Episode 50: Optimizing Higher Ed Website To Convert, Simple and Effective Tips with Joel Goodman

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Shiro Hatori
Okay, hello, everyone. Welcome to the higher ed dimension podcast hosted by concept 3d. My name is Shiro and I will be your host today. And today I’m really, really excited about our guest speaker. We’re going to be talking about how to increase your website conversion rate by 128%. And our guest speaker today is Joel Goodman. He is the principal and CEO at bravery media. Welcome to the podcast show.

Joel Goodman
Thanks, Shiro. Great, great to be here. I recorded my own podcast earlier today. So this is podcast number two recording of this fine day. So hopefully, I’ve got enough to say still, but thanks for having me on. Really, really excited to chat with you.

Shiro Hatori
Nice. That’s awesome. This is also my second one of the day and I have third one right after this. So Oh, man. Yeah, the day I feel you there. podcast. Yeah. Yeah. pickpocket podcast day. Awesome. Well, yeah, if you didn’t already, I love to start with this icebreaker, which is, what do you love about higher ed? So Joe, what do you love about higher ed?

Joel Goodman
So I’ve been in higher ed for almost 16 years now. From from a working standpoint, I mean, you know, I went to college too. So I guess I’ve been hired a really long time. And you know, over that more than a decade, it always comes back down to the people and the the community that gets formed around them. I think the folks that work in higher ed, are a very special kind of human and that puts up with a lot of stuff that they shouldn’t have to put up with. And that does make us a kind of unique group and community across, you know, every every kind of office that you can find at a college or university. So it always comes back to the community all year round. The people I get to interact with online, people get to interact with the conferences, people that I get to interact with through the projects that we do. The people are what make higher ed, an industry worth sticking around in and worth, you know, doing good work for?

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. Yeah, I completely agree. It’s definitely hard work. Can you tell us a little bit about bravery media as well?

Joel Goodman
Yeah, I found a bravery media in 2012, I had just finished a master’s degree and decided to leave my full time University job in the Chicago area, moved to Austin, Texas, started bravery media, doing website redesigns, kind of your typical, you know, the typical agency, web redesign sort of work. And did that for nine years before getting to a point where I needed to, well, actually, probably earlier probably need to hire people earlier than I did. But I ended up hiring three folks last year that that work with bravery. Some of them were subcontractors prior, some people that I’ve worked with for for years, as well. And we’ve kind of shifted a little bit of our focus to be more research base, we still do the design work, I think, you know, user experience, design is really important. But one of the key things that we focus on is that you can’t do a really good and really performant redesign unless you know exactly what you’re dealing with, from a website technology perspective. And, and also just the audience’s that you have. And you know, we’ll get into some of this in this conversation, I’m sure. But there are just a lot of things that go into figuring out what your website actually needs to hit your goals. And so we offer basically, these research based offerings, or research based projects where we do deep dives on university and college websites, figure out, you know, what exactly the institution needs, like we’re not in the business of doing a bunch of research that isn’t going to benefit someone. We tailor what we’re what we’re trying to put together for the individual institution. And then we move into giving you insights like we we’ve got the smarts to, to really dig into all the data that’s there, whether it’s your analytics, whether it’s your SEO data, whether it’s PageSpeed, optimization, accessibility, you know, all the other big topics that affect how your website performs for your institutional goals. And then we turn all of that data, all that research into really actionable, easy to understand recommendations. And you know, what, if you want a higher bravery to put those recommendations into action, cool, we’re happy to do that. But we’re also just really, really happy to get your team up to speed and informed on what’s really happening with your website so that you can get every little bit of performance out of it. Like why spend a quarter of a million dollars on the website redesign when you could just, you know, fix what you have. That probably hasn’t worked very well in the first place for several years.

