Building better bridges - Creating content that makes it easy for students to choose your college over others

Show Notes:

• Verbatim text version of this episode is below for those that prefer to read.

• Download: The Unignorable College Enrollment Video A simple 5-part storytelling template for creative emotional videos that boost enrollment.

• The college or university that builds the best bridges wins the enrollment/recruitment game. However, it's our often natural tendency to build bad bridges, because the messaging that comes naturally to us may not be the best bridge material. In this episode we discuss the 3 components that go into making content that captures attention and attracts applicants - aka "good bridges" - with the help of Kindra Hall's book, Stories That Stick.

(00:00):

If you read one marketing book this year, it should be this one, Stories That Stick by Kindra Hall. This is probably the first of several times I'm going to mention Kindra's work throughout various episodes in this podcast because I've never been this excited reading a business or a marketing book before.

(00:22):

If you were to borrow my copy of Kindra's book, you'd see a lot of underlining and notes. You really can't read this book without a pen or a highlighter, so go buy that. Go buy it. At the current moment, I have some extra copies lying around. Reach out to me and I will gladly send you one if I have any more available. This episode, we're going to unpack the section in this book about building a bridge. A bridge over what? A bridge over the gap between what you have to offer and someone deciding to buy into that offer, between a potential student who's considering several schools and that student actually choosing your school. It's the gap that exists between you wanting to attract top talent and that talent actually making a decision to work with you, the gap between you wanting to influence a group of influential donors with the impact of the work that you're doing, and them actually giving you money. That's the gap that we're looking to bridge and really isn't all marketing about bridging those kinds of gaps.

(01:33):

Pretty elementary stuff, but as Kindra puts it, those who bridge the gaps best win. If you can sell better, pitch better, recruit better, build better, create better, connect better, you win. Duh, right? I mean, the problem is in higher ed marketing, it's real easy to build a bad bridge. So, imagine a river. I mean, this is groundbreaking analogy stuff, talking about bridges and then linking that to a river analogy, absolutely never been done before, so you've got a river, your team is on one side, your marketing team's on one side. On the other side is the perfect students that your school or program targets and the river represents noise, internet noise, the massive amounts of content being produced and published every minute. It's a rushing river of noise.

(02:23):

You might say it's troubled water and you need something like a bridge over troubled water. Now, imagine your team just chucking planks of wood into the river as their method for trying to bridge this gap. Build a bridge over the river. Imagine how expensive that would be. Wood is expensive. Wood isn't cheap. At one point, I don't know, big supply chain issues with COVID, I don't know if that's still happening. It was really expensive last time. I actually do buy wood fairly often because I'm a painter and I build canvases and it was pretty expensive, so wood is not cheap.

(02:59):

You know what's even less cheap? What's even more expensive than would is your marketing team's time. Every hour they spend is billable. We forget that people are on salary, but every hour we spend sending them in this direction and that direction and just taking shots in the dark is money that is coming out of the marketing budget. Duh. You're spending that bridge budget just chucking that into the water and then you're wondering why people aren't crossing the bridge at the rate you'd like. Maybe some get across, maybe one of those planks of wood get stuck on a log, and somebody can make their way across. But for the most part, there's no bridge, or at best it's a really ineffective bridge.

(03:42):

As Kindra discusses in her book, Stories That Stick, there is a structure to a proper bridge. It's a three part structure. I'm going to read straight from Stories That Stick here. "First and foremost, the best bridges must capture attention and captivate the audience so they know the bridge is there in the first place. The second element influence is the means by which you're able to compel the audience to take the action you desire, and third, if you don't want to have to keep bridging the same gaps over and over again, the best bridges transform the audience, creating a lasting impact and leaving the audience changed so they never even consider returning to the other side of the bridge, thereby closing the gap forever," so attention, influence, and transformation.

(04:28):

Okay, no longer quoting from the book here. Let's start with attention. With the rise of the smartphone. We all know attention spans are getting shorter, or so people say. What if I told you that's not necessarily true, though? I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in with marketing teams or someone every time without fail will chime in and say, "This video needs..." I make videos. If you're just joining this podcast, I'm a video maker. Someone in these meetings will chime in and say, "This video needs to be short because people's attention spans," and I tell you, they're short.

(05:04):

But do you have a favorite show on Netflix, Hulu, whatever? Maybe you watch Yellowstone and you're like me. And you can't stop saying, "I reckon," you just can't. It's part of your vocabulary. Now, my wife and I, we are dedicated to Yellowstone. Die hard. I went as far as I bought a $13 cowboy hat on Amazon just to wear while watching the show. It's mostly just a funny joke and my kids mostly just wear it, not while watching the show they're not allowed to watch it. But if Yellowstone is on, my hat is on, and my Southern accent is out in full force.

(05:39):

Tell me a time when you've sat down to watch your favorite show, or even just a show that has captured your attention. Maybe you've watched the first few episodes and you're like, "I'm hooked on this," and you get to episode four, and then like 30 seconds in, you're like, "Nah, I'm good. Next." When people make a decision in their minds to invest in something, it's a movie or a show, YouTube videos of people falling in hilarious ways, whatever they're in it for the long haul, they, they'll go down that rabbit hole and they'll watch an hour-long episode of something.

(06:09):

Kindra has similar things to say about this. Here's a passage from her section on capturing attention. She says, "I recently enjoyed a lunch with marketing executives in higher education. Oh, look at that. Landed right in our backyard. They were lamenting the abysmal attention span of their customers, namely 17-year-olds, and it appeared as though my suggestion to tell better stories instead of focusing on using the fewest words possible was causing some internal chaos. One gentleman tempering his frustration asked, 'So, how do you suggest we incorporate a long-form story when our audience has an intention span shorter than a goldfish?' The question was a good one, but flawed. First, the whole goldfish thing, if you've heard it before, is a myth.

(06:53):

"Second, it implied the message recipient was at fault, conveniently shifting the blame away from the message creator. Maybe people don't pay attention because your hashtags don't matter IRL, in real life.

(07:06):

"Finally, and most importantly, the question revealed the subtle belief that the marketer's relationship with an audience's attention has to be a challenged one. But in fact, when done correctly, attention doesn't have to be stolen or wrestled away. It's given freely, willingly, and in many cases without the audience realizing it's happening. The ease of attention is one of the great strengths of storytelling and is the result of a unique leverage point. No other form of information exchange has the storytelling process is a co-creative one."

(07:39):

Then she goes on and talk about narrative transportation, which is the thing that happens when you get swept up in a story. You start to visualize the story playing out in your mind, your emotions are activated, your senses are activated, and you lose your sense of space and time thereby getting lost in a story, and that's why stories are effective because they have a stronger ability than say a commercial or a typical piece of marketing content to transport the viewer or listener to a place where they are getting lost in the story.

(08:08):

Nobody tricks you into getting lost into a story you willingly give your attention because it's drawn you in and captivated you and the great thing is studies show that the further a subject is transported into a story, the more likely their beliefs are to line up with the narrative.

(08:25):

There's a study done about this. It's called Murder at the Mall. It's a little bit morbid. Subjects were given a story to read. It's about this girl that goes to the mall with her college-aged sister and ends up getting murdered by this psychiatric patient and they tested different variables. They told the study participants that this was a true, they told some of them it was a true story, they told some that this was a fictional story. It actually was a true story, unfortunately, and the study showed that even if some people's minds the story was fictional, it still changed their views and their beliefs to be consistent with the narrative.

(09:10):

For example, participants in this study were more likely to believe that psychiatric patients need restrictions, or that the world is a dangerous place. They have an exaggerated estimation of how likely it is to go that you'd go out in public and be randomly killed by a stranger, so applying this to higher ed marketing, the more you can transport prospective students into an actual story. By that, I don't mean, "Here's our school. Here's why we're great. We have small class sizes, topnotch professors, et cetera, et cetera," here's the whole list of the laundry list of reasons why we're great. I'm talking about real, an actual story, a story about a student or alumni's journey through something significant. The more you can transport them into a story like that, the more likely your audience is to adopt the emotions and beliefs of that story subject and look favorably upon your school.

(10:09):

Don't be boring is the bottom line. Pay attention to that first impression your audience is going to have with your marketing content and make sure it piques their curiosity and then focus on how you can craft your content so that your audience can get lost in the message or the story. Because when they get lost in your content, the need for it to be super short goes out the window. That's not to say that if you're not telling an actual traditional story where there's a beginning and middle and end and instead you are creating something that's more like, "Here, here's the benefits of our school." That's not to say that you can't transport someone through that, but just think about the stuff that you get hooked to and you want to see the end. The reason you want to watch to the end is to see what happens in the narrative, to see where this character ended up, or how the problem was resolved.

(11:07):

That's really what really launches you into that narrative transportation space. Could you get lost in something more of a commercial or an infomercial or something like that? Sure. It's just less likely your audience is going to know the whole time that they're being sold to and more likely to just be like, "Ah, this is commercial."

(11:29):

The second part of the bridge is influence. And here's where I want to talk about something I like to call arriving at the brand through the back door. Our default tends to be I'm making a piece of marketing content or a blog or sending an email or whatever, I need to talk directly about the brand or the product. I need to list its features and benefits. In higher ed, it's like, "Such and such university is one of a kind and blah, blah, blah, and we care about our students and you're not a number and whatever else," those are all fine to say, nothing wrong with that, but it's hard to get lost in that, as I mentioned, if not impossible, because you're just telling me you're not showing me, and the difference is critical.

(12:08):

I talk about this in a previous episode, but one of my mentors in college, I went to art school and studied abstract painting. Her name was Gilda Snowden, super great Detroit artist. She was so influential to my career as an artist. She believed in me, she challenged me. She allowed me access to her experiences in the real world as an artist. Telling that story shows the idea of professors giving close personal attention to students, or having more mentorship, closer relationships with students, and you're not a number in that kind of thing.

(12:43):

It's so much more influential to feature an example of close personal attention than to just say it because we can get lost in the example that takes us on a journey where we don't feel like we're being sold to, we don't feel like we're being marketed to or having our arm twisted into giving our attention to this piece of content. We give our attention willingly because you're showing me an example of something you want me to clean, and if you just told that story and showed your school's logo at the end, the reader, or the listener, the viewer, it doesn't have to be a video, it could be an article or whatever. You somehow made it obvious that this was coming from a certain brand, the reader or the listener or the viewer feels that close personal attention, they're influenced by it. They've got a whole image of what that looks like in their mind and they don't need to be beat over the head with your scripted talking points.

(13:41):

That's arriving at the brand through the back door, telling a story, delivering a message about something deeper, something other than the thing you're selling and bringing the audience back around, connecting the emotions. You've just imparted on them to the brand. Dove did a campaign like this where they had a forensic artist come in and there was a curtain between him and the person he was interviewing or whatever, and they had these people one by one come in, he would ask them questions. He couldn't see them. He would ask them questions like, "Tell me about your nose, tell me about your eyes, tell me about your chin," or whatever, and he would draw them how they saw themselves, but then they would have another person come in that met that person in the hallway or whatever outside and interacted with them and that person would describe them. The bottom line of the commercial is the way that other people described a person was the drawing was way more beautiful than the way they described themselves, the way they described their own features.

(14:52):

Anyway, that's arriving at the brand through the back door that's influencing your audience, that's giving them something other, other that they can feel and something they can believe differently about. Those emotions connect directly to your brand. Dove didn't have to say, "Our soap will make you beautiful. Bring out your natural beauty with its natural ingredients," and blattity, blah, blah, blah. The message was, "You're already beautiful. You don't need our soap to do that for you, but we're here for you." When that customer is choosing in the aisle between Dove and some other soap brand, God knows there's so many different options to choose from, but when that customer is standing in the aisle, they're more likely to choose the brand that made them feel something deeper than just what's in the soap or why that's specially formulated, or whatever.

(15:44):

Kindra Hall, she unpacks a great case study about Extra gum, how their slogan for the longest time with sending it around long-lasting flavor, that's a feature or a benefit about the gum. But their sales took off when they decided to change the narrative to gum in general being about creating social connections with people, the events that happened around sharing gum with another person, and she talks about this ad that Extra did that was the story of these two people that fell in love and gum was a part of the story, but the story was really about something deeper and more romantic, but it made people cry, and so people bought Extra gum like crazy because they had a strong emotion attached to the brand.

(16:27):

The third bridge-building element is transformation. Transformation is really just pointing to the fact that when you are transported into a narrative, you're going to come back changed. I watched The Sixth Sense when I was a teenager or whatever, and if you've ever seen The Sixth Sense, it's about ghosts and this kid can see dead people. I tell you what, trying to go to sleep for years after that, having these images of these ghosts in my head and feeling like they're in my bedroom changed me. That's an example of transformation. That story just sticks with you and you feel it long after you are done watching the movie and it's create, it's the effect of creating that element of transformation in someone, taking someone from, "I used to think this and now I think this, I used to believe this and now I believe this," it's that element of transformation that bonds people to your brand.

(17:41):

Long time ago, that show Undercover Boss was real popular and they did an episode on this winery called Kendall Jackson Winery. My wife and I watched this together. I can't remember the plot, I can't remember what actually happened in the episode, but what I remember is feeling like moved by the heart behind the people that ran that company. I remember just feeling good about giving them my money instead of some other random wine company. I don't drink a lot of wine, but we did go to Meyer, I think, and pick up a bottle of wine, and gosh darn it, it was Kendall Jackson because they had transformed us. They had imprinted on us. They had made us feel like, "Man, this is a really good company that really cares about their customers and cares about the quality of the wine and they just have a good heart behind them," and so that's always stuck with me when I'm looking at this huge,.

(18:48):

I mean, geez, have you ever brought wine before? It's tons of options. Because I know very little about wine, it's really a gut decision. I'm looking at the packaging. Do I like the font on the label? Does this feel like some hoity-toity high-end kind of wine? Or does this feel like some cheap box wine/designed bottle thing? But a big part of that decision is emotions. Do I feel something for this brand? Do I have any sort of connection to any brand on this shelf? Usually, the answer is no, except for Kendall Jackson. I have a little bit of a connection there just because I have some sort of feeling associated with the brand.

(19:36):

Bridge building, attention, influence, and transformation. Those are the things that make up, as Kindra puts it, a quality bridge. That's a very intentional move on the part of the marketing team. You can't just throw materials or content into the river and expect there to be this well-engineered bridge that's going to reliably get people across.

(20:09):

If storytelling is something you want to do more of for your college or university, I have a couple things to offer you, number one, go to my website, unveild.tv/unignorablecollegevideo. I'll put the link in the show notes, whatever, on the webpage or whatever. You can download that. It's a simple storytelling framework for creating emotional videos that boost enrollment, and if you have nothing to do with making videos for your school or getting a video made in some fashion, then it can also apply to writing an email, writing an article, giving a TED Talk kind of lecture type thing. These same principles apply. So, that's something you could check out, and it gives you kind of a plug-and-play framework, and it also comes with if you were going to make a video or if you're going to interview a student for a blog post or an article or whatever, it gives you a list of questions that get at those responses that kind of speak to something other than just the obvious, "Here's why we're great, here's why the school is great, and every student should come here."

(21:18):

The other thing is, my company, Unveild, we help schools put their storytelling on autopilot. We make it really easy with one contract, with one engagement to get a whole year's worth of storytelling content and supplementary video content. I mean all told, you're going to end up with 132 videos for the price of maybe three or four one-off videos from a typical production company. If you were to approach them as one-offs instead of in this format that we've come up with for a flat monthly fee, you're going to get one student story per month, or any kind of story. It could be a faculty story, it could be a story on the janitor, whatever you want that's like two to three minutes, and then we're going to give you a 30-second cutdown of that story, a 15-second cutdown, and then eight topical videos.

(22:09):

Those topical videos are just extra stuff that we got in the interview so that we're not leaving great content, sitting on a hard drive. We create a package of extra videos for you of that person talking about whatever it is that we want to ask them about. Could be scholarships, could be career development opportunities, so it really, it takes a lot of the legwork out of really having a strong, strong, consistent video presence. If you want to know more about that, go on my website, book a call, and I would love to chat with you and tell you more about that. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.

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