Presenters
Corynn Myers — Convince & Convert
Description
If your institution is siloed, you wear too many hats, and/or there never seems to be any budget for tools that will make your life easier, you’re in the right place. This session will cover the creation and delivery of an owned content report starting with getting the content out there to the future of owned data reporting.
Topics include:
- Setting yourself up to be more strategic
- No tech or budget? Try these free resources
- New ways to look at owned content data
- Effectively reporting data across campus
- The future of data and how to get started
Video
Transcript
Corynn Myers, presenter:
Hello, all. This is the “Analytics and Reporting Presentation for the Silo Sufferers and Budgetless.” Thank you for being here. I’m really excited to share the next 30 to 45 minutes with you talking about analytics, data strategy, and all the things that I love. First, my name is Corynn Myers. I am a full-time consultant doing strategy for higher education universities and institutions. I also do consulting for travel and leisure, tech, B2B, B2C, lots of different things. About 13 months ago, I was at the University of Michigan where I oversaw digital strategy in the central communications office as the associate director of marketing, as well as operations and strategy for the digital marketing agency we had in-house. I helped campus partners deploy recruitment campaigns, build up their digital presence, and strategy reporting. I am a year into full-time consulting and enjoying the diversity of the work I get to do with universities across the United States. On Twitter is where I talk about higher education all the time, @CorynnMyers you can follow along.
[Owned content]
Today we’re going to get into owned content specifically. Owned content is any content you’re creating but not putting money behind to distribute. That’s your website, your organic social, your email. You are not paying for advertising, placements, or sponsorship. We are going to talk about owned content analytics and strategy. About establishing goals and what do goals look like? How do we get there? Expectations, expectations setting, and getting the right data. We are going to get to the analytics at a latter part of this presentation. And finally communicating all the above to campus. You’ll notice that although this is an analytics summit, I’m going to talk a lot about non-analytical things because it is important to establish the foundation. If you don’t do that upfront, you will not be able to measure anything. I believe that unless you know where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going, you can’t measure anything.
[Goals and expectations]
Let’s get into goals. It’s a little bit of a journey to get to these things, especially in higher education, and if you’re working with non-marketers. Finding the problem or identifying an opportunity, here we are looking at it from a lens where you can work backwards. I have a problem; can I work it backwards into what that means in terms of strategy? This consists of, asking for feedback, revising, asking for more feedback, and revising again until we all get on the same page.
One thing to keep in mind with goals is that asking non-marketers for marketing goals, or asking non-communicators for communicator goals, ends up getting us into this place where we are being micromanaged. “What should our marketing goals be? Well, we should do Facebook”. We don’t want that answer. We don’t want a tactical answer right off the bat. At this point you want to get to the high-level business goals and what those look like at an institutional, department, or program level opportunity as opposed to tactical execution. Maybe our goal is to ensure in-state students know that they can get an education here regardless of their income. From there, as a marketer or communicator, you can take that goal and translate it into a marketing and a communication strategy.
You have to ask non-marketing questions: “What is your business goal?”, “What is the opportunity here?”, “In a year, month, week from now, when we look back, how will we know we were successful?”, “What does success look like?”. Once you get some answers, you need to reiterate, and say it back to that person. “The opportunity as I understand it is this”, “the requirements are these”, and “these are the goals we are trying to accomplish”. “Yes or no”. Let’s get on the same page because not being on the same page from day one will make everything much harder going forward. Say it back to them the way you heard it. Because people say things, they have experiences and expectations that they are not expressing to you, and you may be hearing something else. You have to get on the same page.
[Measurement]
What does this look like in terms of measurement? For web specifically, maybe it’s visits, sessions, time on site, and inquiries, which ultimately leads to our students. But maybe it’s something else like organic social, reach, engagement, applause, and shares. Something along those lines. What does this look like in terms of measurement? Talking about metrics, how will we know we are going to be successful? How do we know we are on the right track towards our goal?
[Ask for feedback]
Ask for feedback, feedback, and more feedback. Ask for feedback from your immediate manager, from their leadership, from teams that have to work with you and understand what you are doing in order for them to do their job. All of these things, asking for feedback and everybody getting on the same page, is very important.
