Podcast episode #8 - Getting Clear On Your Target Audience and Maximizing Content That Speaks Directly To Them, With Jay Kruger of Walsh College
Show Notes:
Verbatim text version of this episode is below for those that prefer to read. Made by a robot so probably only 80% accurate.
Content referenced in this episode:
-Akash Ahuja's alumni testimonial
-Aaron Eller's alumni testimonial
-Walsh College's commercial
-Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller
-Learn the storytelling framework we used for Walsh College: unveild.tv/studenttestimonials
(00:00):
How Walsh College was able to get clear on their target audience, create content that spoke directly to that person, and maximizing the use and reach of that content. So it makes your marketing life just easier, less stress. These are all things that we're talking about with Jay Kruger. my buddy, who is the director of Creative Marketing at Walsh College on today's episode,
(00:28):
Hey, welcome to the Higher Ed Storytelling University podcast. This is a podcast dedicated to helping higher ed marketers tell better stories and enroll more students. My name is John Azoni. I'm the founder at Unveild a video production company working specifically with college marketing teams on automating their video storytelling content. Learn more@unveiled.tv. That's U N V E I L d.tv. My guest today is Jay Kruger. He heads up the marketing at Walsh College, which is a really cool business school here in the Detroit area. That's my team has gotten to know, and like Jay is a super thoughtful leader within the marketing space. he's got a really good knack for marketing and messaging and unveiled. We've done some recent work with Walsh that you'll hear about later in this episode and how they've been able to take that content that we created for them and really maximize you know, maximize it and get, and really connect with students emotionally, but also just get a lot of mileage out of it. And I hate long intros. So let's stop this intro and let's go. Here's my conversation with the one and only Jay Kruger. Jay, thanks for being on the, on the podcast, on the Higher Ed Storytelling University podcast. Tell us who you are, what you do.
(01:38):
Yeah so I I'm the creative marketing director for Walsh College. I started at Walsh four and a half years ago. prior to that I was in different marketing roles. some of my favorites though were, was really working with the entrepreneurial world taking taking people from their initial idea through their first customer and kind of coaching them through what that looks like on a sales aspect, on a, a marketing aspect, and really trying to get people to kind of think outside the box when it came to how to get their product out. So but yeah, now I've spent, now I spend my time here at Walsh and it's been, it's been a pretty crazy ride the last few years, as you can imagine, with higher ed and, and everything else in the world for sure. What
(02:26):
Is, what is Walsh for people that
(02:28):
Aren't from Michigan? Yeah, so Walsh College is a, is an interesting college. so we are a upper division only college, so we actually don't have freshman and sophomore. but we we have a, a lot of time spent with the undergrad side in their final stretch of their bachelor's degree. We focus on business and technology and we pride ourselves on the fact that our faculty are working professionals within the industry that they're teaching. So we bring real world, real world experience into the classroom and we, we make it a nice little check mark whenever our students comment about how their faculty has told them to close the textbook. Cause they're gonna tell 'em how it's done in the real world. Yeah. So that's a fun thing for us. That's, that's a really big point of pride for us. even our accreditation is different.
(03:19):
we are not a theory-based accreditation for a college as most of 'em are. we are an application-based, so all of our stuff is based on, on real hands-on learning experiences. and another big point of pride of ours is when our students go out into the world, we have these employers coming back and just going, yeah. They were able to start that day being an asset to us. And that's a huge, that's a huge factor. Yeah. So, I, I just started getting to know you when you, you took on this role marketing for, for, for Walsh College. But tell me like and I, and I, I think I sent out an email recently saying to my people that I have a a, a col, a Walsh crush or like a marketing crush on Walsh College or something, cuz I just follow your guys' stuff.
(04:07):
And it's just like, I just feel like it's just, you know, you're cons, you guys are consistent with content and that's one of the things that I really try to do for myself, but also try to teach, you know, my audience is just like, you know, find something that you can just keep churn out and do doing consistently. one of those being storytelling. And I think you guys do that, do that well. but tell me like, what was the, what was the marketing landscape like at Walsh before you got involved and how has it, how has it evolved? Yeah, so I, you know, it's, it's interesting. I think that the interesting part about marketing is it was very different before I came to Walsh, but it was different because the world was different. I think marketing has to, has to adapt so fast anyway.
(04:51):
but prior to coming over to Walsh, from what I can tell, I was not heavily involved with what they were doing before. but from what I can tell it, they were, they were very focused on on being a lot and being everywhere, which is cool. And it has some great elements to it. they had a lot of people know Walsh College for their yellow notepad, and that was like what they were known. Yeah. Right. Like, I remember that. And, and we have students still to this day that tell us like, oh, I remember the yellow notepad. And that was cool. And it was everywhere. I mean, and literally like, they soaked that campaign for everything. It had, they were in parades with yellow suit guys with briefcases. I mean, like, they went, they went crazy, which was great. Yeah. And it's like marketing, it was like a yellow, it was like a yellow legal pad with like, sort of like handwriting font and you guys would have different like messages Yeah.
