money toward the undergraduate population. And I think with that enrollment cliff on its way, we're really starting earlier, hitting people that are more Freshmen making sure they see our brand in some way. So that's, I think, the bigger challenge right now, especially for regionals like us.

Speaker B: Mhm. So how are you using each platform? I'm curious. You talked about TikTok, I'm sure using Instagram, Facebook and Google. I mean, how are you using all these different platforms? Because I'm sure you're using it beyond just advertising. So I'm wondering how are you using it in terms of different levels of engagement messaging? Just to get an idea of what you found are the strengths and weaknesses of each of the platforms.

Speaker C: Well, I think it's a really good point. We've done a little bit less advertising on social media than we have through Google and doing search. So for the undergraduate population we've decided to do, and it's been very successful. Text ads in Google targeted for every single program that we offer. So if anyone, whatever age, is searching for anything that we have, they're going to see it. We do put a little bit of a geofence around the Midwest, a little bit. We spend less outside the 13 contiguous states or maybe 14 that touch us. Just because we know we can't really build a brand in Texas or California or New York. It'd be difficult for Southern Illinois University to do that. So we try to go where we know most folks are. We employ the same strategy for our online, which we're starting to do a lot better now finally. And that's good. As far as social media goes, we use those channels a little bit more to engage audiences that already know about us. One thing that's really helped us with enrollment in Illinois is that we have built relationships now with every community college in the state. So we have articulation agreements with all of them. And also we go and visit almost every high school we can. And the chancellor literally goes out and does this as well. So we follow that kind of activity up with showing video and pictures and talking about people. We've given scholarships to surprise them in their high school with $100,000. And we try to market those kinds of things like look what we're doing, we're out there. And it's really had a big effect in Illinois. So our enrollment's gone up the last two years. I think that's five semesters in a row as well with enrollment growth where we have really decreased over the last 10, 15 years very badly. And so it's a big win for us. So we're really trying to do the high level stuff from some billboards. We can't afford a ton of those down to the web marketing and digital and then boots on the ground and follow up with social and not saying that works for everybody. Again, we are a regional so the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign doesn't have to do what what we do. They're going to get record number of apps every year. It's just the land grants have a benefit. They're in their brand and they are very good. I love the fact that I went there, but I've been at many regional universities as you can see and we know that we're always going to be a little bit more challenged for enrollment than some of the bigger brands. So we just work really hard. We try to work harder than anybody else really.

Speaker B: So what role does traditional media play or not at all? Tv, radio, newspapers, magazines.

Speaker C: We don't do hardly any print. I'm um, not ruling it out. I mean there's always a possibility that we might want to be involved in some things depending on the target audience audience. We're actually trying to re engage and reignite the relationship between SIU and Southern Illinois, the whole region because I think they've become complacent and we have too about what we bring. I mean we're the largest economic driver, largest employer. Southern Illinois is not really healthy. So we're trying to make sure they see that while we are an R1 institution now in research, what does that mean for the region culturally, research wise, how do we affect healthcare for the region, all those kinds of things in commerce. So we're using the traditional media to take care of that message message as well because we know there's just a lot of people that may not consume the media that the younger folks do. We want to make sure they see us and see our brand and know we're so important. Now we do some of that not with terrestrial. We still might do streaming but yet they'll see our commercial. They live here in the area. So that's the kind of things that we're doing here. And we won't stop doing that. We'll still do that and we do a little bit of radio while we do like Spotify and Pandora and all those in a region with an economic situation like we have, not everyone's going to be able to pay for subscriptions to Apple Music and Spotify and things like that. So we really do need to do some terrestrial radio to stay on the radar.

Speaker B: Mhm. And ah, what are some aha moments you've discovered in terms of the messaging you find that really works and resonates with your audience?

Speaker C: Well, you know, I've done a couple of one really big rebrand at Southeast Missouri State University, from new logos to the entire brand messaging platform. And I think that was one of my first more comprehensive projects. And we used a firm named Ology out of Columbus to help us with that. And just being able to see how they got folks to reveal in many focus groups the things that made our institution special to them, whether it's alumni, local constituents, politicians, government entity folks, and just people that lived in the Southeast Missouri area watching that unfold and then started to get to the fact that, wow, people see Simo as a roll up your sleeves and to have the will to do and get things. So I did the same thing in house using one of the consultants I had before here at siu and it was interesting. I've always felt from afar as I watch siu, I always thought about coming back and helping here. It's where I grew up. But I always thought the messaging wasn't there. And truly it really wasn't. We had good writers and we still have them. What we didn't have was a brand platform that really spoke to everyone. And so we did the same process here. And when we finished, we realized we were Salukis are kind of have a little chip on our shoulder where graduates sort of discover what they didn't expect to discover while they're here. And when they go do things, they achieve big things that weren't really expected of them. So we came up with a, uh, discover your unexpected, defy the odds, those kinds of things. We're going to go around and take different paths and get to something really special that we think that a lot of other folks might not have even thought of trying to attempt. There's a real interesting attitude and it wasn't the same as Southeast Missouri State, where we found there's something different there. So I think we really enjoyed uncovering some of those aspects that we've been deploying that messaging platform across all of our advertising. Now we're using a little bit more of an attitude about I went to U of I. So but this is what I hear from alumni. People will ask them, did you go to U of I? You're from Illinois. Well, no, I didn't go to U of I went to siu. Why would I go to U of I? And that came out over and over. I thought, wow, that's really special. So we kind of bake that into the messaging platform we're using now.

Speaker B: Interesting.

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Speaker B: What role is AI playing in your marketing efforts these days?

Speaker C: Oh man, we are still uncovering that. I mean I'm like a lot of folks. I'm m catching up because I wasn't prepared for how useful it is so far. I found it really great for making some of our writing a little bit more succinct. Not developing taglines though I've noticed they're really for what I've used in ChatGPT, uh, and Gemini and a couple others. I'm not really loving what it comes up with taglines and things of that nature. I think we've done that in house really well when it comes to longer pieces, let's say an annual report or economic impact report kind of thing. Putting some of that uh, content into there and seeing if it could come up with something a bit more succinct and powerful has proved useful. I thought we've written something good, but could it be a little bit more polished? And you have to admit sometimes it returns something really good. Now I know that for one thing Google is going to be employed or has already even more automated AI ad buying or ad placement. And while we'll never know all the secrets, I do like the fact that I know they're trying to maximize their profit. But that means it's also going to maximize our exposure in more meaningful clicks. I hope in better ROI for us. So I think that's a big thing. I really think that's going to be helpful to all marketers and maybe we can keep our hands off the wheel a little bit more and not have to worry as much. But then again I'm not real trustworthy so we'll see where this takes us and we're trying to monitor closely. I know in higher ed though, I wish I had a bigger staff. We're struggling with being able to fund positions and I don't think I'm unique in that. When you read press about where everybody stands these days with budget and state budgets, et cetera, I'd love to have two more people just focused on digital marketing and looking at the metrics every single day, and we just can't get it done that way. So it's a little bit more once a week or every two weeks trying to get our hands in there.

Speaker B: First of all, how do you define insights and what's the process you go through to get insights from your students?

Speaker C: We really do try to talk to students a lot. Our social media team has some very young folks on it in their effort to create some fun content. A lot of it is for TikTok or Instagram and so forth. But they're learning from the students every day when they're doing those kinds of things. And so I don't know how to exactly quantify what it is they're learning, but we bring it back and we see what worked. We see. Okay, so they told us they want to hear this from us or they'd like to hear this from the university or see this. So we attempt to do some things that we think based on our feedback, what will be engaging. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Usually it's because we misinterpreted what they had meant. So I think we need to go back and find out. This didn't do well, but you said you wanted to hear or see something about these kinds of resources that are available to you. So we're learning every day. That's the thing. You really have to talk to the students and let them talk back. We have lots of student workers, probably. Well, we have 25 that run our university call center to answer the phones and email. I have a couple just for marketing. We've got others in photography and videography. So we're always asking them for feedback, regardless of their major. It could be an engineering major that's working in the web team. And I want them involved to tell us what they think about a new campaign that we have that we're about to do. So it could be mailers going to prospective students from admissions. It could be, uh, TikTok videos, it could be commercials. I want them to give us some honest feedback and say, I don't know what you're talking about, Jeff. You're going to have to change that because we don't know what you're saying. Why don't you try this? And it's really been refreshing. But I've always tried to do that. I think sometimes I've done better than others. But we do have a very healthy group of student workers here, probably more than I've had at any other institution. We need their help as far as the labor goes. But we really need their help as far as ideas and input even more. That's been really refreshing.

Speaker B: So how do you define insight?

