Blog Recap:
In this episode of the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast, we dove deep into a topic that is paramount for every institution aiming to elevate its game – why higher ed marketing must be a key player in the strategic planning process. And who better to help us navigate these waters than the brilliant Megan Horton, the Interim AVP of Brand Management at Oklahoma State University (OSU)?
A Massive Overhaul, Years in the Making
OSU has been undergoing a gigantic transformation for the last 5 to 7 years. Think of it as a marketing makeover from top to bottom. Megan told us about their ambitious project of centralizing marketing communications, which was originally scattered across various divisions. This reorganization wasn’t an overnight success but a labor of love and persistence. Imagine flipping multiple servers, centralizing CMSs, and creating a user-focused web journey – now that’s dedication!
The Digital Front Door
One of the highlights discussed was the website project. Megan and her team realized that a well-oiled website is the digital front door of the university. After almost 10 years of hard work, they established a consistent and user-centric experience across the entire OSU system. Kudos to Andrew Brashears, the Associate Director for Web Strategy, for spearheading this revolution!
The Arrival of a Visionary Leader
In 2021, OSU saw the arrival of a new president, Casey Schrum, who emphasized the importance of a unified strategic plan. With unwavering leadership and collaborative spirit, they launched a plan that doesn’t just sit on a shelf but actively propels the university forward.
Collaboration is Key
A major takeaway from Megan? Collaboration. Their Marketing Communications (MARCOM) team works closely with the network of communicators across OSU’s five-campus system. It’s about building meaningful relationships, understanding what’s happening on the ground, and creating a cohesive strategy that everyone buys into.
The Secret Sauce
So, what’s the secret sauce that keeps it all together? A mix of frequent meetings, transparency, and genuine collaboration. OSU’s annual Brand Summit is a must-mention. It’s a full-day retreat where they set the tone for the year, celebrate achievements, and tackle breakout sessions on focused topics.
In essence, higher ed marketing isn’t a solitary endeavor. It’s a strategic, collaborative, and relentless pursuit of excellence that, when done right, transforms not just the university’s image but its very soul. Huge thanks to Megan Horton for sharing OSU’s inspiring journey with us. Until next time! 🚀
Read the transcription
Shiro:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast hosted by Concept 3 d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Apple, Spotify, Google, whatever you’re listening to. My name is Shira Hautore, and I will be your host today. And on this episode, we’re gonna be talking about why higher ed marketing needs to be a part of the strategic planning process. And for that, I have a really special guest here today, Megan Horton. She is the interim AVP of brand management at Oklahoma State University, and her team actually recently was awarded 2023 American Marketing Association’s Higher Education Team of the Year. Welcome to the show, Megan.
Megan:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Shiro:
Likewise. And I do ask all my guests this. Please tell me what you love about higher ed.
Megan:
I love higher ed because of the impact. I think I’ve worked in higher ed for 16 plus years and the opportunity to touch a student’s life in some way and have an impact has incredible meaning in my personal life. No 2 days are the same. So there’s always an adventure and, a new project underway. That’s fantastic. And I remember on our previous call,
Shiro:
your team is actually, irresponsible for KOSU or right? Is that right? The radio Yes. Station. And so that’s a very unique thing about, I think, your role that I I haven’t heard from anyone else or any other institution. So I thought that was really cool. You can tell us a little bit more about that in a second. But, yeah, I would love to learn a little bit more about, your role as, interim AVP of brand management.
Megan:
Sure. Well, you know, I think one of my favorite things about serving in this role is working with the talented team that we have. They are amazing Marcon professionals who are really passionate about our land grant mission. You know, as evidenced in the AMA award this year, they have done some amazing things and it’s creatively very fun to work with them. As part of my role, I oversee MARCOM for, the university. We have a five campus system across Oklahoma. We are the largest higher ed system in Oklahoma. And so there is, you know, significant amount of projects that we do across those campuses.
Megan:
And, you know, we handle everything from crisis comms to advertising, social media, web, everything in between. And also part of my role is helping oversee our KOSU, our our public radio station, award winning public radio station. And they do an amazing job providing journalism and coverage for Oklahoma and helping address, you know, issues that are really prevalent across our state.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And I know you you told me a lot about this in our previous intro call, but, you know, OSU has been going through this big overhaul, and it’s not the work of just 1 year or a short term. Right? You’ve been working on overhauling the the marketing team, centralizing this, coming up with the strategic plan for the last 5 to 7 years. Can you tell us, a a story of, like, you know, how things move in that 7 year period?
Megan:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think it probably started about 7 years ago. Mhmm. Historically, marketing communications at OSU was decentralized, reporting up to different divisions, and, struck early partnerships with colleagues across, you know, departmental lines to to find ways to work together and change culture and eventually realize a a reorganization of our central MARCOM and enrollment communications teams, which I think has really given us a significant competitive advantage and, really provided the opportunity to have impactful strategic plans that we can act on and, move the university forward.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And and tell me more about the the website project. Right? Like, how long did this this take, and, like, you know, what are you really proud of?