(05:42):
On there. Yeah. And it was, and it was cool. And it was, I don't know I don't know who came up with it, what agency came up with it, but it was, it was cool and it was a great campaign. it it like borderline like gorilla marketing of like, I'm gonna put this everywhere you look. Yeah. And we're gonna, we're gonna be here. what's shifted is once I came on, we were actually, our whole marketing team was new at that point. we, we really kind of took a different approach to it and we started to amplify the professionalism of Walsh versus the being everywhere. W we weren't after being everything to everyone, we were like, look, we know who we are. We built an entire college around working professionals. So we're here for those of you who have a full-time job, who are, who have kids at home, and you have soccer practice later that you don't wanna miss, we're here for that.
(06:37):
We can fit education into your life. Our classes don't even start until after work hours. Yeah. So like, we have, we, and we have all these things, which is cool, but from a marketing perspective, what it allowed us to do was speak very directly to our audience, not to everybody everywhere, all at the same time. Right. So what we've done in the last year and a half now is we've started to take this a different approach of we're, we are not a student life based college. We don't have, we don't have on-campus housing. We don't have a, like we we're starting to get a student life platform together. But it's really an interesting atmosphere because it's less student life and more like student mastermind because our, our average age of our student is in their thirties. So we're not here talking to these 18 year olds in the same way that anybody else in the region would be.
(07:32):
That's not who our audience is. And what our audience wants is not, not the same thing that anybody else wants. We're not here with, we don't have sports. Business is our sport. That's what we do, <laugh>. And so it's, it's interesting for us because we have to talk to a demographic differently. And we've learned that, and that's been something we've had to adopt strongly over the last three and a half to four years, is defining who our audience is and speak to them, not speak to everybody and try and make them our audience. Yeah. I think I, and I think that's like that is the challenge for every organization really. Every, you know, but like, it's, you know, you, you, you learn, you, you wanna learn how to like write copy or, or you know, you market to the right people. The, the advice is always know your audience.
(08:22):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, but but that's like so much easier said than done. How, how have you guys, because I think, and I think that people, I think that schools struggle really with that. And like, who is the, the, the one, you know, student profile. How how, how do you guys, how have you guys kind of managed those conversations and kind of figured out who your audience is? Yeah. So it, it's, you're right. I mean, the hardest part is figuring out who that audience is in the first place, right? So for what, for us, what we did is we started with our alumni. It's a lot easier to, to go to what you've already done and figure out what part of that was working. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. we quickly realized our alumni were, were pretty focused into business in all aspects. So realizing that it didn't matter what industry you were in, that there was a business element to it.
(09:14):
So for a while we were getting a ton of people that were nurses and they found themselves like, oh, I'm leading this team now, but I have no experience on how to be a leader in a business world where I'm having to manage things that are not things I learned in nursing school. Yeah. And that was just one example, right? But it was, it was figuring out that our, our students and our audience was a, was a demographic unlike the regular student population. So it was, here's these people that may be 18 and they may be 65, but they all kind of have this thing of like, they're not there for, they're not there for student life. They're not there for sports. They're not there for living on campus and making new friends with all these new people. They're there because they wanna be successful.
(10:00):
They want to be leaders in business, and they want to be seen as the asset that a company needs. And so we did that and we started to take that audience and we started to define that further by saying, okay, what now are their interests? Now we know that we can't really go after age cause that's not really what this is. So what is it? And it's this success factor that they were after. So, okay, how do we provide that? How do we make sure that we are providing the thing that they're looking for? And so maybe it's, if it's business, great, what part of business? Is it accounting? Is it finance? Is it business leadership? Is it whatever it is? Is it hr or is it it, is it these places? And then how do we make sure that what they're getting out of this is gonna be far more beneficial than what you're gonna get out of a textbook?
(10:47):
And that's where it came into like, you know, the it, the IT program I think is one of the prime examples. It is something that when you go in as a student, it is not at all what a classroom has ever been known as. You go in and there is two banks of computers and there's an attack and defend class. There's, you sit on either side of the room and you have red team blue team, and red team's gonna hack into blue team. Blue team's gonna defend it and return, and they're gonna play capture the flag, and they're gonna go steal files from servers. And how do you do that in a way that creates this ethical hacking atmosphere so that you can go out and prevent these things from happening to anybody else? And that's the hands-on types of things that are crazy. I mean, the capstone for our, the capstone class for our nba, you bring in all walks of life from different, different programs.
(11:41):
So you, you are running a business on a global competition. I mean, you're competing from, with people from around the world in the same time 10 week capstone experience where you're running a company and every week the this courier comes out, you have to re review the report. It's a 24 page document. You review the reports. What happened to your product? What happened to your research and development team? What was the cost? What was the marketing cost? What are we selling it for? What are we producing it for? Are we hiring, are we, are we retaining those people? Are we having to hire more and train more and spend more on training? I mean, it covers every aspect of it. But like when I went through it personally, I was on a team coming through an M B A in a standard, you know, general business function.