Speaker C: I am a metrics ROI kind of guy, so I do want to watch what's performing and continue to enhance and change the campaigns to make them better. After the messaging platform was built, we were trying to just test out some taglines and so we went right, we just put together some ads with the same visuals, same call to action and things like that. But we changed the main tagline and we did about five different which we voted and chose five, put them out there on Google for about a week and there was a clear winner, which really was surprising to me. It was discover your unexpected. And I don't know why, but that one didn't hit me compared to some of the others, which I don't have in front of me. I wish I did. But it really hit a home run and so we've been using it. It's really getting a lot of traction. So. But we don't use just one tagline. We do mix it up. We're not just, just do it like Nike or let's do this with Home Depot. I do like that. But we wanted, uh, to keep trying some other things as well, a little bit under the radar and that's been good for us. So that's one way we gain insight. So data. I do try to look at attribution all the way down the funnel from a clicked ad to an actual new student. Now the weird thing about higher ed, I shouldn't say weird. Your audience understands this. But it is hard for us to track attribution. We're not an E commerce company where they literally do click on something and might buy it that day because they're searching for it. If they have high intent and are searching on Google for us, they click on, I do want to see about a bachelor's in engineering or whatever, electrical engineering. They click on it. They um, go read. They may just leave at that moment and not finish their research. Then they go to another university, but then they come back a month later, the cookie might still be on their machine and they finally fill out the form or make a phone call and we can actually track something all the way down the funnel, but it's very hard here we use Slate as a CRM, which can ping data to try to track that. But even though we can prove that for let's say a few hundred students a semester, that is, they literally clicked on the ad and then within A certain timeframe enrolled. The truth is, we know that they may have already heard an ad on the radio before that. And then later they thought, well, I'll go search, or they saw a TV ad or they met with an admissions person at an event. There's so many touch points that we have then, it just makes it real difficult to do that. But I do find some good insight from seeing which ads ended up producing the highest revenue. Or let's say it's gotta be projected revenue because the revenue keeps being generated for multiple years as a student is taking classes. So we're trying to look at like, well, in six years, what's the average revenue an undergrad actually gives us versus a grad student? So we look at that and calculate that wide.

Speaker B: There's been a lot of changes with this new administration in terms of higher ed. How's that impacting your marketing and how's it going to change your marketing moving forward?

Speaker C: Well, interesting you say that. We found a student had their visa revoked this week. It was an international student, only one, thank goodness. So that's in the media's inquiry. And I just responded to CNN this morning. No kidding. So I don't know how much more national it'll go, but we're just one. And we have no reason to understand clearly why this happened. But it has made us step back and think about talking more about how we support international students because that is an important population for our culture, but also for our revenue. To be honest, they do a lot of great research here from all over the world. They come here and help us discover. So we quickly put together an email of support and background to send to all of our international student community on Friday afternoon and got that out. And I think we're going to now figure out how do we make that much more visible to potential incoming international students from now on? We can't solve all the problems. We can show them, though here's what we'd be trying to provide for you while you're here. And it's just an unfortunate situation. And then also we've got such a divided audience base, it seems right now which students respond to which kind of messaging regarding which way certain things may lean. So we can't control. Let's say that we have a undergraduate student and they're very politicized family. We don't know that. We don't know what side they're on. It's our job to be as neutral as possible. Really foster an open education environment so they can just pursue what they want to pursue regardless of all that. But as you know, faculty and or administrators are on one side or the other many times. So the student, if they uncover that it's not on their side somehow they're like, you know what the faculty. I've done some research on the faculty and I don't agree with where they stand. And some of the things I've seen them post on social media, which we can do nothing about and we don't want to. It's freedom of speech. We want the faculty and staff to be able to express themselves. So it'll be interesting to see if we get even more politicized on sides, how that might affect different institutions. As we know some probably lean one way more than another. It's up in the air and it's just going to be an ongoing situation constantly to observe and make changes to our strategies. I guess my answer is. I have no answer.

Speaker B: Well, I think you'd have a great crystal ball, but it's always hard to connect the dots moving forward, right?

Speaker C: It is.

Speaker B: But having said that, I'm curious, what trends and things are you seeing in the future that really excites you that you think is going to have an impact on on how you market higher education?

Speaker C: Oh, that's a great question. I haven't recognized anything really new besides the tools that are here today that we're trying to get our arms around and learn how to use better. Probably the AI thing is the biggest question mark and wondering how will that help us? I think it would be great for data mining, really understanding all your past data, probably more recent data is more important, last five, 10 years. But being able to look at all that data and put it into this AI machine and help it much better projections than what we've probably seen the last 20 years. We had all these folks that help us try to figure out where to go next. But I think the AI piece is really going to be incredibly helpful there and I'm kind of excited to go to the Higher Ed conference, probably the next AMA this year, and see who's made some strides with that. I'm sure there'll be some new companies out there or existing consulting firms that have something new that they can try to sell us. But I hope it's something fantastic that would really help us not waste time and money. So don't know where that is yet, but I am excited to see it.

