Ep 69: Quick Take: 5 Digital Marketing Truths Higher Ed Marketers Can’t Ignore

Welcome to the very first Higher Ed Conversations: Quick Take, a new, bite-sized episode format designed for busy higher ed marketers who want actionable insights without a full-length listen.

In this inaugural Quick Take, GradComm CEO Cheryl Broom goes solo to share five of the most important lessons uncovered after analyzing over $4 million in digital marketing campaigns from community colleges across the nation. Drawing from GradComm’s latest research, Cheryl breaks down what’s actually working right now in higher ed digital marketing and where many institutions are still leaving opportunity on the table.

This episode is all about cutting through the noise. From mobile-first realities and YouTube’s growing influence to the power of authenticity, Spanish-language campaigns, and first-party data, these insights are grounded in real performance data, not trends or guesswork.

If you’re responsible for enrollment marketing, digital strategy, or proving ROI to leadership, this Quick Take delivers practical takeaways you can start applying immediately.

Cheryl also shares how to access GradComm’s newest white paper, packed with platform-specific insights, top-performing ad examples, and campaign ideas tailored for community colleges.

What You'll Learn

• Why mobile-first is no longer optional and how poor mobile experiences cost you students
•  How YouTube has become the new front door for student discovery and decision-making
•  How Spanish-language campaigns drive stronger engagement across platforms
• Why your first-party data is your biggest marketing superpower in a cookie-less future

Thanks for listening!

Connect with GradComm:
Instagram: @gradcommunications
Facebook: @GradCommunications
LinkedIn: @gradcomm
Send us a message: GradComm.com

Higher Ed Conversations is hosted by Cheryl Broom, CEO of GradComm, a marketing and branding agency specializing in community colleges and public education.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Hi everyone. I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of grad com, and welcome to Higher Ed Conversations. Today's episode is a little bit different. I am kicking off our very first monthly quick take. So the idea behind this is that every month I'm going to be bringing just a bite-sized episode, something that's just 10 or 15 minutes long.

[00:00:23] Cheryl Broom: Where I can unpack like one powerful insight that's shaping higher education or that shaping higher ed marketing. So this isn't gonna be an interview necessarily and this month is not an interview. You're just gonna get the joy of listening to me talking for 10 minutes. But I really wanted to give something useful to you all that you could digest really quickly.

[00:00:43] Cheryl Broom: 'cause I know how busy everybody is. So let's, let's jump in. Let's jump into our first topic. Some of you who follow me on LinkedIn or who are friends or clients know that this past fall, I hit the road grad, calm, hit the road, and we traveled 1700 miles over seven weeks and we went to seven different conferences.

[00:01:05] Cheryl Broom: And at every conference I found myself talking to people kind of about the same thing. How do we reach today's students in this digital world where everybody's attention spans are so short and expectations are so high, and when we do this, how do we prove ROI? So those were kind of some of the big conversations I had.

[00:01:27] Cheryl Broom: And at several at these conferences, I gave a presentation call, I called it from scroll up to sign up. And the presentation focused on lessons that we learned from managing over $4 million in digital marketing campaigns for community colleges across the country. So we took our 2024 campaigns and we right sized them for budget.

[00:01:52] Cheryl Broom: So we kind of eliminated like, who's spending the most money or booking the most ads. And we really wanted to look at which ads, which tactics and which strategies got the best results. And I packaged this up into a, a great 50, 60 minute presentation. And I gave them, I think, at, at four conferences I gave this presentation, maybe five.

[00:02:13] Cheryl Broom: It's kind of all, it's all a blur now. Seven weeks of my life. I didn't even know where I was from place to place. So today on our very first quick take, I wanted to cover my five takeaways from doing this analysis. the white paper itself, the research paper that we did and we published it was distributed by Insight Higher ed.

[00:02:36] Cheryl Broom: It is available for free on our website, so it the paper, we dive into each different platform to see which ads and which strategies perform the best on each platform. And you can download that paper on our website. You just go to Grad com. Dot com slash insights. Put in your email and it's, and it's yours for free.

[00:02:55] Cheryl Broom: So you can get some really great information and some campaign concepts. You could see some of of the work that was recognized as some of our top performing ads. But today what I wanna do is just talk about some big takeaways. So I'm gonna cover five of them. And the first one, I don't think anybody's gonna be surprised by.

[00:03:14] Cheryl Broom: I think what the surprising thing actually is, is that people still aren't following this rule, and that's that mobile first isn't optional. We see that over 90% of all of our ads consumed, digital ads consumed, were on a mobile device. And so I know those of us creating these ads and paying for these ads and managing these ads are on our computers.

[00:03:39] Cheryl Broom: But students, potential students, their parents, influencers, community members are viewing them on a mobile device. So when you're designing your ads, you really should be designing for mobile first. Your website should be designed mobile first, and if you're slow to upload or your website's old, or the web experience is poor, you are going to end up with lost students.

[00:04:04] Cheryl Broom: So one of the things that we looked at. Our analysis was not just did people click on an ad, but what did they do after they clicked on an ad? Did they take an action? Did they fill out a form? Did they make a phone call? Those are the type of things that we consider to be successful in a campaign. So we wanna see if they're doing something on your website, and if your website is not mobile optimized or it's not a great mobile experience, students are going to leave no matter how good your ad is.

[00:04:35] Cheryl Broom: So takeaway number one, mobile first isn't optional. Take away number two, YouTube is the new front door. Another one that I don't think is a shocker, but when I was asking at these conferences, how many colleges were on YouTube, I was only getting about like a quarter of the room. Holding their hands up, answering the question.

[00:04:57] Cheryl Broom: So I think there's still a lot of opportunity for you to claim a spot with YouTube pre-roll. We know that YouTube is the second most popular site behind Google on the internet, and it's where students are going to learn. To explore and to decide where they go to college. So what we saw when looking at the ads run on YouTube is that ads that were more testimonial style that had students or ads that were showcasing how to do something, saw a much higher completion rate.

[00:05:27] Cheryl Broom: We're talking like 70% completion rates on our student testimonial videos. So you do not need a big budget to be on YouTube. Some of our top performing ads were not professionally produced. some of our best campaigns were run with only $500 a month in budget, but they were real and they were authentic.

[00:05:46] Cheryl Broom: Which brings me to our number three and probably the thing that I saw the most across. All of the campaigns was that authenticity in digital marketing is beating polish over and over and over and over again. So our top performing ad on Meta, it's on Facebook and Instagram was an ad made by a student on a cell phone.

[00:06:07] Cheryl Broom: The college gave it to us to run. It is not anything spectacular. I had to really think hard, like why is this ad performing so well? It had a 7.7, 7.57% click through rate. On Facebook, which is huge. It's like double, triple, the industry average. And it literally featured dogs and students eating tacos.

[00:06:31] Cheryl Broom: It wasn't even particularly shot on a bright sunny day. It had like trash cans in the background. But you know what, it showed authenticity and it asked the question on how, how does your school support you? And a student was showing that their school supports them by giving them food, by giving them animals to pet during finals week.

[00:06:50] Cheryl Broom: And just, you know, being a great environment for them to spend their time in and to, and to realize their dreams. And this is authenticity, kind of 1 0 1. It's like we could spend a lot of money on, on great videos, and there is always the need for great videos, but on social media, you don't have to have like a $20,000 budget.

[00:07:11] Cheryl Broom: You can have something made by a student and it can perform well if people can relate to it. So take away number three. Authenticity beats Polish. Take away number four, Spanish language campaigns deliver. So we used to hear a lot from our clients. Well, we don't wanna advertise our credit classes in Spanish because our credit classes are taught in English.

[00:07:34] Cheryl Broom: Well, students are consuming in their native language. They are not just watching ads and watching YouTube and on social media and watching their shows. In English, they're watching it in Spanish, they're watching it in other languages, their families are as well. And so if you have a lot of students who speak other languages in the household, this is a great way to market to them.

[00:08:02] Cheryl Broom: And so we, we saw that across all of our platforms, no matter what platform it was, whether it was search engine marketing. Or TikTok. Spanish language ads almost always saw double the click-through rate, almost always without exception. So don't just translate, strategize, strategize your language, strategize for cultural nuance, put some thought and energy into advertising and languages outside of English.

[00:08:34] Cheryl Broom: And then finally, this was another one that I think is, is. So important, but I don't see people doing as much as they should unless they're clients of ours. In which case we recommend this always as a, as a top line topic, top line tactic. And that is using your own first party data. So your first party data is your superpower.

[00:08:56] Cheryl Broom: We know that cookies are going away. We know that people have opted out of some marketing or they're on private browsers, but you own lists. You own lists of students who applied and not enrolled. You own lists of students who have come a semester and stopped out. You have alumni lists, you have lists of donors.

[00:09:15] Cheryl Broom: You have lists of people who have attended your events on campus. And this data is a gold mine. So you can market to these, individuals and you can build lookalike audiences from them. And across all of our social media campaigns, those campaigns that targeted. These lists that targeted the students on these lists were the most successful when we looked at strategy alone.

[00:09:39] Cheryl Broom: So lists are so important, and guess what was also super successful? Lookalike audiences build off these lists. So I think the future belongs to marketers who know their audiences inside and out, use these lists, do personalized marketing, and are really start smart about using their own first party data.

[00:10:00] Cheryl Broom: So my top five takeaways from all this research and a little bit extra added in there for those of you who might have come to a presentation, some more thoughts I had from questions I got afterwards and, but this is barely scratch the surface, and that's kind of the whole point of these new quick takes.

[00:10:16] Cheryl Broom: but if you want. If you wanna learn more, if you wanna see some of these ads, if you wanna see what our top performing keywords were for community colleges and search engine marketing, or you wanna see what email subject lines perform the best in our email marketing campaigns, just go to grad com. Dot com slash insights and.

[00:10:36] Cheryl Broom: Download our white paper and you can read more. You can also always shoot me over an email at cheryl@gradcom.com or send me over a question on LinkedIn. I'm on there almost every single day, so I'll be back next month for another quick take. Until then, please keep being bold, keep being curious, and keep being creative in how you serve students.

[00:10:59] Cheryl Broom: Thanks for listening.