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Shiro Hatori
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the higher end demand gen podcast hosted by concept 3d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, Google, we’d love to hear what you think. My name is Shiro Hatori. And I will be your host today. And I cannot start a cannot wait to start talking about increasing enrollment from digital marketing channels by 42%. As well as talk on the first 90 days as a higher ed CMO. And for the conversation, I’m very excited to have kin stage Paul, join us today. Ken is the VP of Marketing Communications and the Chief Marketing Officer at the University of Redlands, I also got to meet her earlier this week in Chicago at ama so that was a nice added touch as well. Welcome to the show. Thank you, it was so great to meet you in real life. I know it’s always a good opportunity to meet someone from the podcast, in our in IRL. As they say, Yes, we try to be cool, right? I want I’m sure there’s another way to say these days that I might learn from tick tock someday. I know. It is a big, big acronym that’s popular.

And I love to always ask all my guests to create a little icebreaker for the show. Tell me what you love about higher ed.

Kin Sejpal
Oh, wow, wow, there’s so many things. So maybe we’ll start with it’s such a collegial community of changemakers. I think that is perhaps the most succinct way I can talk about why I love higher ed and why I love higher ed marketing. That is so much more about higher education and about its transformative power. We all are in it because we know it and we recognize it. But as an international student, that is I mean, I wouldn’t be where I am without higher education. So that’s an I know that’s a story of a lot of people. But in my case, it particularly has made a world of difference. No pun intended. Gotcha.

Shiro Hatori
Yeah. I mean, let’s let’s jump in. Can you tell us a little bit about your higher ed journey and in your take on its transformative power and how it’s helped you to reach where you are today?

Kin Sejpal
Yes, well, once upon a time. Well, I was born in India, and you know, just humble background, my, you know, lower middle class as they would call it there. There was a lot of class system that people would self categorize into, or others would categorize for them. And the idea of where I am today was really not even a passing thought that I had, because it felt so out of the realm of possibility. It’s like somebody’s thinking, oh, yeah, they’re gonna end up in Mars someday. Right? So that was the level of expectation or lack thereof that I had. But when I had the opportunity to pursue my master’s degree in at Purdue University, I made the leap from India to Indiana. So just added a couple of letters, but a whole world of change. The reason I was able to afford that was because of tuition, assistantships. And as a graduate student, you do get some stipends and things like that. So jumped in on that opportunity. And fast forward a few years at Purdue, where I got my two degrees, two master’s degrees, one in communications, one. One was an MBA and then ended up working there because of what I had studied in grad school was very relevant. And what I was practically practicing in grad school as my projects or assistantship projects with my faculty were around branding. And so I found myself full time at Purdue University and I am eternally grateful to my supervisor there that took a chance on me and gave me the opportunity to work in a newly reorganized marketing and communications area, which again, for that time, it was very ahead of its time. We introduced this idea of brand, we introduced this idea of student as a customer, we introduced this idea of reputation and image building through consistent brand narratives. And such, we introduced the idea of data and analytics in marketing function. And as my mentor would say, the ABCs of marketing is what we really lived by which is about the customer, build the brand, and combine the art and science. So the ABCs have been ingrained in my brain for ever. And then I had the opportunity to take what I had learned and done at Purdue, which was brand management and enrollment marketing, and market research and analytics and oversee that at Rochester Institute of Technology are at in upstate New York. And those were, that was a pivotal moment for me too, because all the areas that I was ingrained in having my hands in and doing it firsthand, I was now overseeing those functions and building those out. Then I had a five year itch to you know, at once I completed five years at IIT, which were really, really great, was was a great experience, to come to the University of Redlands and build out the marketing function and work closely on enrollment marketing, in addition to building our reputation and differentiation strategy. So here I am. And the transformative power has really been that I am in, I’m in a place in California that I never thought I would be in, I am able to support my family that is still back in India that I didn’t think was going to be possible. I mean, I knew I had to take care of them. But I didn’t know that I would be able to do that, to this extent, the transformative power has been in the way that they’ve, that has changed how I’ve I look at the world and the global education that I was able to get in the sense of just meeting students from all walks of life, but then also having a chance to work and work with and work at some global campuses. And then I never thought I’d be ever in a position to give back. Although one can argue no matter where you are, and how much you make there is there’s always something that you can do to give back. And I’m talking about give back financially, I was giving back with time by mentoring international students while at Purdue, because I wanted them to have the same experience or at least similar to what I did, which is really go all in on your education and experiential learning so that it opens up these opportunities for you in the future. So it was not a nonprofit, but I operated a search. It wasn’t like a registered nonprofit where I called it kinship. Career Services for international students, it was pro bono work, I worked with students who were international that didn’t really know how to navigate the job search environment. Because it was so different. And it’s all you know, people are very humble about how they get you know, how they talk about themselves. My goal was to really get them out of their shells. And yeah, so it’s allowed me to give back to people in a way that I didn’t think I could and get back to some passion projects, like animal welfare and things like that financially to a higher education and such. So, I mean, I could go on about just from where I was to where I am, and all the things I’ve been able to do, the number of countries I’ve been able to travel to, both for work and outside of work. And it’s just opened up just just so much appreciation for taking having a moment of gratitude. Which I have to remind myself every day when it’s like the daily grind kind of sucks you in. You’re like yeah, oh gosh, is this really worth it? And yes, it is worth it. Absolutely.