Speaker B: How much of your advertising and messaging involves storytelling?

Speaker C: You know, most of it, but in the digital ads there's not much. We tried to go to a landing page though that does provide a little bit more of that story. So we're hoping just to get them to click and see that there is going to be something there. Some of that local stuff that we're doing is not quite recruitment based, but it's more. Illinois is selling our alumni stories and we're trying to tell those stories more and more. We have so many crazy stories. I was in Florida for one of our big takeover events. We call it Very Great event in Naples with 150 people showed up. I guess there's one alum that back in the maybe 70s had built his own dorm room furniture because he didn't like what we had. So this person ends up building a company and a life out of making furniture is ridiculously successful. And so uncovering those things and then re engaging them to perhaps help us in many ways here on campus provide better experiences for students is really helpful. But yeah, storytelling, it's all about the students, the recent students, what they're doing. Current students telling the story about the R1 situation. Here we just became R1 with the new Carnegie classifications and how they measure that. So we're telling students, what does R1 mean? Well, the biggest thing is we're one of the big boys now. At least we call ourselves that. We feel that way. But the bigger thing for SIU is that freshmen and sophomores and juniors and seniors are able, undergrads are able to be involved and conduct research here. I mean, let's be honest, if you go to uh, a flagship, the U of I, Northwestern, those are grad students. There's not enough room for the undergrads to be involved. But here, and frankly in some other institutions more similar to us that are R1, you're getting to participate at a level that most people can't. And so we're really trying to tell that story and show students that are actually involved in that right now that have been interesting.

Speaker B: Are you seeing any big shifts that are going to happen on the horizon in terms of higher education marketing?

Speaker C: Well, it's always surprising how year over year we've been spending more and more money on marketing to get students, which means we need even more expensive staff that have the expertise to do these kinds of things or we outsource it to an agency, et cetera. I think as it gets more competitive, you know, I wish we didn't have to do it, but I think our budgets are going to have to increase our marketing spend. And mine just went down recently because we had to for A bit. We were already very efficient. Our reach is a little bit smaller this year, and we've tried to get even better at our targeting and watching that roi, or at least engagement. But I think the big thing is for us is that undergraduate enrollment Cliff, that's going to hurt us for a while. We were really getting competitive. I think we were in front of this. But reigniting all those relationships with transfer students, populations, with community colleges was absolutely huge. And so right away, we're already seeing our competitors in the region starting to try to do the same thing. Luckily, we were ahead of the game a little bit, but once we all do it, then we're back to a real level playing field again, and we're going to have to uncover that new strategy that we think might give us a little edge. So it's not just marketing. It is marketing, but it's also coming from the admissions side and just trying to think of new ideas, how we can work together and be really aligned and effective.

Speaker B: Interesting. So if you could have lunch or dinner with anyone in your industry, who would it be and why?

Speaker C: I think my former employer, who we've only met twice, I presented his work in group one, as they say, at asu, President Michael Crow. Even though I was there working on something new and innovative, he has been involved in bringing so many innovative people to ASU for all kinds of different purposes, setting up institutes of research and other things that I think a lot of folks thought is not even possible. And number two, the reason this is interesting to me is before he came, ASU was a good school and its reputation had been on the rise. But U of A and Tucson was the flagship of the state. And it's as if in his first 15 years, maybe 10 years, I think U of A woke up and said, what has just happened? ASU really became the news media darling. Wasn't about pr, it was about just doing the things. And the PR came organically, if you ask me. Although I love the PR people there, they're fantastic. But it was all about the work that they did and how they innovated and have really uncovered so many ways to be successful. But, uh, not just elevate the brand of asu, but also do some things that are extremely meaningful. And I thought, I'm so proud that I got my MBA there and also worked there for four years. So I'd really like to sit down with Michael. Plus, by the way, he got his master's here at siu, so that's kind of a fun thing. I think he might be coming to campus. I'll try to get in front of him, so we'll see.

Speaker B: Sounds good. Well, I want to thank you, Jeff, for sharing your Aha moments and giving us insights in higher ed marketing. And I, uh, look forward to seeing the stuff you guys are putting out there in your marketing.

Speaker C: Well, I really appreciate the time. It's fun to talk about it and probably come up with some more, uh, Aha moments just because of the invigorating conversation and questions. So thank you very much.

Speaker B: Thanks again. Getting to AHA was brought to you by iResearch. To find out more about us, head to iResearch.com and make sure to search for Getting to uh AHA. In Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Apple. Anywhere else podcasts are found. And don't forget to click Follow to ensure you don't miss any future episodes. Thank you for listening.