Megan:
Well, well, tip of the hat to our associate director for web strategy, Andrew Brashears. He has, helped me with this project for, close to 10 years now. And, we, many years ago, knew that the website was the front door to the university and had websites on servers. We had multiple CMSs. We had different templating in place. And, we flipped the switch, and did a lot of research, partnered with New City to really centralize our our websites and to make it user focused and really personalize that student web journey and putting their needs front and center in the way we set up the information architecture, obviously rooted in data and insights and what they were looking for. And, I’m proud to say that the templates and the information architecture that we’ve set up has been implemented across not just our campus and all of our academic colleges, but now will soon be launched across our entire system. So when you think about higher ed as a whole, that’s a huge foundation for us, from a, you know, customer journey standpoint to have centralized templating, consistent user experience, whether you enter our web presence from a degree program page to, looking at an academic college or a unit.
Megan:
They are all consistent and have that, unified experience, And it was painful. It was very, very difficult, required a lot of hard work and advocacy and communicating with senior leadership about the importance of how this would propel enrollment and retention and customer satisfaction. And it’s certainly a project that our team is incredibly proud of.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. I I actually forgot that you had worked with New City. I had David on our podcast a few episodes ago, and I loved his description of how he he comes into design. You think he calls it human to human design and, you know, bringing the the narrative of the student and the customer model to the front, which I can hear that his his, his philosophy is is, traced back to your website too, so that’s fantastic.
Megan:
Absolutely. User experience is paramount for us and has been for a long time. Mhmm. So finding that partner that had had had alignment and that thinking was was really critical for us to transition from where we had been to where we wanted to go.
Shiro:
It’s amazing. And so this whole website redesign and reimplementation and centralization, was this one part of your strategic plan that you’d set forth 7 years ago?
Megan:
Yes. It started before the strategic plan. However, it was baked into the one that we launched previously. We just completed, the previous academic year, the strategic plan. It took us about 5 years that the rearchitecture redesign of our websites was a piece of that. We had several other, monumental achievements, one being unifying our brand under one logo. We had a rebrand within that, expanding and launching a branding campaign, beyond our traditional markets and really elevating that messaging platform. And then recruitment and comms and, user experience research.
Megan:
Just having that brand voice nailed down and training across our system communicators was a piece of that. So those are a few highlights of that strategic plan. And a lot of those projects were foundational to getting the the basics right on what we how we needed to connect with our audiences and, be strategic.
Shiro:
That’s amazing. And I know while speaking to a lot of higher ed CMOs or similar seats, you know, it’s I hear the the common struggle a lot that it’s really hard to get involved with that strategic planning process to start with. Like, how how did, OSU how how were you able to get a part of that process or be part of that plan?
Megan:
Yeah. So we are fortunate that, in summer of 2021, a new university president started. We helped with the retirement commemoration of our former president who, significantly fundraised for our buildings and our university footprint. But President Casey Schrum started July of 2021, and she was very intentional from the beginning that we needed a strategic plan for the university. Of course, COVID and conference realignment at that time were also just a challenge, so we had to deal with some of that. And, but once we got to a place where they could have those, listening sessions and kind of dig deeper on the strategic planning process, she was really focused on making that a top priority early in her presidency. So one, I think it’s having leadership that prioritizes that and give her all the credit for making that a priority and getting the right people together. And one of the things that we try to do was, you know, bolt on to that process to build buy in from the very beginning.
Megan:
Transparency and communication, timeliness and communication, as well as just engagement with all those stakeholders and thinking through, okay, you know, what input is needed and how can we help our senior administration as much as possible to, be a part of that process, from an audience standpoint, but also what insights have we seen with, with our, you know, prospective students and other audiences that would be a benefit. So, yeah, I’m I’m incredibly proud of the work that our senior administration did to to watch this amazing strategic university plan. But also, the team had a lot of fun in keeping our ear to the ground and trying to help make that process successful. And it was incredibly successful. We had a Apple style reveal launch where we had motion graphics and went live and kind of shared the nuts and bolts of of the plan, because it doesn’t sit on a shelf. It it’s living and breathing, and and she wanted it to be something that was, galvanizing for our communities. So we really tried to match her vision with, you know, connection strategies with our audiences to launch it, to help them feel engaged and empowered to take part in where we were headed.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. We’re actually going through our own brand audit exercise here at Concept 3 d, and, one of the assignments or homework assignments was to bring to the table, like, a a brand you like that does, you know, branding extremely well, and Apple was one of them. So it’s funny you mentioned that as well. I mean, I’m sure it’s on the the mind of most people, but, yeah, what a what a great brand to align to in when it comes to, you know, that cohesive and, always identifiable brand. Right? It’s it’s just Yeah. They’re just so good at it. Yep. That’s amazing.