Shiro Hatori
That’s amazing. And just to take one step back, does bravery media work just with higher ed institutions? Is that Yeah,

Joel Goodman
we do at this point we do. There have been times when you know, when I started out I did a fair amount to work with, with tech companies in Austin. And, you know, over the years, we’ve just really focused on higher ed Higher Ed was always, you know, at least 90% of the work that we did. Now we’re 100% exclusive within higher education, that that includes universities, colleges, at every level, but then also kind of the the ancillary support groups, some of the associations that help in, you know, finding, like, like aggregating programs for various health, maybe maybe Dental, schools, things like that. So all the kinds of support services that aren’t, you know, like when I do in other agencies, web, web work and stuff like that, but we’re definitely working with the associations that support different institutions.

Shiro Hatori
Higher. Gotcha, well, I can tell you’re, you’re in the right spot, because we are higher ed, specific podcast, so good to have you. And so I know, you kind of covered it slightly already. But just wanted to reiterate, so the bravery media process, really, you know, started out with traditional web design, but really now the bravery media processes, lots of research, upfront insights, audits, and then catering to some needs, like accessibility, is that what I’m hearing? Is that right?

Joel Goodman
Yeah, that’s exactly it, we, we want to fully understand your website, your audiences, and then provide actionable resources for how to how to improve on what’s going on there. And, and the key is that, you know, the research and data that you get a lot of times in higher ed, you know, it’s like, oh, cool, we’re gonna do a website redesign, and then you hand it over, and the agency walks away, and you kind of like, sit and you know, as, as someone on the institutional marketing side, and you’re like, great, I’ve got a website, and then it doesn’t do exactly what you thought it was going to do. And a lot of that isn’t round to necessarily the, the website was bad, or the thing that was delivered was bad, it’s around, not having the institutional knowledge to continue the actual research and improvement on on top of it, right. So like, for instance, you know, kind of concept 3d. Thanks for having me on concept 3d, you know, like, you have products and, and, you know, take any of the products that concept 3d offers, y’all don’t sit internally and just like build the thing and then not do anything to it in the future, right? You’re Not You don’t just like let it sit there and like, look at your Google Analytics and say, oh, cool, we got, you know, our bounce rate is lower, or people are spending more time some of those data points do affect decisions that you make, but you go out and you do user research, you get feedback from your clients from the, from the colleges and universities that you’re working with. And then you incorporate that feedback to make your product better. And we don’t really do that in higher ed very often. I mean, there are there exceptions, the mega universities definitely do this, because they’re on more of a product cycle kind of strategy with with how they produce their web content and their their web design. But you go to a regional small institution, it’s build a website, put it out there, and then like, content maybe gets looked at, you know, more regularly than anything else. And then, you know, the emergency Oh, the President needs this web page up for whatever sort of reason, right? We’re trying to take a step back, and instill this process of research, first research in the middle research at the end, and put all that into action to constantly optimize your website.

Shiro Hatori
That’s great. I mean, those those mega schools probably aren’t the ones also struggling right with with enrollment cliff and issues. And so it like they’re they’re the ones doing the right thing, but they don’t have the same issues that some of the schools, the regional schools, smaller schools, have. They, they’re the ones that need to be really emphasizing and working on. I like your analogy of, you know, like, constant improvement on the product of which is their website. Yeah, I like that analogy there. I think analogy is the right word. Great, awesome. And you know, what, what kind of goes into some of this research, you said, three, the three R’s start middle and research, what kind of goes into some of those work, just so you can get an idea of it?

Joel Goodman
Yeah, we have a few different levels that that we offer. You know, one of the kind of where we start is with a needs assessment, we want to go in with a with a client and talk to them about what their needs are. Because sometimes, you know, a college or university marketing office might think that oh, SEO is the big problem. You know, we’re not ranking really high on search engine result pages. Okay. But maybe that’s not your technical SEO, that’s, that’s making that happen. Maybe it’s your, you know, your your website pages are loading really slowly. Maybe it’s that you don’t have a very solid content strategy that you’re keeping up with maybe, you know, there’s just a governance issue internally, and so you can’t really manage all the different content design and everything else that’s supposed to be going out on the web. So we can sit down and talk and figure out like what your needs actually are. You’re not going to pay a ton of money for a bunch of stuff you don’t need right your we can, we can kind of help you figure out if the thing you suspect is the thing you need actually is the thing you need. So from there, we will do things like usability research, depending on you know what it is we’ll do a deep dive technical research, looking across all your content and doing audits on how things are voiced how things are written, how things are organized on information, architecture side of things will go so far as to deliver? Well, um, you will, will go so far as to like, actually dig into your operations and figure out do you have the right staff? Do you have the right people on your team to execute the things that you need? Are you making specific enough decisions around goals? Or is everything kind of vague? You know, do you have a lot of leadership transitioning that makes your goals kind of moving targets? And can we fix some of that stuff. So you know, a lot of the research goes into that, that front end Audience side of things, but there’s an equal amount that I think normally gets ignored in the process of are your operations actually working well. And if your turn, if your team can’t support the things that need to happen, from a front end standpoint, it doesn’t matter how much research goes into, like who your audience is, if you can’t attract the audience, because you don’t have the right people in place, or you’re underfunded, or you’re stretched too thin, or you don’t have the focus, it’s not as valuable to spend the money on researching that sort of stuff. So we cover we cover the gamut. It’s a lot of front end usability, SEO, you know, typical technical stuff. And at the same time, you know, we look at what structures are in place to support the operations of optimizing your website going forward?

Shiro Hatori
Absolutely, yeah. And I know you’ve covered a ton of different elements there, depending on the different needs, but are there like key key insights or metrics that you kind of first come in to, to, to help support you know, what direction you want to go? And the flip side of this is for our audience, you know, like, what are some of the things they should be looking for? I know, it’s hard to paint everything with a broad brush, but you know, there, are there things that really, you’re seeing maybe some of my main are continuity across several your clients, like, Hey, this is like the stuff we looked at first and determine the next steps.

Joel Goodman
Yeah, definitely, I think there’s, there’s a pretty common grouping of, you know, what we would consider low hanging fruit sort of stuff that any college or university could could do today. You know, I think a big part of that, where we start is looking at how fast is your website load? You know, there was several years ago, there was this trend of putting drone video footage on every homepage of every, every college website and in the country, probably internationally. And that’s fine. But does that video serve an actual purpose other than just slowing down your homepage load times, because we know that for every second or every, sorry, it’s every like, quarter second, under three seconds, I believe it is. Your conversion rate just drops like exponentially. And so like, if your website is loading at six, seven, I’ve seen what I’ve seen home pages that load in 2530 seconds. And these are like, these are newly launched websites with big name agencies that, you know, like, look pretty good. But you know, if you’re loading in 2030 seconds, you’re, you’re effectively cutting off your conversion rate optimization potential at its knees, you know, people aren’t going to stick around for that long to wait and see if your website is, you know, is worth visiting. And, you know, that’s even worse on mobile. Like, if people are slower mobile speeds. You know, a lot of times, we we like to say that if your website is slow on mobile, that’s actually an accessibility issue, because accessibility goes beyond folks that, you know, that have specific needs for browsing your web content, it goes to people that live in rural areas that may have still have dial up connections, those people exist, or people that live, you know, in in urban areas, but still are on like, you know, pay for data, 3g, mobile phone data plans that, you know, are is their only way to get on the web. If you’re not loading quickly. For those people, you’re kind of leaving money on the table and you’re not fulfilling that promise of higher ed. So PageSpeed is a big one like that’s, that’s a pretty easy thing to try. You can you know there’s free tools to run your web page through to see how quick or how slow it runs, and it’ll tell you exactly what you need. To fix. Second to that is your journeys on your website, I think we find a lot of times what I like to call black holes, where, you know, you want to emphasize say like a student’s story, you know, that’s great, cool student spotlights wonderful, but when you when someone clicks on that student spotlight, and they get on a page that has no other link to say, the related program that you know, the actual marketing goal that you might have with that, if they get lost in your site, because there aren’t obvious paths back to where you want them to go, that’s a huge issue. That’s conversion rate issue. That’s, that’s just a user experience, frustration issue, fix those things like, it’s the internet, it’s, it’s the web, you can you can use hyperlinks in your content, like, like link to link to the program that this student, you know, is a part of, it’s fairly obvious stuff. Anyway. So we see that a lot. It’s, it’s this, it’s this mentality of of thinking through, you know, what does an actual prospective student or parent or whoever your target audience want to find on your website, and then just tailor the content and the content structure to that, and ignore the stuff that you want to do internally, like news stories? And you know, that man, sure, the one that I the one that drives me nuts, right? It’s when you have like a social media feed on your homepage, that links out to like, Instagram, or Twitter or whatever else, someone lands on your homepage, and you want to get them immediately off of your homepage by going like sending them to your social media, it makes zero sense, like you’re trying to get them to request information or apply. Why are you sending them away from your website? With no obvious way to get back to it? It’s, it’s right, it’s either Yeah. And it’s one of those vanity things, I think, and, you know, there’s good intentions behind it. It’s just not super well thought through, like, cool. You want to show your community? Great, but Right. It’s just it’s a it’s a, it’s a bad thing to do. Because you’re just you’re decreasing the potential of people that could actually convert on your on your homepage.