Let’s do this little exercise here on why it’s so important to get on the same page. Imagine some basic shapes: a circle, triangle, and a rectangle. Now, take those shapes in your head or on a piece of paper, and create a person. Here is what I would have drawn, does yours look exactly like this? I’m guessing not. Does it look kind of like this? Maybe, or maybe you have a stick figure, I don’t know. The point is I gave you vague instructions. You get vague goals or vague opportunities that aren’t really defined into objectives. Objectives are smart, they are specific, practical, time-bound, and measurable. Objectives are defined: “I want to increase students by 3% by fall of 2023.” What we’re getting from leadership in management are more like goals, and those are vague. Managing expectations in terms of what you are thinking versus what they are thinking.
[Getting the right data]
Let’s recap. This is where we were going: goals, expectations, getting the right data and communicating across campus. Getting the right data is important in terms of defending your strategy, getting benchmarks and baselines, and figuring out where you need to be in terms of competitors. Also being able to express your information, metrics, and things you’ve done in a way that makes sense and is a universal language to everybody from your direct team to executives.
[Data and access]
Talking about getting the right data, first of all, you must have access to your data. If you were an owned content strategist, or you work with owned content, it being social, email, or web, you should have access to web analytics. This typically comes in the form of Google Analytics, but I’ve seen Adobe, Web Analytics, and Google Search Console.
As an owned content strategist, you should know keywords, search queries, and things like that. Google Search Consoles should be turned on and connected to your Web Analytics and Google Sheets in Excel. Get comfortable with manipulating data in these programs. Maybe you are using Sprout or Falcon-I, whatever the case may be in terms of the software you’re using, I’m sure it has its own reporting. Maybe you’re doing this all manually, that’s okay too. Facebook has its own reporting; they show you graphs and things like that. You can export data to answer the questions that you have, like “was this successful?”. Doing that in Google Sheets and Excel can really help you get to those metrics. Get familiar with those two and then your own tech stack data.
If you are working in Slate, Salesforce, MailChimp, any sort of tech that is doing the work for you in terms of sending or receiving, you need to have access to that data. You need to understand how to read it, take it, and use it for your own purposes. Slate, Salesforce, and MailChimp have customer education content. They are in the business of keeping you and retaining you. They are going to do their best to ensure that you are maximizing that tool, and the way that they do that is by providing resources and education on their tools. Take the time, understand, and have access to those tools because in owned content you are looking at a holistic picture of all the content. Even if you’re just doing social, you need to understand how that post translates into web. You need to understand that flow.
[Have a research question in mind]
The hardest thing I run into with consulting is the amount of data. There’s social data, email, you could literally have 12 spreadsheets of data. And what people don’t do initially is have a research question in mind. If you don’t have a research question in mind, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. If you are looking at Google Analytics and you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can spend hours in that tool. A research question is something like, “Did we increase page views over last month?”. With this you can go into Google Analytics and find that report and answer that question. Don’t go into Google Analytics and say, “Hmm, I wonder if we did well. Understand the question you’re asking. “In social, did we increase shares on mask mandate posts?”, “Did we increase reach on mental health and wellness content this month?”. The various specific questions that you can ask that tie back to your success metrics and keep you from getting overwhelmed.
[Free services]
There are a lot of tools that offer free services. There are keyword tools, SpyFu will tell you what your competitors are doing. Spark Toro does Twitter research. With Chrome Lighthouse you can get an SEO, an accessibility, and page speed audit on your website. Rival IQ has free benchmarks reports for higher education and social media. Answer The Public is good for content ideas. Headline Analyzer. Milled has real live emails that you can browse through. Really Good Emails has email templates that you can look at. MindMeister, is great if you like mind maps or to brainstorm things.
If you don’t have a CRM, owned content strategy will be difficult. Salesforce has got Trailhead. Slate has its knowledge base, and MailChimp has tutorials and videos. Like I said, learn your tech stack, understand those tools, and have them available to you. If you’re a one-person team or don’t have a budget, the best thing to do is ask, because somebody on campus is using these tools. Sometimes it’s as simple as buying an extra seat or borrowing a seat. If you have the tools, make sure you know what you’re doing.
With Airtable, Callie Goodwin has four templates for higher education communicators. I have a client who I do TikTok strategy for, we have their content in Airtable, and we have a UGC automation setup. If someone finds UGC on TikTok in our ecosystem for that client, they just add it as a record. And every time my record is added in Airtable for that particular client, the right people get an email. It’s automated and free.
The last thing on tools. If you need information data to back up something and you don’t know where to go, email me. It’s my job to know where to go for data to back up my strategies and I’m happy to help.
[Shift your mindset to student experience metrics]
I think in terms of data. I talk a lot about student experience in terms of data and thinking about where to get data from. I want to challenge marketing communications professionals in higher education to shift their mindset towards student experience metrics. And student experience isn’t a new concept. But in terms of marketing communications, I feel like we haven’t made it our center. Shifting your mindset to student experience metrics is going to be key in terms of longevity and success going forward.
[Example: student experience cycle]
This is a human experience cycle, but I put student here because students are humans. We buy from brands for specific reasons, but before behavior comes into play, we have expectations. I have an expectation that your website is going to provide me with X information. We combine that with the actual experience to form a perception. I went to your website and it had X information. Great, you’re helpful. You have the information I need. It was successful, it was low effort, and I’m happy. My attitude towards your brand has maybe shifted, changed, or formed by this experience. Now I may go back to your website, or I may take the next step and make a purchase. This is the cycle.
The key here is experiences and expectations. Students expect to find program information. “How much is this going to cost me?” They want to know about community and student life. And there are other things, like motivations and where they are at in their educational journey, that they want to know. And so, if I am a student and I’m expecting you to tell me upfront how much this is going to cost me, and you’re secretive about it, I’m going to be upset. Now I’m thinking “what are they hiding?”, or “they’re too expensive. I can’t find this information, I’m frustrated. They are making me call somebody and I don’t want to call anybody. I hate calling people.” Maybe “I’m just going to leave the website and explore other options”. There is this cycle that happens over and over again about expectations. Our expectations regarding an experience and then what actually happens. This forms our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. What is interesting in marketing communications, especially for that expectations and experience portion of this, is that you can, as a content marketer, control and enhance the experience. You can manage expectations for a better experience for students.
[Managing expectations]
Student experience in owned content is a couple of different things. The main one is managing expectations. I said this before, about managing expectations with our leadership on strategies and content, what we’re going to measure, what does success look like, and getting on the same page. Managing expectations of students is very similar. If your marketing messages and social posts are talking about something, and they direct me to a landing page that doesn’t talk about that, you have broken the experience and my expectations have not been met. Or you say “we are a tight-knit community”, and it turns out all your classes are 3000 students. Manage expectations, stop lying to people, stop trying to persuade them into this ideal that you may think you are as an institution but is not the reality.
Jay Baer tells a story about his couch. He bought a couch online and it was going to be there in the next couple of months. Then there was a delay, and another, and another. If they had just said, “Hey, you know what? You’re not going to get your couch in two months. It’s going to be six months.” You will be a little mad but having that information up front lets you figure out your next steps. It’s about managing expectations. It’s ensuring that the customer, and in this case the student, knows what to expect. That way they can react accordingly.
If the institution is saying something out loud, whether it’s in web copy, social copy, email copy, and later on not living up to those expectations, you’re going to end up with angry students when it did not have to be that way. Managing expectations by ensuring that what you are saying in emails matches what you are saying in website copy and matches what your people on the phone are saying. What is it that you are promising in terms of copy and what is actually happening?
[Reducing cognitive load]
Cognitive load is an interesting thing and something you can reduce. Cognitive load is making people work harder than what they want to work. For example, you are getting to a website and you have three calls to actions on a web page. You are making me choose between three different actions, it’s too much. Or your navigation has 12 items on it, it’s overwhelming. Simplify it by making it easy to navigate and thus make a decision. Now you are pushing them towards an action you want them to take. If you have a landing page and you want them to submit their information, stop asking them to do 12 other things. Reduce the amount of clutter, chaos, content, and options.
[Personalization]
Students are consumers, and consumers are increasingly demanding when it comes to experience. Consumers want personalization. And so, in emails, in content, they want to see what is specific to them. This could come with layering on CRM and first party data. What information do you have about students that can help you get them personalized information?
I tweeted about Ohio State recently where if you filled out a form and clicked some boxes about what you’re interested in, it sends you to a page populated with content specific to those interests, which is an interesting concept. The idea is that there is so much content on higher education websites. How do we make it so that an out-of-state transfer student interested in communications can get the information they need without having to look through all of the content? If you put the student at the center of your marketing communications and ask yourself, “If I’m an out of state transfer student looking for communications majors, programs, and information, when I get to the homepage, do I know what to do?”, “Do I know where to go?”, “Do I know what academics versus admissions means?” Because I’ll tell you, I’m in higher education, I know the language, and I am often confused by the language being used on higher education websites. I do audits all the time and it’s a lot. “Apply, visit, and give” is my favorite navigation in higher education. I think University of Iowa utilizes that one, because otherwise it’s overwhelming. Personalization, being able to provide content to students, their families, and their influencers in a way that is specific to them. Stop making students work hard to get the information they need in order to feel confident about making a decision.
[Communicating insights for data-informed decisions]
Communicating insights for data-informed decisions. Taking all the things we just said and getting it out to campus. Reporting across campus is hard sometimes. There are a lot of things that we don’t think about as marketers and the silos are hard to communicate through.
[Data without context]
Data without context is misleading. If you say “we increased form fills by 300%”, but we started off with zero, right? That is very misleading. We need context in all the data that you’re reporting. If you have a report and you’re giving it to somebody, always make sure there’s context around those numbers because that sets expectations. If someone thinks we’re doing amazing, because we left out context around the date of reporting, you are going to be in trouble with the next report or when the campaign ends since the performance is not going to be how that person thought. If context is missing, then it becomes misleading.
[Data without insights]
Data without insights is a waste of time and effort. We have so much data in higher education, so unless you can take the data and actually say why we should care about it, it’s a waste. Why do we have the data if no one is going to say, “Here is why this matters.” Or “Here is how this informs our goal,” or “Here is how this changes what we do going forward.” You need insights.
[Data-guided decisions vs data-driven decisions]
Data-guided decisions are better than data-driven decisions. Data can be paralyzing because there’s so much of it. Sometimes you get insights and when you get those insights it’s hard to make a decision. We are in this digital age where making a change in something is relatively easy. Therefore, it is important to let data guide decisions but not necessarily hold us to this. We are in communications; everything is subjective mostly. That is why data-guided and not data-driven. Let it guide you but don’t be paralyzed by it.
[Personalization reporting]
In terms of reporting across campus, we are including context, we are not letting data paralyze us, and we are looking at opportunities for personalization in reporting. Personalization reporting is important in terms of communicating what you are doing across campus or to your teams. If you are a web manager, email marketer, social media manager, and you’re by yourself or you have a team, you probably need a daily dashboard of some sort. You need to understand the numbers every day in an intimate way. Maybe your dashboard, your reporting, or your insights look something like this traffic overview: acquisition, conversions, and content overview on a day-by-day breakdown. And maybe your immediate manager wants to know this as well. However, reporting on a day-to-day content bounce rates to leadership executives it’s the fastest way to watch people just glaze over. Looking at ways to bullet point high level things, for example, “Compared to last year we are seeing an increase in student inquiries, that means that upper funnel is being filled”. And “We are hoping that they convert down the funnel and here’s three steps we’re going to take or optimize”. These kinds of things: “We are seeing traction based on the data and we plan to”, “We are projecting that we need to shift”, “We need more money”, all those things.
Reporting out to your team versus executive leadership is very different. I suggest personalizing those reports based on the people you’re talking to. In the middle somewhere is maybe your manager or their manager and they need a combination of data and bullet points. If you are working with your IT department, or student life, or some other team, maybe they don’t need to know 90% of the things you are doing but they need to know this one tidbit to adjust on their end. “We are running a campaign for health and wellness, and we’re going to put the CAPS website in a series of Instagram stories”. Great. The CAPS people should know that you’re doing that because they’re going to get an influx of things. And so, “we’re going to run it on this day, this day, and this day at this time, here’s what the plan is”. And after that, “here’s a report on what we saw with those numbers”. That kind of personalized individual reporting. Because sometimes we send reports out and they’re so overwhelming to people who don’t know this industry and don’t need to know half the information. Don’t tell them something they don’t need to know. Customize your reports because your expectations and my expectations are different.
[The future of data is student-centered]
Let’s talk about the future of data. The best data policy is student-centered. I’m saying this because the future of data is complicated and it’s ever changing. The cookie-less future and Facebook reducing all their targeting capabilities. It’s overwhelming and it’s hard to keep up with. The best data policy is student-centered. So, what do your students expect? How can you personalize to them while maintaining their privacy? This is a hard balance. A lot of us are saying the answer is first party data, that is the data that your students are opting to give you. Those are being held in CRMs usually, and that data can help you meet and manage expectations and personalize content while ensuring privacy. Looking at first party data as an institution, a department, and a team is key. You need to get that aligned and hopefully your institution is on board with that because this is where this is going. If you haven’t heard, Universal Analytics is going to stop collecting data next year. You need to upgrade to G4.