Shiro Hatori
Thank you so much for sharing all that. It was it’s probably one of the more incredible stories I’ve heard on this podcast, you know, coming from India and having all these different expectations in life. You know, when you’re you’re compared to where you’re at now. So that’s really incredible. And speaking to some of the incredible work, you and your team at Purdue did, I actually just had Kate young, who’s the host of this is Purdue podcast, which is their official university podcast. And that I think, launched early, early 2020. So I think some of those residuals are can continuation rather of the work you did in 2017, through 19, I think right around that period, has contributed to some of the branding efforts that still continue. So it’s, they’re doing incredible stuff, like no one else has a official university podcast that I know of, and get a great effort towards building a brand with their customers.

Kin Sejpal
Well, I’d like to believe I had some had to do something in that. But you know, it’s all props to their new marketing team that they’ve built since Ethan went there and just build a machinery of this understanding of what the brand should be an IS. And that this, you know, it’s definitely a higher education is definitely progressed to a stage where people are embracing this concept of telling us stories, but not just telling us stories, in print or in magazines, it’s really about a unifying story. And then how do you get everybody on the brand? Right? And like, I like to say, yep,

Shiro Hatori
bandwagon. Got it. Yeah, well, let’s, let’s talk about marketing. Now, I know you’ve moved into this more of a leadership role several times at this point now. And, you know, I’d love to hear about what key areas do you really focus on in those first few months or the first 90 days?