Shiro Hatori
Right? And are there quick ways to kind of do your work with a, basically like a student advisory board to help understand if the website’s flowing correctly in terms of the user journey? Like? Are there quick ways that schools can implement some of this on your own?

Joel Goodman
They could I there’s, there are a few tools out there. I think the hard part is that like it really does take, it really does take some coordinated groundwork. A lot of times we’ll do formal usability studies, you know, sort of like maybe like a focus group or a heuristic evaluation with a single person, or we’ll work with a tool that leads people from a panel like a survey paneling service, like through the different things that we want in order to surface like, do these journeys make sense are people getting to it? I think the things that that could, that people could do right now at their institutions are implementing things like AV testing, on their homepage is designing, you know, different versions of the homepage to try and see what’s going to perform better, was a little bit more cost effective. You know, you’re having to do it kind of in the wild and out in the public. But at the same time, if you don’t want to spend the money on doing, you know, formal usability research, it’s a good way to start incrementally building towards those better optimized optimized architectures and structures on on your various pages and across your sites.

Shiro Hatori
Gotcha. You know, it love to talk about more like that, what happens if you implement all these good practices, right, and I’ll go back to the intro, where I talked about how you can really increase your conversion rates by 128%, which is a case study on your website. And, you know, I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about what you were able to achieve here. You know, how did you get to that conversion rate, right, like, yeah, very being very specific here helps, I think because it helps provide some context and visualization, mental visualization, at least on what, how we are able to increase those conversion rates.

Joel Goodman
Yeah, definitely. So in 2018, we got a contract with National University in San Diego and a lot of people have heard of national university now back then, I mean, this is not that long ago, just a few years ago. They they were they were kind of perceived as a for profit, you know, like degree mill type of place, but they’re not there. They’re a veteran, vendor veteran founded not for profit University in the San Diego area, and they focused on you know, military veterans getting back off a tour and needing To get back into the workforce, they do a lot of online stuff. So we are kind of tasked with helping fix some of their web design in order to make it feel like a, you know, the legit university that it actually is. And that design has changed at this point. So don’t go to National University’s website and think that we did that. Because Yikes, not a big fan right now. But but the work that we did in 2018. Essentially, what I did was started out internally, figuring out what the goals were, you know, what did we need to do? What did we need this? What how do we need this website performed? What were the hard numbers that we needed to hit and, and put together basically a strategy for organizing the website, a full information architecture, we looked at the homepage, we knew that the number one conversion goal that we wanted to hit was an increase in inquiries. So we wanted someone to fill out that requested information form or dial the phone number on the website. And the strategy for National University’s internal admissions team and marketing team was to try to respond to an inquiry within, you know, as fast as they could. So basically, I think at one point, they got the number down to within 30 seconds, I think it was actually less than 30 seconds, where they were calling back following up with with an inquiry immediately, and that was how they would convert someone from an inquiry to an actual applicant, right. So we weren’t going for applications because the you know, the analogy that that we kind of talked about internally, it’s like, asking someone to marry you, and you just met them, right? Like, oh, yeah, fill my application out right now is easier lift to say like, Well, hey, do you want more information? Can we help you figure out, you know, what the plan is going forward? So we did a lot of work with copy on the page to make it feel not like, you know, just like request information, it’s prompts with a question saying, Hey, are you ready to take the next step? Or do you want more information about this thing, fill out this form. So So working with how the copy worked on there, we really helped him in kind of improving some of this stuff, we made sure that the design was engaging, they had really good photography, we were very specific about how we set up a narrative on each page to lead people and kind of build the case for requesting information. So you know, if the if the homepage find a program wasn’t the thing that they that they wanted immediately, which you know, is like for 98% 99% of visitors as the number one thing they want to know, do you do you have my program? If that wasn’t the thing, cool. Next, next step on that page was backing it up with, you know, here’s some social proof. This is how we know that what we’re doing works. If, if that convinced you cool, you want to request information, nope. Okay, cool, just like kind of building that case, all the way down all the way down the page. And eventually, then, the team at National University, put in place, you know, ABX, testing a whole bunch of a whole bunch of analytics data, they had a great team internally, that was parsing through all this data and making decisions. But they focused very specifically on making sure that they would test the multiple designs that we did. And the ones that performed better, even if it was by you know, a marginal percentage, whatever performed better, that was the design that they were going to go with. They’d continue testing, but they would give it the time to perform that they could. So by implementing this redesign, I think I think we took sick about six months to do the design, they helped them hire an internal dev team, their dev team built the site out, when they launched it, they saw they saw an immediate 128% increase in conversion rates overnight. Earlier, I mean, even when I just first got there, we had made some subtle tweaks, we we had basically just put a link to their to their program list in the hero on the homepage, and increase their conversion rates by 30%. Like right off the bat, like really easy things. It’s so you asked for specifics, right? The main thing is know what know what your audience your visitors are looking for. And give them that like if you know that, that finding a program is the number one thing that a prospective student wants. Don’t put it at the bottom of your homepage, don’t, you know, don’t bury that within content, give it to them right away, because they’re going to click and you’ve hooked them. They’re going to start getting into that content. If you know that financial aid and cost intuition is the second most important thing. You know, put that high up in your homepage hierarchy so that they don’t have to hunt for it. People don’t have the patience to look for stuff. You know, don’t assume that they’re just going to engage with the content you put there because you think it’s cool and you want them to you need to give them the content they actually want like I mean, that’s the whole secret. It’s it’s it’s not a secret. It’s it seems pretty be obvious but like that’s, that’s the whole key, right? It’s right. It’s people come to your website to get something done, give them the things that they want help them get that job done.

Shiro Hatori
I have a question for how you do this. But real quick, I had a message from our sponsors before this. So our sponsors are concept 3d. And so if your school needs an updated interactive map, that’s accessible, virtual tour that’s also accessible and essential that centralized events calendar, please reach out to concept 3d dot com, we are working towards full digital accessibility on all our platforms. And we think we have the best golden standard on each of those solution stacks. And so now I’m ready for the question asked there, Joel. So you said, given the content you want, right? What are some quick ways that you can actually figure this out? Is this? Yeah. Do you go into Google Analytics? And you look at the top 20 viewed pages? Is this how you start this process? Like how do you how did you know at National University? Oh, we’re going to add the list of programs to the top hero. And then we’ll immediately you know, I guess you wouldn’t know the results. But how did you know that? You should start there?

Joel Goodman
Yeah, so we had a couple of data points that we leaned on, I think like industry wide, it’s pretty well known and pretty standard that, you know, we know people are looking for program information. First. There’s there’s a lot of data from a lot of schools and a lot of agencies and a lot of research groups that kind of prove that out. So if you want to, if you want to validate that, you know, that assumption across the industry with your own data, look in your Google Analytics, make sure that the search bar in your website is hooked up to your Google Search Console so that you can see what search terms are being searched or, you know, if you have, if you have another search product installed, you know, go go to the admin panel where it lets you kind of look at what those terms are, right? So looking at those terms, you can kind of start to suss out, like what things are internal searches, right, people searching for academic calendar, or faculty directory, or your intranet, or you know, whatever else, like filter all that stuff out, right? Look for those terms that are that are similar to each other. So sometimes people are searching for program or programs, or maybe it’s a specific degree title, or, you know, something like that. Maybe it’s, you know, for financial aid type of stuff, there’s so many different terms that could be in there, there’s tuition, and there’s misspellings of all those terms. But there’s like tuition, there’s costs, there’s fees, there’s, you know, all these different terms. So, essentially group those together and act like, you know, they’re they’re kind of the number one. So I think the I think the hard part was search terms internally on your site is that if you’re like most institutions, your search volumes like 3% of your visitors, there’s it’s not very big, like, that’s a whole other topic that I want to talk about at some point. But search is a weird thing right now. So the next, the next valid point is to jump into your Google Analytics and see the entry points that people are getting to, you know, not just what pages are being visited the most, but like, what pages are people entering on, because if they can’t find it on your website, they’re going to be probably searching on Google. And Google is going to help you kind of track that sort of the entry and exit point, if you’re running Google Analytics, which, you know, it’s a it’s an assumption, but everyone is pretty much running Google Analytics. So if your entry pages are academics or programs, you know, whatever those whatever those pages are that how’s your, your program content, then you know, that, you know, those are the popular pages. And you can kind of infer from that data, that people are looking for that stuff. The entry data and exit data is just really fun for like connecting dots between, you know, what pages aren’t working, right? Where are people getting lost in the journey? So like, ignore your bounce rate and look at like, where are people coming in? And where are they exiting? And, you know, how does that match up to what actions you want them to take further on? So that’s, that’s what that’s kind of where we started out, right? And then you and then you experiment, you you do an AV test, you decide like, hey, we think our hypothesis is that people are looking for program pages. So what can we do about that? Well move that up the hierarchy on your homepage. I think the key here is to not view your homepage as some, you know, sacred being that cannot be touched and cannot be experimented with, you know, except for like switching out that photo and your hero slider or whatever. It’s something that should be optimized and should be experimented with and should be tested out. Because for a lot of people, it is the first place they land. And if they can’t find the things they want, you’ve lost them to Google. And then like, if they’re really persistent, maybe they’ll end up landing on a program page through a Google search. But it’s better to just capture them on your site and keep them there and tell your brand story.

Shiro Hatori
Definitely, absolutely. And I’m trying to think the best way to phrase this question. Do you think? Do you think that this emphasis on continuation to improve processes is just like not a part of the higher ed website culture? Like, if the web teams or?

Joel Goodman
Like, it’s a great question? I think I think it comes down to underfunding. Honestly, I think the I think the issue is that the folks that work in marketing offices are stretched so thin. And a lot of times, they’ve you know, they’ve been around higher ed for a while they’ve been doing higher ed marketing for 10 or 15 years, in the same ways, and they haven’t had the time or the support from the institution or from their bosses or whatever to grow their skill sets. And so it’s, it’s not an easy thing, right, like doing this research isn’t easy, it’s time consuming. It hasn’t been baked into the cultures, as you said, for very long. But a lot of that is just because some of these people just don’t really know how to do it. And they haven’t had the support to learn it, and figure out how to do it. And so you’re kind of stuck guessing, you know, like, with Google Analytics is like, cool. We got a whole bunch of data there. But like, what do you know, if you don’t know what to do with it, then like, what good is it doing? It’s just, it’s just sitting there in a database someplace. And so I think that’s, that’s, that’s the really difficult part is that marketing offices are so underfunded, in higher ed. And and because they’re that underfunded, they don’t have the right people in place to cover all of these modern data marketing practices that are kind of necessary to compete in, in the higher ed market today. And, you know, that just leads to more frustrating positions across the industry. Because if you can’t compete, like, do you shut down, I mean, we’ve seen shutdowns happening, you know, the last couple of years. It’s just, it’s sad, but, you know, avoidable if investments put in the right place.

Shiro Hatori
And so to sort of, to kind of close the loop on the case study, right, and to maybe help put in the word that, you know, investing in the website is worth it like, Yeah, we talked about increasing the conversion rates and National University by 120%. What did that look like, further down in the business funnel? Like, were you was that able to move the needle in terms of request for information? And then hopefully, applications? Enrollment? Like how did that look like further down the line? Yeah,

Joel Goodman
so like, 128% people were like, Oh, wow, that’s a big number. What does it mean? You know, right, I got a call, you know, about a year after, from, from my contact there, saying that the latest numbers that they had, were that the work that we did, you know, combined with the work that they did internally to do more testing, as you know, after we left, but the design work, and all the strategies set the foundation for them, generating somewhere between eight and $10 million in new revenue in that first year. And that design stuck around for a few years. And so, no doubt, it continued to generate cash. But then, you know, I think the other thing there is like, eight to $10 million, what does that mean, you know, and a lot of people that I talk to you at institutions don’t really know what that means, and especially in a marketing office, like you’re not really privy to what that does, across across the rest of the institution, right. So the the way, the other way that we tried to talk about this, and the way that it was voiced to me was that our work paid for itself in eight days. And I, you know, I asked people, like, when was the last time you did a website redesign project, and you could say that eight days after it launched, like you, you are free and clear of that investment you put into it, and everything else is just profit, you know, I mean, profit, but profits, a different thing, but like the rest of that revenue, you know, it’s, it’s pure revenue that isn’t having to go back to those costs that you that you invested in actually doing the redesign. So that, you know, to me, that’s a big win, because you don’t hear those numbers very often. And we were, I mean, we were excited it’s nice to have that validation that all the work and knowing that the front loading that research, you know, working with a team that does have those research practices put in place was something that paid off in the long run both for us and and for the university.

Shiro Hatori
Right and it’s not like something like In person recruitment marketing that you have to spend the same dollars with inflation every every year. It’s, you know, something that you’ve sort of built, and you just, you continue to iterate, but that basis has at least been created. So it’s not like it’s something that has to be done every year. You know, it’s, it’s something you can build upon. So I think that’s something also to mention and point out as well. Definitely. That’s amazing. Yeah, I mean, personally, we’ve, we’ve invested in our website, we’re obviously a higher ed tech vendor. And, you know, the improvements we’ve made have just get more for what we already had, right? We’re increasing conversion rates. And it doesn’t go away, we don’t we put in a lot of the work upfront. And again, like you said, we have to continue to optimize, we don’t fall behind. But that optimization processes is much less than the initial time and investment it takes, which is usually the hardest part to get higher ed institutions on board, if I’m not correct. Gotcha. That’s great. And so, yeah, maybe hopefully, to our listeners, you know, like, if, you know, making all these improvements on your website and can pay for itself in eight days, you know, it’s something that to really think about and start really talking about is conversion rate optimisation, which is, I think, a key focus area, bravery media helps out with, right.

Joel Goodman
Yeah, definitely. And it comes down to I mean, you know, CRO, as a, as a term, like, you know, comes out of E commerce for the most part, and I get it like, there’s right, there’s iffy feelings around like, Oh, do we want to do e commerce stuff. But I think the thing to remember is that all of the visitors to your website are interacting with, you know, hundreds of sites all the time that that compete in this way of, you know, trying to get your attention of latching on, you don’t necessarily need to have like a bunch of pop up windows and like, you know, save 10% When you give us your email sort of stuff on your website, but you do need to make sure that the content is engaging, and that you’re providing clear pads in your design to get people to take the actions that you want. The website, you know, you hear a lot websites, the number one marketing tool for every institution, yes, it is. 100% like, has to be, you can’t just let it sit there and be a brochure or a magazine for for your for your programs, you have to really leverage it harness the power of that marketing tool into something that is, is generating money for your institution is generating students for your institution is generating notoriety for your institution, in in the best way as possible. And the only way to do that is to research, iterate on what you have, and continually do optimization through that research process.

Shiro Hatori
Amazing, and you know, what’s, what’s next for brave bravery? Mita oh, by the way,

Joel Goodman
yeah, we have a few different exciting things in the pipeline. We’re launching some some revisions to our service packages. here shortly. I mean, probably by the time this episode comes out, there’ll be live. So folks who visit bravery dot c o to take a look at those. We’re also launching later this year with our first client a fully optimized web operations management service called University insight where we have our we have a content platform that we’ve been working on, we’re building in deep data analytics to allow us to get those get all that data that’s coming out of how people use institutional websites, turn those into those insights on a constant basis and build this whole feedback loop of research into optimization into place. You know, like we’ve been talking the whole the whole episode. And really helped give gives give institutions a jumpstart on, on getting this kind of product cycle research kind of focusing and not having to be reactive all the time to, to what’s going on. So yeah, a lot, a lot of fun things that have been in the works for a long time releasing this year. And yeah, folks can folks can take a look at that@bravery.co. And, you know, reach out to reach out to me there or on social if they want.

Shiro Hatori
Amazing, thank you. I was gonna ask you to work. Where can our listeners reach out to you, but you just answered my question. But yeah, look for jaw,

Joel Goodman
agile Goodman,

Shiro Hatori
Joe Goodman on LinkedIn. That’s great. That’s fantastic. Well, Joe, thanks so much for joining our show today. And, you know, spreading all that knowledge for us around how you can really improve some conversion rate optimization, some quick wins that your institution could be looking at. So appreciate you coming on.

Joel Goodman
Yeah, definitely show. Thanks for having me.

Shiro Hatori
Thank you, and thanks for listeners for tuning in as well. Please catch us on the next episode. And please reach out to us if you’re looking for a new interactive map event solution or virtual tour thanks again

We want Rice to be a welcoming destination for art, music, lectures, food, athletic events, lectures – a great place to visit just to enjoy the beauty of our campus. [The Concept3D] mapping system will help people find those amenities and explore those opportunities.

Linda Thrane, Vice President of Public Affairs, Rice University
Our residents are getting more savvy with technology and they will certainly appreciate a tool that guides them from location to location on our campus. Concept3D’s wayfinding capability was the immediate draw for us, but the map and interactive media have been valuable for depicting a bird’s eye view in print materials, or when scheduling an onsite visit. Residents, visitors and even staff find a lot of utility and functionality in Concept3d, and we often hear compliments about our beautiful map.
Mike Haber, Digital Media Manager, Shell Point
The CMS makes integrating our data feeds a simple, easy process. We can update our content feed once and it updates within the CMS and our map simultaneously.
Robby Sietz, Webmaster, Ole Miss
Concept3D’s photospheres really allow us to show rather than tell what separates our studios from others.
Corepower Yoga

The new virtual campus map is particularly helpful to showcase our campus to prospective students and families who are not quite ready or able to physically visit campus. International students are a great example of a group who typically do not visit our campus before enrolling, but really value getting a birds-eye view of the place they’re considering calling home.

Admissions Director at Boise State

The biggest challenge for [Claremont Graduate University] was lack of a centralized map system entirely. Roughly 30 different maps existed on our website pre-[Concept3D], created by various departments to meet their own needs.

Claremont Graduate University
Vantage is committed to exceptional customer service, and the technology developed by Concept3D helps us work closely with potential clients, give them an incredible preview of the data center and offer a compelling way for them to explore the critical details of our facilities.
Steven Lim, Marketing Vice President, Vantage Data Centers
We saw the potential of Concept3D’s platform right away, and it was amazing to see our space come to life in a fully interactive 3D map. We know the platform will improve the overall guest and attendee experience, and we’re excited for all the ways that we can use it for both internal and external needs moving forward.
John Adams, General Manager, Colorado Convention Center

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