Episode Transcript
Kevin Hogan
OK. Well, welcome back, Vernon. I appreciate you taking the time again to kind of go even deeper into the daily dramas that involve the administration's various shifts in the higher education space and what our readers, our listeners and your clients can do to kind of stay abreast of the situation.
Verlan Stephens
Yeah. Thanks, Gavin. I'm glad to be here. It's a challenging time. Yeah. And it's, you know, things are changing. And so it's, you know, trying to sure you're on the right path for that is an important.
Kevin Hogan
Thing. So in in our first episode, we talked about the immediate impacts of these changes. Now maybe we could talk a little bit more about the strategy and how institutional leaders. And be thinking differently about their short term and their long term planning. And you know as a managing partner at Agile, how are you advising your clients? To balance those immediate compliance needs with being able to think strategic groups in the future.
Verlan Stephens
I think it's understanding your portfolio products and how that fits in with the likely directions. I've already we've already seen some shifts. We saw I've seen ads in the last few weeks from both Pearson. And Discovery education focused on career workforce, so some of the the leaders in this space, if you will have already started to pivot their messaging, they're really focused on that already. And I think that they looked at their portfolio of products and said how can we. We weave this into the message where we're likely to have stable interest and funding. Yeah, I think that's always one of the pieces of advice is, you know, look at what your portfolio products are or how can you spend that. Discovery has a lot of strength in science. But yet they're not talking about science right now. They're talking about workforce development.
Kevin Hogan
Yeah.
Verlan Stephens
So I think it's reimagining your story a bit. To make it work in the current environment as much as anything, I think that's the the piece of advice and and the second thing is general advice is don't panic at the end of the day, the vast majority of funding doesn't come from the federal government for education. And so we've put out a lot of material in the last two months around where do districts get their funding, what kind of funding is it? What are their priorities? You know, really the thing we're pushing a lot on is. Align with the strategic plans of the organizations you serve. Look at what they're trying to accomplish, because what I've heard over and over from those folks is. They'll find the money if it's part of their strategic vision, if it isn't. You're at risk. So you've got to understand who you're really trying to go after and what their real needs and direction are, what's strategic to them and what's nice to have. And the nice to haves are in more jeopardy than those things. That are strategic.
Kevin Hogan
Yeah. Yep. Now I know in your analysis you emphasize a lot about ROI based marketing and and focusing on it seems like job placement rates and and cost savings. How do you find institutions shifting their data collections to support those sort of new metrics?
Verlan Stephens
This has been a long term shift when everything was print ads. It was very hard to measure. You knew what the circulation audience size was, but you didn't know much beyond that. Did this ad prompt them to pick up a phone or respond? And as more and more of those metrics became infinitely trackable. ROI and the marketing side came up very dramatically and so. And certainly we see it now where? It isn't just at the end of something. We're running a lot more digital campaigns for clients, whether they're trying to recruit teachers into their education program and masters degree programs. Things and we're able to monitor day by day what response rates look like. You can do simultaneous AB testing and go wow B is outperforming A let's shift more of our ad spend into B and so. We're. Waiting till the end of campaigns to then go back and analyze and say wow at the end of the campaign, we we saw better results from this. Masters should be programmed than this one. We can make those changes literally on a daily basis. That ROI is. Down to that level of really on a daily basis, we can assess how a how a campaign is performing and tweak it and go wow, we're getting a little better performance off of this channel. We're we're seeing better response off of LinkedIn than we are on Facebook or Facebook's outperforming and we can tweak the ad. And suddenly we're seeing a rise in performance and we're like, great, we're on the right. And so that's that's a big change.
Kevin Hogan
Yeah, I mean, this is almost like a dashboard dynamic that we're talking about.
Verlan Stephens
Absolutely, absolutely. A dashboard dynamic where we're looking at that dashboard and we're communicating with our our clients and saying here's what we're seeing. Here's how we think we can tweak your program to get the best ROI.
Kevin Hogan
And now we've gotten at least 5 minutes into this conversation without mentioning the acronym of the decade, which is AI. But I know that when you're talking about that dashing dynamic, you need to have those technologies in the background. Am I right? Can you talk? A. Little bit about how our listeners can kind of grasp and block. The. Using this stuff in as the guts, I think of any new sort of strategy. You're going to.
Verlan Stephens
Have you know, I think it absolutely we're just seeing such an explosion on that front in terms of smaller teams being able to generate more variance to programs and things so much faster. Than they have historically. And so I think that's really that being able to leverage AI in a very. Workforce multiplier. Banner. So where before you maybe had the resources to do 2 variants on an ad, you could have AI produce four or six, run those and then eliminate the ones that are poor performing. And so suddenly we've got this ability as a multiplier of capability and the AI is capable of quickly learning things like tone. Well, here's here's. Our past ads and what we think it perform well and is the messaging we like as an organization and it learns from that. And so that's the other thing that's really fascinating is is being able to set this tone and things like that, that the is really an interesting aspect that we're starting to see and leverage more and more. We're leveraging it in, in so many things.
Kevin Hogan
Now for folks who have been listening to both episode 1 and and now our our second episode here and maybe feeling still overwhelmed. By these changes. Because, you know, as comforting as your insights have been, it's still it's a pretty overwhelming sort of subject, so. Top three priorities that you can suggest to them on what they should focus on immediately after finishing our podcast here this afternoon.
Verlan Stephens
Yes, I and it would we hit on some of them and I think it's just worth reiterating some of. Those. A bit so. Understand the strategic priorities of your audience. And maybe that's down to the university level, where you're you're actually looking at the university strategic plan. What are they trying to get in place, what's important to? Them. Understanding those things is absolutely key to marketing to them at this point. This is a K12 example, but I I know it applies to higher as well. We had a a conversation with an assistant Superintendent and. Major school districts in the country, and he said we reviewed and we had 400 and some initiatives in the. District. He said we have no way to manage 400 initiatives and so we started going through that list and saying does it align with our strategic plan if it didn't? They just quit doing. It. And he said. We've cut that. By 2/3, we still have a ways to go, but we're down to less than a we're basically down to 100 initiatives instead of 400. And I think that's exactly the kind of weeding that's that that's happening at. Educational institutions and people are having to get aligned as to what's really important, and it's not that we're doing in our own business. We really put a lot of energy this year into what's our strategic plan and what are we working on. That's on that plan. And and starting to eliminate things and say these others are nice to haves, we'd love for this to be more efficient or that to be better. Is it part of our strategic plan? If it's not, we're not working on it. Right. Yeah. And so I think that's one where everybody's so overwhelmed they having to focus. Make sure you're aligned with what they're focusing on. That's where your best opportunities are going to be, and if that institution is not move to another one that is, and being able to identify those. I think the second part we just touched on a second ago was. Is starting to leverage and utilize AI as you can, whether it's in software development. We have seen huge gains in the productivity of our developers in terms of what they can accomplish and the complexity of what they can accomplish. We're looking at a new search strategy that allows conceptual level searching, not just keyword searching, but conceptual level searching. Where you can identify those organizations that have needs that align with your product. That's a that's a. It's a super challenging technical problem. It's becoming a reality and it's only becoming a reality. Because of these large language models that are really able to pull some of these things together. And so that's really fascinating. And I think that's going to be a a good development, but just the the productivity, whether it's in your marketing campaigns leveraging because you know we've had for years. Clients that are just like, yeah, we would love to do AB test if we don't have the staff to do that. Use AI. Use it to generate those AB alternatives and leverage that as a tool. See it as a tool to help you be more productive and be able to do the things you just couldn't do a. Few years ago.
Kevin Hogan
Never, never a dull moment and I. Think, as you say, the. The pivots, even in a long term. Strategy have to be addressed on a daily basis, if not hourly basis these days. Yeah. And you know your advice and your insights, I think have been really valuable for our readers and our and our listeners.
Verlan Stephens
And I appreciate both parts of this conversation and and look forward to further ones down the line. Berlin. Absolutely, Kevin, always a pleasure and look forward to meeting up some more and and having some more of these conversations because it's always different absolutely. Our world is changing just like everyone else's is and there's always something new to. Talk about.
Kevin Hogan
And again, since that the changing the conversation from challenges to opportunities, I always like to leave these with the glass half full, right. So I think we are there, there, there are positives to to come out of all of this.
Verlan Stephens
There definitely are. I think that that's is looking for where those likely things are going to be happening and aligning to them. And again, looking at your portfolio products and saying how can we make that align to where the messaging is around where the current priorities are.
Kevin Hogan
Well, once again, thanks for your time and look forward to the next one.
Verlan Stephens
All right. Thanks, Kevin.