Kin Sejpal
Yeah, so I really lived by the bulk of the first 90 days. And, and I just soaked it all in expecting to really follow that to the tee. Except, you know, books and movies are very different from realities. So the whole idea of just coming in, understanding, listening before building that didn’t quite pan out the way the book suggested it should. So prior to my arrival here, the University of Redlands, and this is props to my president, President Newkirk, she had already engaged a consultant to do some org, org analysis and efficiency analysis. And as a result, the recommendation was to centralize all our marketing functions, I would say Marketing and Communications functions, and centralize our budgets as well, in that vein, so it existed, marketing was done in a very decentralized way, which is, again, not unusual, but it is unusual for a university of our size. So we are about 37 3800, strong student body. And for our size, to have that siloed approach to marketing definitely did not make sense. So when I came, I inherited all of these central resources, which I was very happy to get, but I still didn’t know what I was going to do with it, without really understanding where we needed to go. So it was a lot of building the plane while flying it, which tends to happen. But it was certainly the case for me when, you know, I had this I had the marketing positions from different schools now reporting in to me, and I had the marketing budgets that were now consolidated and I had to kind of be a good steward of those funds. Because, you know, you want to do that obviously, but you also don’t want to wash away or ignore how things have worked in the past. So the balance of, of the past and the future. In achieving that in the present was a was an interesting dynamic to work through with my colleagues here and the deans and others. And you know, it existed the way it did for a particular reason it meant it worked during those times. And now this this was what was needed according to the analysis work that I referenced previously. And my when I got these positions, instead, we’re more by beat, if you will, because that’s how I think journalism works, you have a beat. That’s how we had marketing functions. But it didn’t make sense to have a generalist model, you didn’t really need to know. You didn’t really need to have all of the skills that a marketer needed to have, and also have the specialized skills because it’s almost impossible. It’s you really live in a world where you have to have specialists, you have to have specialists who understand SEO, perhaps you have to have specialists who understand brand management and brand experience management, you have to have specialists that understand content strategy, you know, so it just made sense to kind of retool that, but still have that T shaped individual. And individuals who understand what these other functions do, and can speak to those, but also have that depth of knowledge and expertise in a particular area. And so determining what that would be and then how that would break down or be split between internal and external resources. So what do we take in house and what is important to have in house versus what we should have more external, not just because of headcount, and how many FTE is we want to have and things like that. But just so that we can be a bit more nimble and agile, as we know, marketing and technology is changing so rapidly. So that was sort of the my first 90 days is to come up with an investment strategy for our overall marketing efforts. And that was not just in paid media, but also in earn shared and owned media. And similarly, make sure that we had that mindset and approach toward building a team as well, that we were being thoughtful about the level of expertise that was needed in house to then work on the tools that we also needed as well. So the tools and talent piece are so symbiotic right? You can have these SEO tools and the you can have these tools for social listening, you can have virtual tours, and things like that. But then who is helping manage those and making sure that we’re taking full advantage of that, setting it up appropriately monitoring and reporting on it. So we didn’t want to jump into investing in things that we didn’t have the people for. So that was a very deliberate kind of approach that I took in my first 90 days and beyond, I’d say.

Shiro Hatori
That’s fantastic. So yeah, it sounds like you really what I’m hearing is, you came into the team, and this is from just a team perspective, you figured out like here’s what we have, here’s what you know, a person a person B, Person C is good at, you know, they can specialize in this, here’s what we need. And so you really came in, looked at the whole thing is that big picture worked on continuing that centralization that was put in place by your execs. And yeah, like started developing out from a thoughtful approach versus like, you come in first days, hire the agency, like immediately and just expect results.

Kin Sejpal
Oh, yeah. No, anybody who does that, or expects that is obvious, I don’t think is working in reality. That is, yeah, it’s walking reality period, because that is not how a long term game should be played. I mean, you’re not in it to just come in, put a stamp on it and, and say, Okay, I did my part. And you want to make create those relationships. I mean, a big part of this was really creating and building relationships with people with my own team, not just saying, These are the functions we need, but how good are you at those function? Or how, where do you want to be? What would you like to do in your own career? And then let’s do a little matchmaking here if there is that opportunity to So unfortunately, it worked out that the team that I did inherit, they were specialists, they just didn’t know it. And that’s fantastic. And and to channel their, their skills and talent in that area of expertise was both something that the institution and another part gained from but hopefully also channeled them into a career path that they were looking to pursue. Yeah,

Shiro Hatori
let me ask just to follow up, I know previously, we talked and you have a strong emphasis or focus on collecting data and bringing data into the conversation as well. And, you know, what were some kind of like, doesn’t have to be the first 90 days, but like, you know, first year, like, what were some data points that really helped understand, like, the bigger picture coming into this position?

Kin Sejpal
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really believe in the power of data, I was a data, I don’t want to say expert or a guru, but I was overseeing data, and analytics at my at Purdue, and then not just overseeing, I was doing it at Purdue. Like I had my hands in it. I was in Qualtrics. I was in Google. Google Data Studio and GFR. Wait, it wasn’t GA for it was to Google Analytics back then and all of that. And then at our it, I was overseeing that, and trying to continue to find ways to connect data sources where, where we could and now, coming here, there was no real data infrastructure. So for me, it was really important for us to get that mindset about building a data focus infrastructure, so that the people feel that this is not just one more thing that we have to do. Because you know, you when you’re a small but mighty team, you you tend to feel like okay, here is one more wish list of things that we have to do and add to our plates, well, it just has to become part of the culture, it has to become part of the culture that you measure what you’re doing. You measure, you know, we got a project management system to measure the volume of work. That is not to say that that is the only piece of data that we would need. But when you talk about resource and resource allocation, you can’t be talking about that. ambiguously. You want to try and support that with information and data where possible. Similarly, with the investment strategy, one of the things that I did when I came in was, which I alluded to a bit previously. But here, I’ll go into a little bit more depth we really looked, I really looked into what were all the commitments made toward marketing. And I use some of the analysis that was done by the prior consultant. And try to kind of combine and consolidate and see where all the marketing investment was being made in a very decentralized or very siloed environment. And then once I got a sense of that, I found so many ways that we could be efficient. I mean, the biggest way, and the most common way, I suppose, is to centralize digital marketing efforts, right? Because we were literally competing against each other, you would search for University of Redlands, and you could, you could have paid search ads and Google that word taking you to all different programs or different schools. And they were all kind of in the same using the same keywords, apparently, because you could see that and so we should have come up once, not four times and not for four different programs. And by the way, not we never came up for the institution at all, we just came came up for we came up for schools, we came up for programs, we came up for other things outside of hey, come check out this university. So you know, the paid search has always been such an important data point for really many institutions and many others. And it was no different for us. But it was really jarring for a board and others to really get a sense of when that was happening to be like okay, we got to do something here. And then we found some efficiencies. So when I did do that investment planning, and we put it back into the media, we obviously didn’t pay for a lot of duplicative efforts or nearly no duplicated efforts. Had one media plan one agency one creative partner one everything like like my president likes to say we are putting the unit back in the university and we were trying to do that even at the marketing level. We found like a six figure efficiency in terms of being able to put that back into the market. So the budget for that was put into market the prior year compared to the budget that we were able to put into market this year, had at least a six figure difference, or, or I would say 20% difference. We were we were able to put 20% More back into the media, just by just by shuffling things and then bringing them together, taking a step back and saying, here’s all the needs that we will still fulfill. But we will do it at a university level that will lift all boats.

Shiro Hatori
What and so what is that? I’m sure you put those efficiency savings back into marketing comms, right? I think you had a statistic around that the increase in digital marketing or enrollment from digital marketing as well. And so how did you spread those numbers from that? And what were the results there?

Kin Sejpal
Yeah, so you know, I’ve been here a year and a half. So we’re still trying to get a sense of what what this is paying, what what type of ROI we’re seeing on on the centralization. So on one side, there’s efficiency and the other side is effectiveness. Efficiency, we proved it, I think we proved it pretty early on that becoming one organization, one department was going to yield and 20% more, at least financial resources, it also yielded in more human resources. The other pieces the effectiveness on the effectiveness piece. When we compare it for a particular area of study, and school year over year, they used to work in in, you know, they had their own digital marketing agencies as well to help support to help support you know, so when it was decentralized, everybody had their own firms. So it’s not that we didn’t do any marketing, or they didn’t do any marketing, but they knew what they did what they thought was best. And again, there was no malevolent or ill will toward that. That was what worked, especially during the pandemic, when there was no time to kind of think about Big Picture types of things for a lot of the people that were here. So we compared that particular area of study in school in their digital marketing efforts. And we attribute that in Slate, we have the fourth source information, which one can argue you know, there are it’s you know, how accurate that is and such and such, but it was a graduate level of it was a graduate study. So the attribution there is a little bit easier because it doesn’t go into this common black hole and things like that. And so, from what was done last year to what was done this year, we saw that digital marketing as a fourth source contributed 48 42% more towards enrollment than Yeah, and the that school is on the upward trajectory in enrollment. So it wasn’t one the school is an upward trajectory in enrollments. So that already was sort of a correlation piece that we were all really excited about. But I needed to prove some causation. And so the causation was to really work with our enrollment systems, partners. And in fact, now I have a shared position with enrollment system. So the slate folks, and my team has a shared analyst position who looks at really what we’re seeing on the enrollment side, what we’re seeing the marketing side, and what is the attribution piece between the two. And that was the reporting that he was able to do for us and give give us that attribution percentage, that we were able to then feel a sense of more confidence that yes, there is not just efficiency in doing this. There’s also effectiveness in doing this.

Shiro Hatori
efficiency and effectiveness. I like how you laid everything out to it. It makes it really easy to understand for me as well. Thank you. I have one specific question around how previously like Google search and I like to talk tactics to how the Google search engine results were cannibalizing each other. Right. Was that because each school or unit was working with their own agency or running ads themselves? Is that why that happened? Or? Yes,

Kin Sejpal
pretty much. Yes, exactly. So now they had their own budget so they were able to do I mean, I think that in the beginning there was a time when they all started out with one firm but then for for because when you have your own sort of goals and you know people All we’re accountable to do when you have the accountability to see results in your own school or college, then you do whatever you think is best for that. And if that means I’m going to go with an agency that I think has the best, has the most potential, or is better in terms of cost per leads? Whatever, whatever the rationale is, that’s what they would do. And that’s what they did. And again, no, Ill Will there, they just did that best interest of their school.

Shiro Hatori
No, that makes sense. Like, you know, you’re, you’re set to do a job. And so you want to do it the best, it just foundationally wasn’t the correct one. So that’s just that’s what ran into it. I’m curious. So now, when you look at like, a very specific example of like, how you determine Google search, and where spend goes into different schools, like how does the the meeting with your agency, maybe you run your ads internally, but like, what does that look like? How does each school get their say now? And like, how does that conversation or meeting happen? Yeah,

Kin Sejpal
so I’ve always maintained that there’s three legs of the stool for in order to ensure effective marketing and enrollment. Results in success. So that is, one your enrollment partners to the marketing and communications, and three, the academics and and bringing those three legs of the stool is what makes that tool sturdy. And the intention and intent was really to ensure that they didn’t feel slighted in this whole centralization effort. And that we used math and data to really allocate spend. So when we did have those agency discussions, and we consolidated budgets, we did it based on the expected enrollment headcount. And by different schools, it’s like you just try to be as proportionate as possible to that. It was a pretty it was a little lopsided before were certain schools and colleges that had a lower expectation of new student headcount had higher budgets versus those who had a higher expectation and goals and financial modeling for more students had a lower budget. So we did need to correct that. I mean, and everybody understood that, including the ones that did have more budget previously. But then we also factored some of the non you know, that’s, that’s just an apples to apples kind of ratio modeling that we did, but then, you know, there are nuances in certain fields, some, some schools, and some areas of study are going to be more expensive because of the competitive marketplace. In that area. So we try to incorporate some of that, and allocation as well. So when we did all of that math, I think we came to a pretty, pretty unified understanding that this is how we should allocate budgets going forward. And this is how, and let’s test it. I mean, if we feel that that change of investment strategy is negatively impacting some somebody or not somebody but in an area or a school, let’s first assess is that a change in investment that did that? Or is that some Is there something more to it? In fact, we found out that one of the changes that we made, you know, we we did see a little bit lower volume of leads, because of, I think, maybe the change in investment, but again, like I said, there could be other factors, but they converted a lot better down the funnel. So, so at the end of the day, if the goal is to really get people all the way through the funnel, does it matter if you start with 1000, and you get 10? Or you start with 500? And you get 20? Right? And so so that’s what we are, again, with this analysts shared position we are monitoring that is if we start to see the conversion metrics also impacted, then we want to start thinking about how do we kind of reassess our investment approach, but because we saw the success downstream, even though the success even though the numbers upstream, were a little concerning. We have still stuck to the same approach.

Shiro Hatori
That was super insightful. That really helps me understand like, everything you just said was super insightful and yes, to add to the conversation around, you know, conversion rate At the end of the funnel, like that’s something we’re experiencing in my job right now, too, it’s like, we’re actually trying to focus more on quality now, because we know that after we did the data analysis, which you need to do, we found that that was actually a better CPA or cost per acquisition, that versus like, just trying to get as many leads into the funnel. So that’s very top of mind. For me, I’m really glad you explained all that. Switching the conversation a little bit back from the technical, which I love getting into the details of so I appreciate you sharing all that. But taking a step back, you know, with ama earlier this week, ama symposium American Marketing Association, in Chicago, you know, in talking about the broader scope of higher ed and the market, what are you excited for in 2024? And beyond?

Kin Sejpal
Yeah, that’s interesting timing of this conversation, because, you know, the, as I’m still a little, you know, I’m still feeling all that energy from an excitement from, from the conference, which by the way I was on the planning committee for so I’ve been, it feels like a birth, my third baby in the sense because it’s my authority, or with the AMA, higher ed Planning Committee. And it was the best in the sense of it broke records in terms of the number of attendees and things like that. But there was, so in talking about quantity and quality, right, it was also about quality discussions around, what are the challenges facing higher education? How can we as mark on professionals have a role to play and what is our role to play in the future of higher education. And in fact, that was really what a lot of the sessions were about, including the last session that I moderated with Scott JASIC, from Inside Higher Ed, who talked about the top 10 issues and challenges that higher education is facing, and what more calm professionals can do about it. And those are big things. But the main takeaway for me has been, really the fact that you want to do more collective thinking, then instead, you know, then just individual level thinking, more formal ways to advocate for, for higher education. So I work with case as a volunteer, which is the Council of advancement, in support of education, on trying to position and counter that narrative, about higher education, and its value. So I’m on a task force that is launching an initiative called discover the next to really position higher education, not an institution, but imagine how we bring all the schools and colleges under one brand umbrella. Now we’re at any other institution, now we’re bringing all the institutions under one brand umbrella, under the category of higher education. So what I’m really excited about is at the category level, is continuing to do the work to to help kind of brand higher education as a value add for, for everybody. The other piece that I’m excited on a more, you know, on a more nuanced level, is that, you know, marketing is not just about promotion, it is about product as well. And I have been fortunate to be in discussions where I have been a part of the product and my product, in this case, I mean, programs. You know, you can define product in so many ways. So I’ve been fortunate that our it and now you have our University of Redlands to be in that this in those discussions about what products do we have? Do we want to offer having access to those data to understand what is the market demand there? What is the employer demand and things like that? So I’m very excited to finally I mean, not finally I’ve been in this conversations but really helped showcase hopefully and have maybe a presentation or two at ama who knows about how this does work and it’s time that marketers had a seat not just at the table at the cabinet level which a lot of institutions now do according to the Simpson Scarborough research, but that we have an influence and power to define what it is that we want to offer in the first place before we are brought into Hey, come come push this out in the in the Toward the end of the decision making process. So, for me, that is very exciting. And I can’t wait again, I’m a data geek and that those data driven decisions on, you know, what programs to build, what to sunset and how to package them effectively. So we don’t create marketplace confusion. So we are empathetic in how we approach our students, especially at University of Redlands, we have so many first generation students, or we have almost half of our student body. And so we really need to do a better job of packaging what we have to offer in a way that is empathetic, understandable, and, and shows that we are here to serve them and serve students first.

Shiro Hatori
Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, that was fantastic. And I echo I was at AMA and went to a lot of sessions as well. And I echo similar kind of takeaways like super high level like, you know how how to join the higher ed conversation is whole industry reshaping the narrative. And so, you know, I feel the same way about what you just said. So, love that reply as well. We’re just about a time here today, and I’m wondering where our listeners can follow up with you to, to understand what you’re up to or what the Redlands is up to.

Kin Sejpal
Yeah, so they can obviously find me at University of Redlands. I am on the cabinet to the end, my email should be should be out there if they just searched. And I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. So if you want to find me on LinkedIn, happy to connect there. I got I have ebbed and flowed on Twitter slash x. I haven’t been able to make up my mind on that one I I did kind of take a step back. But then when ama came around, I dove right in again because I’m like I need to find my people. So I that might be more events specific than a constant way of connecting So yep, I am happy to be reached at any of these channels and happy to connect and talk further.

Shiro Hatori
Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining those in brilliant conversation. Had a great time and thanks for audience for listening and as well.

Kin Sejpal
Thank you for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai