Joshua’s LinkedIn

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Shiro Hatori
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the higher ed dimension podcast hosted by concept 3d. On this podcast, we discuss marketing topics around creating and capturing demand in higher ed. Before we jump in, we do have a quick message from our sponsors at concept 3d. Concept 3d Its purpose is to foster connections through technology, elevating the way businesses connect with their community by leveraging the power of events and location. If your school needs an updated interactive map, virtual tour or centralized events calendar, please reach out to concept 3d dot com. Alright, so quick introduction of myself. My name is Shiro. And I will be your podcast host today. And today, I am super, super excited to introduce our guest speaker, Joshua Charles. He’s currently serving as the Director of web strategy and technology at Rutgers Business School. Thanks so much for joining us, Joshua.

Joshua Charles
Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.

Shiro Hatori
Thank you, as well. And as as our audience probably already knows, I love to ask this question to kind of break the ice at the start. Josh, what do you love about higher ed?

Joshua Charles
So if the thing that always comes to mind when I think about this question is just the ability to connect with other higher ed professionals across the the industry, where we’re not sort of out there to be competitors, or anything like that. We can meet at conferences, we can connect via podcasts, we all listen to each other’s work and material. And it’s a fantastic community of hundreds and hundreds of folks who are able to just open up and help each other, navigate a space that we’re all familiar with. And we’re all learning and growing together.

Shiro Hatori
Love that. Thanks for sharing that with me. And before we kind of jump into the topics, could you really briefly cover kind of some of your roles and responsibilities at Rutgers Business School?

Joshua Charles
Sure. So I joined Ruckers and 2010. I’ve been there for for a number of years now across multiple roles and promotions. And right now, I work in communications and marketing at the business school, specifically overseeing website strategy operations, and just thinking about website content design, technology, integrations, all of those things like how do they work? And how are we using them and service of our strategic goals for the Dean as well as what it means to be Communications and Marketing for the school and to support faculty, staff and students. So I sit on one unit, that is right, along with our enrollment marketing folks and our public relations group. And together we form Communications and Marketing for the school.

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. And I know the Rutgers Business School is the largest school at Rutgers University. What does it mean, like some of the work that you’re working on? What does it mean for the rest of the university as a whole.

Joshua Charles
So one of the things that I like to think about when it comes to the Business School is, because of the nature of the school, we have 10,000 students, the Rutgers University itself is 70,000. So we service a lot of different students across many, many different programs, I believe it’s up to 21, or 22. And along with that comes more resources, more responsibility, more ability to reach out and do more experimental things when it comes to communication in the marketing. So for example, we can lead Google Analytics for implementation, because we have some time to think about like, Okay, here’s where the industry is going, here are some of the things that we can do. And we have the availability to do that. And as we’re going through those sorts of processes, we can help share best practices and ideas with other schools on campus. So on the one hand, you have a large school with many different students and programs, and that provides those resources. And on the other hand, we because of the university being in such a large system, it is such a wonderful opportunity to be able to work with staff, other communications and marketing folks across the multiple campuses that we have. So no matter how large or small those individual schools are, or those campuses or those units, there are so many smart people that we get to bounce ideas off of each other. And so whatever we learn, we share and what they learn, they share out. And so it’s very collaborative and that sense. But there are certainly obviously benefits from from being such a large school that we’re able to do so many, so many great things and I’m just very thankful at the scope of what we can affect, but also at the same time, appreciative of how we can leverage our resources to help sort of lift everyone at the same time.

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. Do you have an example of a recent project that you worked on that, you know, you were able to work across these different units or different schools? I Within Rutgers University,

Joshua Charles
yes, that there’s there’s actually a couple as of now, the biggest one that stands out is, of course, the many, many different schools thinking about the future of web analytics right now with Google Analytics, three sunsetting, July 1 of this year. And so for us, at the business school, we spent some time thinking about, like, what is our analytic strategy. So last spring, I believe we sort of laid it out, this is where things are going. This is where we want to be by January 1, and by April 1, and then ultimately, by July 1 of this year, and saying, Okay, if this is the roadmap, let’s put in some time, study the platforms, and not just Google Analytics for it, but look at Fathom analytics, matomo, plausible analytics, different solutions out there. So that we’re thinking holistically about how tools are going to help support the goals that we’re trying to reach. And in that process, we ultimately decided that Google Analytics four was going to be the platform that we needed, because it hooks into Google Data Studio, which we will then start to use to present the information that’s going to be actionable for our various stakeholders. Throughout all of that learning experience, we thought why not share that with other parts of the university folks are asking the same sort of questions. So I reached out to the university central team and our partner and I got together and said, we can present this information to many different folks who are looking for it. And the outcome of that was that we had a an hour plus long session where we sort of showed the landscape of what Google Analytics is going to be. And we were able to provide that information to roughly 80 Different communicators across the entire university.

Shiro Hatori
Wow. And obviously, like, you know, there’s probably minimization of work by having, you know, working across the teams and having you’ve kind of lead the charge, there’s, you know, save time, it’s probably more efficient. But are there also been some other outcomes that you were not anticipating like, in the net positive results as well.

Joshua Charles
I think some of the things that maybe go less unsaid is that by creating those relationships, and makes it easier to connect in the future on things that may come up, and the university, so if we’re overseeing website operations for the business school, by having these relationships with various people who are doing great work in their own space, and the university, and the future, that makes it easier to be like, Oh, hey, this, this thing came up with data security, or there’s a new website strategy that we’re talking about over here. And we want to bring you into the conversation because we know the work that you do at your school, like those relationships are super, super valuable. And they begin by just being open and helping each other and making availability. I know, we all sort of think that we’re hired for the one thing that we’re supposed to be doing at our school, but it goes beyond that, because we’re all part of the same organization, ultimately. So I found that by having these these ideas and projects that we do together to help support the entire community, we are at the same time, being able to create long lasting relationships that ultimately make it much easier to communicate back and forth in the future on any other related ideas that come up.

Shiro Hatori
Love to hear that. Yeah. I mean, don’t have several marketing teams within our organizations. But I hear the same thing in terms of our communication with our sales team. You know, just having that open line of communication and working together is extremely beneficial. I am curious, though, because I also look at web analytics constantly. And obviously, we’re a company doesn’t you know, our our customer isn’t students. But I’m curious, like what some of your KPIs are. Are you looking at requests for more information? Are you looking at web page views? Like what are some KPIs that you guys report on?

Joshua Charles
So with this conversation, I always like to start with, like, what are our strategic objectives, priorities, business goals, as a school, because starting from there, everything else that we do sort of downstream has to flow back up to something that’s literally affecting the business. So from there, if, if our dean and her goal is enrollments is one, brand visibility, preeminence is another one. What is our impact on our community? That’s, that’s the third one. So I start from there. And then I start to think about what is the website’s role? And how many different websites that we have because they’re each each, each of those could have a different purpose. So looking across all of our different websites in our web sort of ecosystem, what is their purpose? How can they support our top level goals and then from there, design those websites around those goals, so any future website updates free designs, it’s taken into consideration our strategic priorities and then we can form Cape He eyes around that. So practically speaking, for example, let’s look at enrollments, our main website that we are using to hopefully reach out to prospective students and other audiences to come and learn more about Rutgers Business School. I would say, starting from there, it’s requesting information setting, setting up for events pageviews, but not just in sort of a broad sense, like, what are the pageviews specifically on the pages that are directly related to academic enrollments? So I don’t I don’t want to just measure alumni content, if that’s not related to this specific goal that I’m focused on. So we’re being very strategic about the pages that we’ve identified ahead of time that these are the areas that are mapped to that customer journey. So MBA student, for example, like, what do we believe based off of data that we have? And how current students and former students are moving through that system? How are they navigating from the moment they come to our website to fill out some sort of action? And then from there, does that journey map to what we’ll hope, hopefully, are looking for in terms of our actual goals? And then look at KPIs from there? And again, you know, pageviews, are they filling out forms? Are they clicking on certain links that we’re hoping for? How often are they coming back to the website, or they’re filling out forms? Again, it we’re tracking their source, history and things like that, all of that gets put into the conversation. And it helps us be better marketers, because we’re starting to save that information in their profiles in Salesforce. And we can report on okay, this is the persona of full time MBA, which may be different than the persona of digital marketing students, which may be different than supply chain management. So we’re trying to be strategic about learning how people are naturally behaving and what we want them to do on their journey to our school. And and then how does that tie again, back into our actual business goals?