Megan:
And and they’re successful because they keep the user first. Right? We’re humans first. Well, when we talked about David’s philosophy, I align very much with that. And Mhmm. To compel people to make a choice to connect with you or enroll or give, it’s really important to think about those experiences and interactions and, you know, curating them in a way that’s truly impactful and influential.
Shiro:
Mhmm. I’m glad you mentioned the audience, actually. As a part of that, strategic planning process and identifying your audience or, you know, the prospective students. Did did anything change? And the reason I ask is I went to AMA, and I listened to Anne Peters, speech from, yeah, University of Texas San Antonio, and they they shifted a lot of their messaging that made sure they resonated with your prospective student audience or the majority. And I thought that was really interesting. So I’m wondering if you did some audience realignment or messaging realignment towards your audience in that process as well.
Megan:
That’s a great question. You know, our university’s strategic plan is called We Are Land Grant, Uncommon Preeminence for the Common Good, and it truly aligns our strengths as an institution and the needs of our state and prospective students. So I think it starts with having a compelling vision that’s relevant and actionable, and I feel like our strategic plan addresses, not just those concerns of our audiences, but the, you know, national conversations around the value of higher ed. Well, how are we going to stay relevant? How are we going to stay forward thinking? And thankfully, our strategic plan was responsive to those concerns, and it answers those questions. So as marketers and communicators, you know, it it was gave us a really good messaging opportunity to say, hey, it’s it’s not just a tagline or a message point. It’s this plan, these things that we’re doing, are going to address student debt and and improving access, which is a core part of our land grant mission. And, you know, we have significant strengths in the areas of aerospace, one health, agriculture, energy. And, and so the strategic plan has imperatives in there to really elevate those areas and the public impact research that’s happening.
Megan:
Well, those are great messaging opportunities for us. So we have, along with launching the plan, built messaging platforms around it to, A, increase knowledge around what is land grant and why does it matter. I think prospective students are looking for impact or looking for ways to give back and and things beyond themselves. And that really aligns with who we are as an institution. And so we’ve worked on messaging around our strategic plan because it is a differentiator, I think, in our market and from a recruitment standpoint. So, yes, you know, I think promoting the plan, but also thinking about our brand voice and messaging and communications and how we show up across all mediums, that we are aligned in that messaging has certainly been a priority for us and is a part of our newly launched strategic plan. So we we kicked one off in the fall, that centers around the university’s strategic plan.
Shiro:
Awesome. And and I’m curious, you know, what has held things together when it terms in terms of, you know, when you first started the centralization process and implementing the new strategic plan? I think you mentioned a little bit about the council collaboration. Can you tell us more about that?
Megan:
What I think one of the secret sauces about OSU is our culture. So we have a central MARCOM team, which is, you know, all of our communications, colleagues, marketing colleagues, enrollment management, comms. But we also have a network of communicators across our 5 campus system, And we are decentralized in that regard. However, if you’ve learned about OCU, you know that we live by the cowboy code. So there’s, you know, a value system around how we live and work. And, ultimately, everyone is highly collaborative, even if we have different reporting lines. And that has benefited the strategic planning process, both from a university standpoint, but also for our MARC COMM strategic plan that supports it. And we have systems and, you know, recurring meetings in place to foster that collaboration.
Megan:
Because their buy in, their connectedness to what we’re doing is incredibly important. And they have a line of sight into our academic colleges, our divisions, our institutions.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Megan:
It benefits the whole. So, you know, what that looks like is when we have a big project that touches many areas, we have meetings to talk about that and we delegate projects out and, you know, work together and row in the same direction. We have recurring Marcom council meetings with the leadership from each area. And, you know, in those conversations, we talk strategy, we talk big picture, but we also get into the nuts and bolts of what’s getting in the way of success, what trends are we seeing, and have those shared conversations. So meeting with frequency and the way we work together, I think, has truly helped us to do some amazing things and centralized systems and processes when we work within a decentralized environment across the 5 campus system. The other fun thing that we love is we have a brand summit every year. And so our it’s an all day retreat for our marketers and communicators across the system to get together to, you know, set the tone and vision for the year, but also to look back. What had what worked, celebrate achievements of the group, bring in outside experts on various topics that we wanna dig deeper on in the coming year.
Megan:
And we do some breakout sessions where we let people, like, if they wanna learn more about social, we have sessions on that or, you know, media relations, things like that. So those, you know, the recurring meetings, the way we go about our projects, and transparency in that vision and strategy, and seeing them as a key stakeholder to making it happen, I think it has has been incredibly helpful for us as an institution.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. I like the Brand Summit. I I think that’s the first time I’ve heard, at least on this podcast, about that. So that’s fantastic. I is do you have an example of, like, a recent finding and solution problem solving that you’ve gone through with either the summit or the recurring meetings you have with your council?
Megan:
Oh, that is a great question. I’ll give you two answers. 1, with the brand summit, this past year was the 1st year that we did breakout sessions. And
Shiro:
Mhmm. Cool.
Megan:
We rolled out our strategic plan, the MARCON strategic plan at the summit. And I think it was really energizing in what we’ve learned from respondents because we do a survey after the fact. There if you’re a stakeholder, you know, you fill out a survey because we wanna know what what helped. They loved being able to to dive deeper into certain topics. So, you know, that was certainly something that we tried differently this year, and it worked. The Marcom Council specifically has been incredibly helpful, in times of, you know, big picture vision casting and and getting buy in because they report up to their dean or or VP and can Mhmm. In addition to the senior leadership conversations, share insights with them so that there’s, cross communication within the system. But one way that was particularly helpful was through COVID.
Megan:
It was really hard for all institutions to address that when you went virtual. Some universities had walkouts over masking and all of those things, but every time we met, we would say, okay, what are you hearing? Everyone had an ear to the ground on trends within their respective areas so that we could address that, within our internal communication strategy. And it really, really helped us as an institution to, have less issues, less concerns because we we knew what pockets of concern there were, and it was just a, you know, a cyclical flow into our internal comms strategy and help the broader group. So I think sharing insights has been an a great, byproduct of that group as well that influences the broader communications and marketing strategy.
Shiro:
Thanks for sharing that. That’s, yeah, super helpful. I think breakout sessions. Anytime you can collaborate and maybe, you know, have more peer to peer discussions on what can be improved, it’s it’s paramount, I think. And you just gave a great example of a question I wanted to ask next, which is, you know, bringing data to the table, any insights you’ve gained and learned over time. But, yeah, what what advice let’s say we have someone similar in your seat, but they’re really having a hard time advocating for getting marketing and brand involved in strategic planning. What what advice do you have to sort of get the ball rolling or tie the right people together?
Megan:
One thing that we did early on is find alliances and connections outside of your division or org laterally. I think that’s really important that you do the best you can to strike relationships and make connections with people. It benefits the university to have those strong relationships in place. You know, if there’s a pocket that’s been historically hard, don’t shy away from it. Embrace it. Ask questions.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Megan:
The other thing is for your senior leadership and executive cabinet, don’t assume that they know the insights that you know. Right? So communicate often, the value that your team is bringing, the things around the corner that you see coming that as an institution they need to be aware of or be conscious of. You know, provide insights for them that would be helpful for them in, helping move your university forward. I think adding value is incredibly important because they’re continually getting that whenever there is a strategic planning process or a big project, they’re going to want your insight in that process. So I think it starts with just, you know, intentional outreach and thinking about what they need to know to be successful and that you’re a pipeline for that. You mentioned data. Staying grounded in data and trends and insights is imperative for CMOs. It should influence your strategic plans, but also the universities because the world is rapidly moving, and our consumer needs are changing.
Megan:
And those trends and insights, what we know today may not be the same in a year. And if we continue the same processes and operations based on old data, you know, it’s a good way to become obsolete.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. Yeah. I think I think I’ll end it there because, like, that is I’m gonna write a headline with with what you just said there, that finishing sentence. Yeah. So we’re just at about time. I’m wondering where our listeners could follow-up with you and learn more about what you’re doing at OSU.
Megan:
Yeah. Well, first, make sure to follow Oklahoma State University on social and learn more about our land grant institution at okstate.edu. You and connect with me on LinkedIn at, linkedin.com/meganhorton. We’d love to connect, and feel free to reach out anytime.
Shiro:
That’s awesome. Oh, do you actually have a plug for the the radio? The award winning radio station is
Megan:
Oh, yes. Yes. Okay. Sorry. I wanna make sure. I’m going off script here, but I’m gonna pull some
Shiro:
No worries. I just think it’s so cool that you’re involved in that process. It’s like, I I don’t know the right metaphor to describe it, but it it feels like full circle with marketing that you you have this thing that you do, that’s not traditionally a part of that marketing comms, but it’s it is a part of it. Right? Because it is marketing and communications.
Megan:
Yeah. So a core part of our land grant mission is sharing information and helping the public. And our public radio station KOSU is a key part of that. You can listen in and visit their website at kosu.org. They also have a daily news podcast you can subscribe to. I highly recommend following their award winning coverage of not just issues that are happening within Oklahoma, but nationally.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. Yeah. Make sure to go check them out. Thank you so much, Megan, for joining us today. It’s been an awesome conversation, and thanks for sharing all those, you know, relevant examples. So really appreciate you.
Megan:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Have a great day.