(12:26):
But I also had somebody on my team that was coming through from finance, and so they were helping us handle the financial side. And I had somebody else coming in from a, a development and IT side that could he kind of help us understand what the technical aspects of of different product management pieces were. And I had somebody that was in that was coming through HR and they were helping us understand like, what do we need to pay this, this group of people, and what does the training cost and how much are we gonna spend annually on training these people up further to retain them? But what that did was bring people in from all these areas that are having very real experiences, very hands-on things that I may not have known. I didn't come through hr, I didn't come through it, but they did.
(13:09):
And they can explain it to me. And it's the idea that like, I can teach them something, they can teach me something. And that's gonna be more powerful than anything I'm gonna read in this textbook <laugh>. So For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So like, I know, and I know that got a little off topic, but I think that's a good, I think it's a good example of where, where we were in deciding who the audience was in taking this thing that seemed like a vast age in dialing it down into something that was very much not, because yeah, you may be somebody, and, and 18 year olds, they see college in movies and they're like, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm partying, we're doing frats, we're doing, and it's great. If that's what you wanna do, great. Totally. Yeah. But that's not what we do, and that's not what we're going to do.
(13:52):
We're not gonna, we're not gonna bend to that. We're gonna go to the people that, that's not what they're after. They're after being the ones that are leading Fortune 500 companies. And that's who we're gonna talk to. Sure. That's awesome. And so those, those, you said the, it's not a vast age range, once you kind of narrowed that down, do, do you find that that's like a, so I think the age is still pretty vast, but I think the, the focus of that, of that group, so I think it, what it was is we discovered that like our age grade, our age group is, is pretty big because maybe it's 18 and maybe it's 60 and that's fine. But they're, they're after a common goal of, of a success factor. They just may take a different approach to get there. So like on one hand, you're gonna have this 18 year old who's gonna not have any college experience yet.
(14:41):
Great. So we're gonna partner with the community colleges. You're gonna run up through there before you come to Walsh, but you're gonna be conditionally approved with us to, to come on and as soon as you finish up over there. But we're gonna encourage you to finish up over there cuz it's gonna be a huge, like, it's like a $30,000 savings if you start over in community college and then come to us at the end of the day, you're gonna come through and you're gonna have a degree that says Walsh College. And we love, like, we love our community college partners because that makes the most sense. We need them, they need us. They don't, students can't finish their bachelor's there and they can't start it with us. So that partnership makes sense. Plus we're not trying to take their students in freshman year to be like, Hey, yeah, guess what?
(15:19):
We have student life. Right? We're not there to do that. Right? Yeah. But we can offer this thing to these 18 year olds that go, look, we, we can introduce you to people that's gonna amplify success. Right. It's the, it's the it's the whole thing about like, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Right. But we fill your class with people who are executives. You've just elevated your entire time. Totally. And that's really what we, we, we lean on. So, but that 18 year old is not the same as the 55 year old who just found themselves in a leadership position. And they're like, man, I just, I need to figure out what this data science looks like. How do I, I have all these reports, but I don't know what to do with this. Great. We have a degree for you.
(16:01):
And not only do we have it, but we're gonna fit it into your life. Because if you're already somebody who's in a management position, you're working 60 hours a week. The idea of going back to school's terrifying. Yeah. And absolutely. So absolutely. We can cater that to you. You can do online classes. You don't wanna come on campus, great. Start it and do your class at four in the morning if that's what time you're up and that's what you wanna work. Great. Do that. Yeah. Or maybe you're a midnight person, whatever. We're here to cater that to you. And that's the cool thing that I find interesting about what we do is catering it to the needs of whoever it is taking the class. Yeah. And that's a real emotional, I mean, there, there's kind of an emotional component to that cuz if you're fifties, sixties, finding yourself in a new position that's stressful you don't quite know what you're doing.
(16:48):
you know, the idea that, that there's a school that can fit into your life, it's like, ah, it's like a breath, you know, a breath of, of fresh air. Like how, how do you, how do you guys cuz a lot of what, you know, I talk about in this podcast is reaching students on prospective students on an emotional level. Like what, how, how do you guys get that message out there and kind of get that to resonate? Yeah, so it was interesting when we started really playing with the idea of, of getting our, our marketing to align more closely with very specific individuals. We, we again went to our alumni and we're like, okay, so what do what's out there? Like what do we have here? And it was just story after story after story of people that did this. So we were able to start telling those stories of like, basically not only us being in like, yeah, you can totally do this, but now we can say like, you can totally do this and there's somebody that just did it.
(17:42):
Yeah. And here's an, here's another story about that. And I think that we're in a weird time with marketing too, where everybody's like, you wanna wanna be authentic, you wanna be authentic, you wanna be authentic, which is fine, but at some point if you put so much energy into being authentic, you're no longer authentic. You've gone too far. So what we did was we said, okay, great. Let's go find these alumni stories and not everybody's gonna be a great storyteller. Great. Well then we're gonna interview you and we're gonna write this story around you, but maybe you are a good storyteller. So we're gonna put you on camera and we're gonna bring you in. And that was an interesting thing to start hearing that because the more time you spend with somebody, the more heartwarming pieces start to come out. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, we did Akosh. So for
(18:30):
Listeners for context, we did, we just wrapped up two stories. We did a story on an alumni named Akosh who came to America from India with like almost no money in his pocket to kind of start a professional life here. and ended up at Walsh and was really successful. and then we did Aaron who, who has a story that we'll, we'll talk about a little bit later. Okay. So Akash,
(18:54):
He came here to, he came here to finish his degree cuz he had, he had gotten his, he's, he'd gotten almost to the end of his doctorate in physical therapy, then came to the US to finish it so he could have a, a us version of his doctorate in physical therapy. Yeah. And then started it and he loved it, but then the, the nursing home he was working for got a cyber attack. Yeah. Yeah. And it like locked out everything. And then and then they couldn't find medication. They couldn't get everybody to the, where they needed to be and the care they needed. So then he was mad and the next day his bank account got broke into Right. And he lost 18 grand. 18 grand. And so then he just, he got mad and he's like, this shouldn't be a thing that's allowed to happen.
(19:39):
So he went back to school and now he's finishing up his cybersecurity master's degree after and while being a 60 hour week physical therapist full-time. Yeah. And what I like about the story, so, so like I said, we, we did a, a gentleman named Aaron and we did Akash told their stories. And, and what when you guys came to, came to me with those stories, what I what impressed me was that there was an actual story to each of them. And so I think, like, you know, when people approached student testimonials or alumni testimonials, they approach it from like, I'm gonna get this person on camera saying we like the school, or I like the school five stars. Here's, here's, here's the reason I give it five stars. You know, and then the, you know, the, the, the talk, the, the sort of marketing, you know, talking points, it's, it's but as opposed to really finding digging around and finding an actual story of transformation, I think both of the, both Akash and Aaron's story represent a, a like, I started here, I encountered Walsh and now I'm, now I'm transformed into this other person in place of life that I wanted to be.
(20:52):
and, and we were able to sneak in, you know, some, some aspects of the Walsh experience. Akosh talked about his cybersecurity professors and how he liked the classes and things like that. But it really was about his transition from being a physical therapist to getting a, you know, attacked, experiencing a direct, you know, two direct cyber attacks and then going to do something about that and, you know, going to, going to change the world with those skills that he's, that he's doing. And Aaron's story was worked in manufacturing and and he was moving up, moving up, went, went to Walsh, got his bachelor's was in his master's degree program got got let go from his job. And then because of the education at Walsh, he was able to become then the president of <laugh>, the competitor for that company.
(21:45):
so I just thought, you know, that's a, again, it's like someone wanting something and, and, and going out and, and getting it experiencing challenges along the way, not being afraid to talk about those challenges. Cuz even we opened that video with saying, I lost my job. Like I didn't know what I was gonna do, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it, it wasn't like I'm, hi, I'm s I'm such and such. I'm the president of Welsh College <laugh>. Right. You know, it wasn't Right. Well, and I think, and that's, but that, I mean, and that goes back to the authenticity thing, right? Like, you can't force authenticity, but when there is a story there, it, it resonates. I'm not there to, I'm not there to push. And I think the, I think some of the best marketing in the world is the times you don't know that it's marketing.
(22:25):
Like, I think that's like when you get really strong stuff and like in that space, like, I'm not here. I, in reality, like I know that my job is to market the college, but in the case of these stories, like, I'm not here to tell you that you should come to Walsh, but I am gonna put this story in front of you that's gonna make you realize that not only is this completely doable, but you're not the only one in your situation and probably people have it worse than you. Yeah. And, and then, and like even from a personal perspective, like I, so I, when I did my master's degree, I was two weeks into my, my MBA and I went to my wife and I was like, I can't do this. Like, I had, I had been outta school, I did my undergraduate 11 years prior, I was two weeks in and I went to my wife and I was like, I'm done.
(23:09):
I can't do this. And she's like, look, give it another week. See how you feel at that. And then maybe we'll go from there. And I did, and I like focused in on like time management stuff and like, just basic things. And I was like, okay, fine, I'm gonna do one semester, we'll see where we're at. Right. And then I, and then after that I kind of got it right. But it's, it's a lot scarier to start than it is to be doing it. Yeah. And it's, and it's different to hear you, you, you know, when you hear the story of how you got through that or how someone else got, you know, got through that in the time management, it's so much different than, than saying, you know, it's good to say that, you know, we have classes that start at five o'clock and things like that.
(23:47):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, it's good, it's good to have that information cuz cuz you need that information. But I think it's so much more it touches an emotional nerve to know like, here's someone else that did what I wish I could do or what I wanna do. Yeah. and so it can be done mm-hmm. <affirmative> you know, and then it, that's sort of like, just like backed by the Walsh brand. Yeah. Yeah. How, how have so you guys just have launched these stories. How, how have they been? How have they been working for you? Yeah, so it was, the stories have been awesome. So between the, the commercial that we shot along with the stories, like it is, it is so interesting to hear from everybody to, to have that response be like, holy cow, that is my story. I did that. I felt like that I, and they were able to do it.
(24:36):
It was, that to me was more rewarding than anything else because at the end, like, again, I'm not here to really market the college. Like, I just wanna put this person in front of you and let you come to that conclusion. Right. Cause it's gonna be more. Right. And so when we started hearing these responses of people being like, holy cow, like that is my story. Like, how did you find somebody that has my story? Yeah. And we started hearing that instantly as soon as we put 'em out because it is, it, everybody believes that everybody else's world is better. Like, it's just that grass is always a greener thing, right? Yeah. But like, but it's not, and I think when you start to get people that tell a real story and they're able to open up and be like, this was hard. I gotta let go from that job, and then I gotta, and then I became the president of the competitor.
(25:27):
Like, I think people have to see that. And I think as long as you can tell that story in a real way, it's not forced authenticity. It's real people telling real stories. So the results of it have been cool. It's been really fun to hear. And like, does it draw people in? Yeah. Does it draw people into an application? Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, was that the goal? Not really. Like, I mean, yeah, obviously it was the overall goal, but that's not really what we were after. And I think as long as you start with I think as long as you start with the, the basic feeling in mind of like, I'm not here to make this conversion based. This isn't my end goal of this is not to get you to come and apply it for school, but I, what I want you to do is realize that it is possible so that in two, three years from now when you go, you know what, I think it is time that we're the people that are on top of mind because you remember that story.
(26:21):
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately there is a, there is a conversion there, but that's not like, it's not like the direct, you know, click this link at the end of this video and Right. Yeah. That's a dangerous foundation to build on <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we'll put these two story, these two caution Aaron story in the sh in the show notes. if you guys want, if listeners wanna check it out, but tell me how you guys have rolled those out. So what I see a lot of is, you know, we spend all a lot of time on a video and then, and then I, I'll go back to, you know, their, their YouTube page or something. It's got like maybe 50 or 60 views. and I'm, I'm always curious to know like, how else are they using it aside from you know, just posting it like post and pray kind of thing.
(27:09):
So how, talk, talk to me about like, your guys' strategy for content distribution. Yeah. So I, I kind of take the the, the Gary V method of this, which he's one of those people that people either love him or hate him. I love him. I think, I think he's got some brilliant ideas. I think he's so crazy, but for all the right reasons. But I think that the approach here is like, if you're going to spend the time and the money in this case, right? Like we're a small college, we don't have a huge budget, but if you're gonna spend the time and money to do this, do everything with it. So in our case, what we did with the stories is we took those and first we post the story, right? That becomes a social thing. That becomes we chop it up into different pieces.
(27:55):
It becomes Instagram stories, becomes Facebook stories. We've done highlights, we do all the things, right? Like that's all the basic stuff that you would just normally do with it. Sure. From there, we did the transcript, you start writing it out. What is all the, what is all the words that are in here now? It's a blog post. Great. So now it's all written, we can format it, we put it into a blog post. Then from there you start taking that and you say, okay, great. Here's the transcript. Here's all the words. These are great, but there's this, the one line that's really cool. This is a great one line thing. Great. Now you have a quote. So you pull that out, you put that onto a graphic within social media. So you say, okay, here's a post, here's a quote, here's a picture of whoever it is that said it marked, you know, alumni 2021, whatever.
(28:36):
So you have that aspect of it. Then you take each of those pieces and throughout the year you start adding 'em into program pages. Like, okay, they're an alumni of this program. Great. So we're gonna take that, we're gonna dump it into this program that they're an alumni of. So we can call out the fact that this person was in your position. Now they're successful. And also we're in a program that you're also interested in. Oh, hey, they also did this one. So you start layering those pieces on, which is cool. And I think that the, the moral of that is like, squeeze it, like squeeze anything you got. Like, and even if it's not a professional level video, so what if you have an alumni that wrote to you and is like, Hey, here's one paragraph about how cool my time was. You have at least 10 pieces of content in that paragraph.
(29:22):
Yeah. Like, pull it, take a quote, take a, take an image, tweet it, take a screenshot of that tweet, post it over here on Facebook. Like, there's, there's a lot of ways to do that where you can take that content and, and run it. Have great, here's a, here's a professor's reaction to that alumni posting this thing and talking about this thing. Great. I'm gonna put a faculty member that they had and they're gonna be like, oh, I remember so and so, they were so good in class because they talked about X, Y, and Z. Great. Now you usually have that 32nd video that you can go back through and do everything else I just talked about. And you can do it all again. Right. Every piece of it, every thing that you have, whether it's a paragraph or a five minute video, there is 10 to 30 pieces of content inside of that.
(30:05):
And I think the important part is being able to run with it and, and really stretch it across. But yeah, when it comes to the commercial, so the commercial was the other thing that we did. And I think that that was a really fun piece because that was a, that was a longer work. Like that was a, that was a cool thing. for, for context, we did, we, for the listeners, we, we we produced these two stories and then we produced a, a a 32nd commercial. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the commercial was really cool. So the, the, the part that was interesting about the commercial is back in, I don't know, beginning of this year, we had partnered up with with an agency for StoryBrand. And we kind of went down this story brand philosophy of telling stories and being able to get the word out about how this stuff works.
(30:52):
And StoryBrand is like the, the Don Don Miller yeah, yeah. Donald Miller story brand. and so we, we partnered up with Hughes Integrated to do the StoryBrand stuff. They were awesome. They really helped us kind of get our mind wrapped around all these things because we think we're really cool, but it's telling that story that gets difficult, right? So they kind of helped us gather these thoughts into a place that made sense, and then be able to tell a story out of it. So when we did the commercial, we went through all of our graduate programs. We're like, okay, what is the key factor here? What is the story we're trying to tell? What is happening? They put together a, a rough 62nd commercial to which we came back to you and we're like, let's talk through this. Like, this is too much.
(31:35):
We need to shortness down to 30 seconds. And then re reworked the script from there to tell a real story. It went from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. That was great. But at the end of it, we had this little nugget in there, and it was this real world experience, real life results mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it was that little nugget that we were able to stretch into a full campaign out of this commercial. Yeah. And so we took that, and again, we took every line in this, and suddenly it was no longer just a commercial that's played nationally now across streaming TV services. it's on it's on cable now through through Comcast. It's through a handful of things, right? But then we also took that script, and now I turned it into a podcast and it's an, it's an ad for podcast now.
(32:25):
And I took a 32nd version of it, turned it into a little bit more audio focused. I elongated it into a 62nd by adding a couple key elements. And then I shortened it down to a 15. And now that's going into a podcast ad that's gonna be able to follow that same theme. And that was just kind of the beginning. The other piece that's been really fun the last year is turning these, these little nuggets into full-fledged omnichannel marketing campaigns where we are, we're talking about tv, we're talking about podcast advertising. I turned all of that into into display ads. So now we have these banner assets where you go to websites and they're on top of the page, and you'll see that in there, real world experience, real life results. And it's tied into these different facets so that you can see it across the whole thing.
(33:14):
Then we went through and we started adding it into our social. We started adding it into basically anything that we were doing. And we were running through this, this stream of leveraging these different lines and being able to pull point things out that no matter where you are, if you start to hear something that sounds like Walsh, you're gonna be like, that's Walsh. Yeah, I know that's Walsh. Yeah. And it's, and it becomes really cool. It becomes a really fun thing now because we can do billboards with it. We can do social with it, we can do our website, our website's getting updated with it. Our, we have podcasts, we have commercials, we have radio spots, we have blog posts, we have anything that you can imagine. Now we have these things going into place because we finally have the resources to do that.
(34:01):
Yeah. And we're getting things put into place where we can have these, these campaigns that'll run through from beginning to end. And it all comes off that initial creative base of, you know, making sure you're telling the story appropriately off the bat, so you have something to tell from that point forward. Yeah. What is your what does your team look like? So our team executing all this stuff. Yeah. So our team is very tiny. so it is myself. and then we have a digital marketer that runs the website side of things and our crm I have a marketing specialist that runs our social channel for me. and then we have somebody that's kind of a part-time writer for us. So she's also working with other pieces of the college. And then for our paid search pieces we have an agency. We have an agency called Media Genesis that has been phenomenal for us. Oh, yeah. but that's it. Like, that's, that's our team. And then we're, a long time ago, I, I, like, long time ago I applied to a job at media Genesis, and I think I addressed them as media genius <laugh> in my like application or something. It's a good way to get the door <laugh> instant, instant rejection <laugh>.
(35:19):
but we, you know, and it's been great. And then we're overseen by the by the chief operations officer. And he, he kind of oversees this, but he, he really focused on like, I wanna put people in place that I don't have to think about this stuff so that he can run the rest of the things. And so he's been, he's been a great a great addition for us because he kind of lets us try things. And he's, he's very analytical. So he, it's funny because his big thing is like, okay, great. Run the experiment. Go try it, see what works. Yeah. And so that's been fun. Like, we, like, we've been trying all kinds of weird things. <laugh>, it's just, and then things work. Some things work, some don't. And that's fine. Great. Yeah. And we're also, we also are a team.
(36:03):
I think because we're small it helps, but we're also a team of like, let's try something. And if it didn't work, great. That is equally as exciting as if it was successful, cuz now we know. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I've been in, I've been in a, a little period of like testing different content and, and, and trying to look at like views. And it's amazing to me, like how just like one little tweak can make something be viewed a lot. at least on LinkedIn, that's where I spend most of my time. Or like the, the, this other piece, it's like not that much different from the, from one that got a lot of views and it's, I keep getting messages from LinkedIn. It's like, this only got 14 views. you might wanna tag somebody <laugh> <laugh>, and that's, but it is, right. Like, that's the experiment piece of it.
(36:48):
And so we've tried some new things that have been cool. It, you know, and we've tried really, our, our social stuff has taken off like crazy. It's been, that's been a really interesting thing. I, this this girl I just, I just hired she's been, she was our intern and now she's full-time with us. And she, I, I kind of went to her and I was like, look, I'm trying to balance a million other plates right now. Social's not really top of my priority, so this is yours now <laugh>. And, and you know, I, I had a sense that she had a pretty, pretty good mind for it, which was good. and she did, and she started to, she understood brand, which is so weird that that's a hard thing for people to understand. Yeah. But it is rare and it's getting people to understand that like everything you do represents the brand.
(37:37):
And so making sure the logo is always the same, making sure that your colors are the same. Making sure, like all these pieces need to look like Walsh. So that when somebody sees that logo, that color, that font, that whatever, that you are the first thing on their mind. And getting somebody to understand that all the way through is difficult. So our social's really taken off. It's become far less salesy, which is something we were trying to get away from. But it's hard to do when you know that you're, but again, it goes back to that foundation, like, don't build your foundation of anything you do on the end result. Like, I'm not, don't build your social and the idea that that that post today is gonna be the, that's gonna make them register for class tomorrow. Right. You can't do it. Right. You have to build it on.
(38:24):
Like, why do people care first? Yeah. It's like a a friend of mine was trying to convince me to do essential oils. Oh, <laugh>. And I was like, I was like, I had a headache at the time or something. And I'm like, this isn't working. She's like, well, it's like a, it's a lifestyle. You have to kind of adopt the lifestyle. <laugh>. <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'll sell me. It's a lifestyle. Okay. <laugh>. So yeah. Marketing content's a lifestyle. Yeah. You know, you gotta, sure. You gotta stick with it. <laugh>. Yeah. Although marketing content isn't a, a scam. <laugh>. No, no. Not if it's done. Right. If it's done, if you do it with, if you do it on the foundation of of trying to make something that people care about, not only will you be more successful at it, but you also won't sound salesy and scammy. Yeah.
(39:15):
And I think that's what's good. That's why I, I, I like what you guys are doing with your social with your social stuff. Cuz every time I see it pop up in my feet, I know it's Walsh and it's not salesy. It's, it's, it's very much just like, you know, really trying to provide value and get it something deeper than just, you know, saying, you know, we're come to our school because this, this, and that. You know? so yeah. You guys do a great job with that. Yeah. Thank you. yeah. So let's see. Oh, one thing I I did wanna talk about StoryBrand since you mentioned it mm-hmm. <affirmative> and this being a storytelling podcast it's, it's important to mention that you guys actually, so StoryBrand for people that don't know, is a guy named Don Miller. he was an author, wrote a lot of books grew a lot of companies, and then started this company called StoryBrand, helping organizations clarify their, their message.
(40:11):
and with the, with the idea that like, you know, having, just having some vague sort of description of what you do, or vague way of talking about it, because it sounds artsy or it sounds, you know, creative isn't helpful. You need to be really clear about how you're communicating the val your value to your to your audience. and then there's a whole, there's a whole story brand framework. So if people are listening, you can, you can get the story brand book. I'm not, you know, a partner of theirs or anything, I just like it. but tell me what the, and then, and then they have, they have story brand guides that will help you implement this framework with your own messaging. So tell me what what is, what did that story, brand process do for you guys in terms of clarifying your message and what was that, what was the process like?
(41:01):
The cool thing about StoryBrand for me, and I'll start on the process side of it, was we partnered up with with an agency or the StoryBrand guide like you talked about in Hughes Integrated. And what they did was help us basically control our thoughts. We were kind of all over the place. So we met with them a couple times and then we brought in the faculty from the programs and we just said, okay, we, we wanna tell this story in a way that makes sense to everybody. And they're the ones that talk to our students every single day. They're teaching the content so it make sense to bring them in. We brought them in and then Hughes integrated went through and they were like, okay, so here's where we're gonna start at the beginning. Who is our person? We give 'em a name, we give them an age, we give 'em a focus, we give 'em whatever their thing is at the beginning.
(41:44):
We just, we decide who that person is very specifically at the beginning. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> great. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, they always say, okay, what is the problem they have? Well, the problem is they they wanna go back to school, but they're working 60 hours a week. They don't think it's possible. but they really would wish, they really wish that they could level up. All right, great, now we know, okay, so what's holding 'em back? Their hours are holding 'em back. But they also don't wanna miss out with their family. They don't wanna, whatever it is. Great. So now we're gonna, now we're gonna introduce a guide and maybe we're the guide and we're gonna say, okay, understand this problem. And I understand that this is a problem. I understand why that's a problem. I understand what you wanna accomplish. Here's the ways that we can help you get around those things and still accomplish these goals that you want.
(42:26):
And so it was like a, I don't know, four or five hour meeting. And by the time we got done, we had gone from, well, we have this program we really wanna talk about, but we're kinda over the map. And at the end it was, here's a, here's a one-liner, here's a paragraph, here's the 62nd commercial that will talk about exactly what this program is, who, the, who it is, why they're there, what they need to accomplish, and what happens after this once they do accomplish things. Right. And what was cool is that also launched into the next phase of what do we do with this information? And for us, what was interesting is we took from, from being jumbled in these thoughts of like, well, we think this is super cool, so you should too to, Hey John, I understand that you really wanna level up in your company and you, you wish that you could take on this executive role, but you feel like you're being held back because you don't have this advanced degree and the other people that are, you're up against do.
(43:25):
So what we're here to do is make sure that you can go back to school, you can go back to school and you can do it on your time. You don't need to do this during the day. You got work, you have things to do. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So come to Walsh because at Walsh what we do is make sure that school fits around your life, not the other way around. And at the end of the day, what you're gonna do is you're gonna level up and you're gonna be this person that you want to be. You're gonna unlock the things that we already know you're capable of. We're just here to give you the keys. And that's, and that's what StoryBrand allowed us to do, was build this contact to go, yeah, yes, that's exactly what we're trying to say, <laugh>. And then from there we can run with it.
(44:03):
But it was getting our, our jumbled thoughts into a line that made sense for us. Because once you have clarity on, on what the problem is and how you're gonna solve it, I can come up with a million different ways to tell that story. Yeah, exactly. But if I'm jumbled, I can't tell every story at the same time. <laugh>. Yeah. Good, good exercise. I, I think is to get all your, all your stakeholders in the same room and ask who, like, who is our audience mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you'd be shocked at the difference in answer. Yeah. Like what is, what is, what is the value of our school? Everyone. Yeah. Everyone is gonna say what they feel, you know, what they feel emotionally connected to. I think what story brand, what's cool about story brand is like, it really just helps you get everyone on the same page about how we talk about our school, you know?
(44:47):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and like how, what, what are the emotional components? What are the, the, the pain points that our messaging is going to address and, and help alleviate mm-hmm. <affirmative> in order to make it easy for somebody to, to kind of get over that wall and, and, and you know wanna choose, you know, your school over o over all the other ones. So yeah. Cool. I, I thought it was cool that you, I thought it was cool that you guys did that and then ended up with a whole script for a commercial too, which was actually really helpful. you know, starting from a, from a good foundation not starting. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And ultimately, you know, like we partnered up with you and we didn't go with the exact script because it didn't really fit the story we were trying to tell, but we did use, I don't know, 60% of it.
(45:35):
Yeah. And it was the foundation that allowed us to build everything else out of it. Yeah. And cool. It was cool. I really, it was fun. It was a really fun exercise too. It also just really, it actually like made my brain feel light because I was like, I get this now. Like there's actually like a, a clarity to this and especially cuz like, and you can, I'm sure you can relate to this, but like creative people tend to have a lot going on in their brain <laugh>, like, where analytical people, I feel like have like these straight lines and they're like, I understand this thing because it makes this thing happen. Yeah. Where creatives is like, yeah, but like, I could make 10 more things happen out of that <laugh>. Right, right. And so it was dialing it in to, to understand. And then once I did, then I was like, okay, great.
(46:21):
Now I'm not starting from this spot. I'm starting from three spots later and I can tell all kinds of stories down there because I already know the first three levels of this story. Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome, man. Well, this has been fun. Where can people find or connect with you at so LinkedIn, obviously I would love to connect with anybody that wants to talk creativity and marketing. it's like my favorite things. so LinkedIn and then all the way over on Walsh College. It's, we got, we got stuff everywhere. You wanna see what the, what all this stuff is we're talking about in motion. That's where it's at. All right. Cool.
(46:59):
Thanks for listening. three things I want to give you before you go. Number one, if you wanna learn the exact storytelling framework that we use for Walsh's stories I have a free resource that you can download at unveiled.tv/student testimonials. That's U N V E I L d.tv/student testimonials, plural. doesn't even have to be for video, it works for written content as well. or even telling stories in a presentation in your next TED Talk, whatever. so go pick that up. And number two, if having a lot of student and alumni testimonials at your disposal is something you would love to have, if you could just snap your fingers and, you know, have whatever marketing content you wanted to deploy let's talk. I've got something great for you with our student testimonials subscriptions. imagine having one new student or alumni story video story drop in your inbox every month.
(47:54):
plus 10 other supplemental videos stemming from that story. 11 videos per month, that's 132 videos per year of video content and plus all that B-roll to use as you wish forever. No extra charge for that, like a lot of other production companies would charge you. if that sounds good to you, reach out to me at john j o hn at unveild.tv or book a call on our website. And then number three, leave a review for this podcast. It helps us a ton. thanks for listening. My name's John Azoni. go connect with me on LinkedIn if you want. And in the meantime, we'll catch you on the next episode of the Higher Ed Storytelling University podcast. Thanks.