Shiro Hatori
Right. Let me go just another bit deeper there. So let’s say you know, you’re able to carve out this persona from your learning some data on the MBA students. What do you do with that data? Do you create a B tests on different landing pages to help increase that conversion rate? If you’re, if you’re if your goal was enrollment? Like what are the some of the strategies or tactics that you’re using to use some of that data to inform the next decision or next experiment?

Joshua Charles
Yeah, and that’s exactly right. So the idea is sort of from there, once you have for someone a data off on each of the various audiences that we have, and there may be multiple personas within one program. Now, there’s different types of full time MBA student, for example, we think about how can that inform first of all content strategy. So writing these articles, we’re developing videos, we have social media strategies, we have email marketing strategies, we have website content strategies, all of those things should be informed by who is our audience? What are they interested in? Not just their demographics, and where they’re from in terms of state and things like that. But, you know, what makes them interested in Rutgers business school? Why are they interested in a graduate degree or an undergraduate degree or certificate program? Like leaning into the information that we are collecting in order to inform how are we communicating with this audience? What information is helpful for them? And once we have that, we start to put into place our actual implementation of the content. Hopefully, that messaging is in sync so that when they’re seeing an ad, and then they’re seeing an email, and then they’re coming to the website, it’s largely the same sort of story about how can they see themselves at Rutgers business school through our program for that, whether that’s an online program, and in person program, that sort of thing. I think tactically speaking, one area that we’re hoping to get to next is specifically with like actual AV testing tools and tactics and things like that. It’s something that we’ve talked about as sort of our next level. In the last year, we’ve primarily been focused on accounting for the growth of the different programs that we have. So we’re sort of scaling and that since before scaling in the the advanced technique sense, but you’re right, like the the idea is that we are identifying our business goals, and then we’re taking the customer journey, and hopefully making sure that folks are following the path that we hope they can do so that they can support the business goals, collecting the information, developing the personas, using the personas to influence content strategy, which hopefully leads to further engagement. Like that’s the the big picture.

Shiro Hatori
Right? No, and thanks for taking a step back because I always kind of dive into tactics naturally. And it’s, it’s, it’s a weakness of mine. And, you know, I like how you’re, you’re coming up with the strategy the why and the how verse for like, what we’re gonna be doing so love that example and advice. And now we’re talking specifically about enrollment marketing right now. So I think this would be a great place to ask this as well like you I know, how do you find success in working with enrollment, marketing and making sure your goals are aligned as a director of web strategy and technology? You know, sometimes I feel like maybe it may be in the central team, they might be in separate departments. Or they might just be on separate teams, and how do you keep in contact with them so that, you know, you’re making sure your goals aligned, because they’re definitely connective tissue.

Joshua Charles
Yeah, so and again, for context, our specific department has Communications Group, a web ops group, and dedicated folks who are more day to day and into the weeds of program marketing and enrollments and things like that. And that’s our department, there’s a separate department for it, there’s a separate department for admissions. And then there are many, many different program directors who also influence their own admissions into their into their programs. The idea is that we need to focus not just on sort of tactical things that we can do to in order to generate interest, we also need to think about and those are important, but we also need to think about relationships and communication as just a school. Because if we don’t do that, it’s very easy to present very different visions and views and experiences to the prospect to student prospect, the students don’t care how many different departments are running behind the scenes, they are looking for a unique experience with rockers, to be able to see themselves and art institution to gain, hopefully a wonderful education, and experience and connections and all of those other things. So for us, we need to make sure that our processes and our communication and our collaboration behind the scenes, regardless of the number of different departments that are out there, is leading to a seamless journey for the end user. And for in that respect, the main thing that we try to do is, again, I’d like to start with, what are our actual goals? What are we hoping to achieve, this is the sort of outcome that we’re looking for. So start there. And if that is, for example, we want prospective students to be able to connect with us in various ways, on social media and elsewhere outside and then they come to our website, or they come to an open house, or they email a program director, what is that journey like? Are they ultimately going into our CRM platform, so that we can then further engage with those audiences via text messaging and email, as well as personal communication from the admissions team and the program directors, somebody has to be able to sort of sit down and map or map out what that coordination looks like. And then from there, just continue to work together and to hold ourselves accountable for ensuring that we are trying to stick to process like, it’s so easy to forget about the process. But all of those little things are when they don’t work. That’s what starts to make the journey fall apart. And we try to have regular meetings, regular conversations, are there tools that we can use to communicate asynchronously. So not just having to resort to in person meetings, although those are great. But also what are the simple things we can do to just shoot out information, hey, this happened, this is this is going on? You need folks who are who are ever willing to step up and lead the people side of enrollment, marketing, and not just the tactical things, those are definitely going to help get folks in the room. But again, for me, a lot of it is just focused on what are our processes? How are we working together, all of those sort of touch points between each of those departments, that those touch points have to be working well together in order for us to ultimately reach the outcome that we’re all looking for, which is engagement in each of these different programs. So that’s largely been something that I think myself and many others on our team have been focused on. And the last year, we just rolled out a massive new campaign to to have better email engagement that is very personalized like that, that that whole journey of the moment they come into our systems. That has been a long process that has turned out really well so far. So we really are just trying to be mindful of the people and the processes behind the scenes because we think that doing working on that and making sure that it’s nurtured over time is going to help sort of multiply our impact in terms of enrollments

Shiro Hatori
of that answer. And I know you mentioned, I think on our intro call to like, part of that process is maybe aligning on that the story that you want to tell right because the high level story is the same whether you’re telling it through digital or you’re telling it through the admissions process. Experience, like you said for the student. They care about the one you know this it’s a single story for Then, and how that was important in your process to.

Joshua Charles
Yeah, and like you said, it’s, you know, again, we want to be able to have a single unified journey for each of the different prospects that comes into engagement with Ruckers. And regardless of which platform, excuse me, regardless of which platform we’re using to sort of communicate to them, whether that’s a person face to face, zoom, an email, all of that has to be connected back to a bigger picture about the journey, the experience. And the way to focus on that, again, is how are we we actually working together and collaborating and thinking about the processes that we have to put into place in order to provide that experience. And if we can do that, then I think that’s ultimately a better experience for the for the student, as well as the organization.

Shiro Hatori
That’s great. I just had a curiosity. And we’re talking a lot about the journey for the student. I’m wondering, since you’ve been with the team for so long, we’ll be getting metrics from a few years ago, but are you seeing that more journeys into lying or being interested in Rutgers business school are starting from digital more and more, as opposed to what I would imagine, like, you know, 30 years ago, it was all in person.

Joshua Charles
Yeah, and to be fair, I think one larger influence more recently, is, prior to 2020. Most of our admissions events, were largely in person with the advent of the pandemic, that shifted to online info sessions. And, you know, it’s, it’s been helpful to sort of make sure that our program directors and all of the different folks working behind the scenes experience that because it’s, it’s a new opportunity to reach a wider audience. So before, if you are located near Newark, New Jersey, or New Brunswick, New Jersey, that’s, that’s a little bit easier. But if we are a school that is tamper top ranked in a variety of different areas, and we were trying to reach Pennsylvania and Maryland or California, it is much more accessible to have more online events. So I think one of the sort of thought processes that came out of this, which may sound obvious in hindsight, but I think now, it’s like, okay, this is the this is our goal. And here’s who we’re trying to reach, here’s where they are, what are the different ways that we can be as accessible as possible? There are in person events for folks who are located nearby, there are online events, there are, there’s email correspondence, there’s one on one meetings, sometimes with the program directors, let’s think about how we can provide multiple ways to access Rutgers Business School. And let’s, you know, obviously, every school has limited resources, but you’re trying to think about how many different ways can we make it so that students can engage with us, because if they can do that, then it makes it easier for us to have conversations for us to be able to articulate why we think what we’re offering is valuable to them. And hopefully, they can exchange a communication as well, so that we can understand this is what they’re looking for. And here’s how we can best serve them. I think it’s important to, to think about the different sort of formats and ways that we can communicate. And the pandemic is a lot of a lot of negative things. A learning experience in that is that it’s caused the organization to think differently, I would say, and when it comes to how can we best service folks across our different audiences?

Shiro Hatori
That’s great. Is there is there one that particularly stood out and kept going, I guess, I’m sure a lot more in person has returned. But is there like a certain tactic around it within your website within relation to enrollment or admissions that has really still continued to do well in though, you know, things are a little bit back to normal, per se?

Joshua Charles
Yeah, I mean, I think specifically, things that work well, are having frequent events. So that let’s say, somebody comes to our website on January 1, but our previous event was December 1. Now they have to wait a month until the next event in order to engage with you. So just thinking about it’s less about one particular event because each event serves a different purpose. A, an online digital marketing information session is going to be accessible to audiences. And one way and that may be helpful, but other people may very well like coming in in person because they’re in the area. And that’s okay, too. I think most of all, is less about the format and more about how do we engage with those individuals in that moment, as well as how do we engage with those individuals after that moment, because it can’t just be that they came to the event. And that’s sort of it, there has to be a real connection in order to further engage with folks so that it feels like we are really interested in them coming to our campus, whether virtually or online, in person. So I think that’s kind of the way that we’ve talked about it. And internally, it just, you know, let’s try different things for sure. Like, we’re more marketers, we have to experiment, try different formats, try different times a day, different locations times a year, all of that stuff is good. But we can’t forget about the the communication and the experience after the event, what happens between the time that that event ends, and they actually are looking to apply, because a lot of folks may be looking at more than one school. So we have to be mindful of full sort of circle engagement and not just one particular timestamp.

Shiro Hatori
Yeah. And I love that you’re mentioning the follow up or the post that it reminds me of what you said earlier on processes. That’s part of a process, right? And so you need the follow up and post event communications to really dial in whoever you’re talking to in their journey. Right. I did want to move on to one last topic, which I actually never covered on this podcast set. But I think it’s mission critical, because it’s probably what every digital marketers thinking, whether they’re in higher ed or not, is there’s obviously a huge trend in diminishing third party cookies, and tracking and an increase in privacy. And, you know, that means tracking prospects or potential students is becoming more difficult or theoretically thinking it’s going to become more difficult. You know, how are you thinking about pivoting? And combating or, you know, working with the new changes coming in privacy and diminishing third party cookies?

Joshua Charles
Yeah, so I look at this in a few different ways. I think, first of all, there’s always going to be changes that are happening in our industry, whether that’s with Google Analytics, as we see this year, Google ads, as we saw last year, with performance Max campaigns and all the different ways that that’s calculated. Social media is a super hot topic right now and how that’s that’s that’s changing. I think when it comes to this particular issue with websites and diminishing returns on data, I lean in towards the data that we do have, I think it’s okay, if there’s information that we used to have that we no longer have. But I tried to focus on what’s the most impactful information? And what is the validity, how viable is is maintaining that information going forward. So for example, we know who the students are that express interest in our program, we control our website, we control our CRM, we control, various integration tools that link into those platforms from LinkedIn and elsewhere, that folks are filling out. They’re telling us who they are. And in that process, that information is really valuable. Now, I may lose information in terms of folks who are just sort of exploring their interest in in higher ed, or maybe browsing the website from Europe and other places, and any any of the other sort of data points that have really, really early part of the enrollment cycle. I think that’s okay. I think what’s more valuable is like, who are the folks who actually took an action, I want their information to help better inform us because they’re the ones who are doing things that are directly tied to revenue, and not just sort of interest. And again, not to not to diminish that. But the world we live in is one where we have to make choices, and we have to choose what is helpful for us and what can we be okay, living without. And for me, I lean into, here’s the data that prospective students are telling us about themselves. That’s powerful. And if I want it to try to get a sense of like, okay, how can we sort of extrapolate this out? Let’s lean further into surveying and querying our prospect of students, our current students, there’s 10,000 of them, you know, like, let’s ask them, you know, what, compelled them to reach out to Rutgers business school, like are there other opportunities that they looked at even beyond just degree programs, because that’s not the only thing that we compete with. You know, we’re competing with time, as well. So just leaning into our students leaning into our alums, those are opportunities to get real actionable data that isn’t going to disappear, unless we’re just not doing a good job cultivating relationships with our community. Right and as long as we’re doing doing that well, then I trust that we will find enough actionable information about where our students are coming from, what their interests are, what motivates them, all of that information we can glean from the prospect of students who engage with us, our current students and our alums. And then hopefully, that can help us tell a complete enough picture about what we need to do to further reach out to new markets and existing markets. That’s the approach that I’m taking. Because I feel like it’s the biggest opportunity that we have. Right? And it’s the least subject to the volatility of the industry itself.

Shiro Hatori
Yeah, I love that answer. I feel like I’m at fault of this as well, where I’m always trying to analyze the new data coming in because it feels fresh and new. It’s I want to work with it. And part of it’s, my domain is not, you know, with customers, or in this in your case, students. But there’s a huge opportunity to talk to them. It might not even fall in your domain or in your role to suggest this idea. But I love that you are because said, I think you’ll learn from them. Probably more so than a new new hand raisers are new requests for information is coming in, right.

Joshua Charles
On that note, specifically, if, if we were concerned, like long term about how fresh the that information may be? Well, I think the sort of reaction to that would be Well, looking at the data that we have for the last three to four years, because we can find that if we’re not seeing drastically different behavior over time. And you can reasonably say that we’re not expecting this audience to really change in the next couple years. It’s still meaningful information. So that’s, that’s kind of how I think about that. Yeah.

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. And maybe some of the responses from students or, Hey, I saw this one commercial on on YouTube or another media platform that really encouraged me, and you see that, you know, throughout years, pretty good confidence, you could double down on that a marketing tactic or web tactic. So I love that suggestion as well. Awesome, Joshua? Well, I did. I was wondering if our audience and our listeners wanted to reach out to you to learn more about what you’re doing and what you’re publishing as well. Where could they find you?

Joshua Charles
Okay, so the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, linkedin.com, forward slash Joshua Charles, and that will take you right to me, I’m always around. And I just love connecting with other folks from higher ed, because as as we mentioned, in the beginning, we can learn so much from each other.

Shiro Hatori
Gotcha. And I know you’ve been a part of a couple of speaking engagements as well as a couple organizations. Do you want to share those out as well?

Joshua Charles
Sure, so I am on the board of directors for higher ed web. And I have presented on leadership topics, analytics, SEO, in various forms in the past year or so. And that’s a great community to to network with other folks who are doing the same things. That’s that’s another place to find me. I also am on Twitter, at least for the time being. So which is twitter.com forward slash, serve RONO. But again, the quickest way to find me is via LinkedIn. And certainly I’m always hanging around the the high end web Slack channels.

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. Yep. We love high EdWeb as well. And so we’re very active with them. So wanted to give them a shout out. Hashtag hide Web. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us as a guest speaker today. It’s been an awesome conversation, love that we got into details, and that you’ve been able to pull me back to look at things holistically. So thank you for that. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We’ll have another episode again. posted next week. So tune in. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks