Blog Recap:
We’re excited to bring you practical advice on this episode tailored especially for those of you working in smaller and regional institutions. Our guest, the always insightful Bart Caylor, shared some gems on how to level up your marketing game.
So, what’s topping the SEO charts this year, according to Semrush? It’s all about web visits, engagement rate, and content quality. If you’ve been stressing over the dozens of technical aspects of SEO, here’s your green flag to refocus. Dive into creating engaging content and driving more traffic to see your rankings skyrocket.
Bart highlighted the ultimate hack: Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. A blog post can become an eBook, and a long-form video can be chopped into snackable social media posts. Why create more when you can maximize what you’ve already got?
Your college website is basically your MVP (Most Valuable Player), acting as the face of your institution. It needs to do more than look pretty. Answer those burning questions potential students have: Do I fit in here? Are my preferred majors offered? Can I afford it? Make it vibrant with visuals, videos, testimonials, and social proof to reduce any friction your users might face.
Did you know traditional undergrads prefer scannable and visually appealing content? Think about infusing more videos into your platform. Oh, and Google? They love it when you regularly update content around a core subject like education. You’re looking at better visibility and lead generation.
Besides beefing up your content, think about exploring pay-per-click ads, guerilla marketing, and resources like books, blogs, and podcasts to stay relevant.
Bart’s strategy? Survey your current and graduating students. Understand what drew them to your school and what they value the most. Shape your marketing around these insights. And always aim to target “mission-fit students.” You don’t need everyone, just the right ones.
Read the transcription
Shiro:
Hi, 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 Spotify, Apple, and Google. My name is Shiro Hattori, and I’ll be your host today. And I’m super excited to talk about how to find your mission fit students, practical advice for smaller and regional institutions. And as a guest, I’m really, really, really excited to introduce Bart Koehler, who’s gonna be joining us today. Bart is the president and founder of Kaylor Solutions, book author and cohost of the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. Welcome to the show, Bart.
Bart Caylor:
Hey, Shar. Thanks so much for having me. This is a pleasure to be here.
Shiro:
Fantastic. And I actually forgot to introduce this to you before we started the recording today, but I do have an icebreaker that I ask all my guests, which is what do you love about higher ed?
Bart Caylor:
Oh, that’s a great question. I am a lifelong learner. And so just the idea of being in a industry that is all about learning is something that, that I love about higher education. And so not only, you know, being able to learn about clients, but and and and, you know, the situations out there, but also being able to learn things and bring that bring that to the, to the conversation, I think, is something I really enjoy.
Shiro:
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. So, well, let’s jump in. I’d love to learn a little bit more about your background. Given this is actually our first call, this is, like, super relevant for me right now. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me how you got to where you are today.
Bart Caylor:
Well, I think as most of your audience would appreciate, no one, you know, when they ask as a kid, hey. What do you wanna do when you grow up? You know, it’s usually, like, fireman, lawyer, and then, you know, no one ever says, oh, I wanna be a higher ed administrator or a higher ed marketer. No one knows what that is until you kinda back into it. And so that that’s the same for me. I mean, when I was in college, I went to a small, faith based school, Anderson University in the in Indiana. And, I was a 1st gen student. I had no idea how to go to college. You know, no one in my family did.
Bart Caylor:
And so, you know, my my world existed of the school that was in my city, which was Anderson and the local regional nearby public, which was Ball State. And so that was my that was my world. And as a 1st generation student, I I knew I wanted to go to college. I didn’t know how to get there. I had I had the grades, so I was fortunate enough to get a get a scholarship and and be able to, you know, go to go to my first choice with Anderson. But it was one of those things that, you know, even during school, I I I studied to be a graphic designer and I was a business minor and but during, during school, I had an opportunity to be in the admissions department. So I served on what they called camp teams. So I would go out in the summer and represent the school at different summer camps.
Bart Caylor:
And I was like the summer camp counselor for the week, and then we would, you know, get in the get in the school car and drive to the next camp. And, you know, it was all over the country. So it was a it was an exhausting summer. I did that 2 years in a row and and then they would have a youth convention on campus. And so I would kind of help do emcee that and do some things, you know, fun things with with the youth groups and stuff. And so I always had this desire to be around admissions, you know, even even in college. I you know, that was part of my job on campus. But then as I, you know, started my career, got into the corporate world, started doing a lot of websites.
Bart Caylor:
You know, I did my first website in 1994 and, had an opportunity to kind of, you know, flex in the digital marketing and kinda get get down that road in addition to the print that I was doing. And and my alma mater called in 1998 and said, hey. We see you’re doing websites for, like, Motorola and RCA. Could you help us with 1 for, for a school? We think that might be something that students are gonna wanna start seeing is is websites. So we did the first website for Anderson University and, you know, the Chronicle of Higher Education picked it up and US News or World Report wrote an article about it. And, all of a sudden, we start getting phone calls. You know, people are like, hey. Could you help us? So I had a chance to do a lot of other, small to medium sized school websites.
Bart Caylor:
I worked on Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business. And so really started kind of picking up in the early 2000. And and, and by 2,000, you know, 10, I really was kind of feeling the itch that even though I loved, you know, the work that I was doing with Motorola, with RCA, with, you know, large pharmaceuticals and and big brands, I really loved doing the higher ed stuff more than anything else. It really was rewarding for me to make you know, instead of selling the next TV or cell phone, I’m helping, you know, get students into a a place that’s gonna be a good fit for them, that they’re gonna be able to, you know, grow themselves as well as prepare for a career. And then that just felt a lot better about about things. And so I I decided in 2010 to start my own company called Kaylor Solutions, to just focus entirely on on education marketing. And so, so we’ve been doing that for about, you know, going on our 15th year now. And so I’m just really proud of the team that we have, that we continue to serve clients.
Bart Caylor:
And, and and as I’ve learned a lot over the years, even, you know, going back to the nineties of doing higher education marketing through websites, it just felt like I had finally had a lot to say. And so that’s why I wrote the book was just kinda, you know, hey. I’ve got a lot to say and there’s a lot of small schools that that I would love to serve, but I I I can’t sometimes. And so maybe if I put it in a book, that would be helpful.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. Yeah. That was gonna be my next question in in terms of, you know, why did you start putting the book. That’s great. I I’m actually unfamiliar. So is this KLR Solutions you’ve been in business for 15 years now. Does it focus mostly on on website, or do you offer other services too?
Bart Caylor:
We offer the the full gamut. So we’ll do everything from websites to, enrollment to comm flows to search campaigns to, you know, printed materials. Really about anything that would be within the, you know, the marketing realm, we can take care of. We also partner with other firms that, you know, if you need to have, you know, a a pay per click campaign, we’ve got a a firm that we partner with really tightly to help with that. But we’ve got about 35 people on our team that can can do all kinds of different aspects of the of the marketing journey. So that’s, that’s that’s a little bit about Kahler Solutions.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And I’d imagine, like, you know, your roots started in website, but you quickly found, like, all these other parts of marketing and HireRight are all connected and intertwined. And so it it was probably only natural that those services became
Bart Caylor:
I mean, really, my my roots were truly in print. I mean, that’s what I
Shiro:
Oh, print. Right. Right.
Bart Caylor:
That’s what I did. I mean but it was you know, I was at a print press check one night with my boss at 1994 and said, hey. I think this web stuff might be something we ought to figure out and learn. And he told me, well, that’s a fad. Don’t worry about that. And and then he went and sold the website and I had to figure out how to do it and and he was like, oh, well, we’ll get it figured out. But anyway, that, you know, I I’ve always been one to kinda get thrown in the deep end or maybe I jump in the deep end, I should say. And I did that with the web.
Bart Caylor:
I did that with social media. You know, I remember talking to a school in, you know, in 2004 about this new web 2.0 thing. You know? I said, hey. Mark my word. When Facebook goes public this September, it’s gonna change. And they’re like, why? Who cares about that stuff? They Myspace was the only thing people knew about. And then that changed and then not too long after that, it was all about digital marketing and pay per click. And so I’ve kind of always been on the edge of of all that.
Bart Caylor:
I’m currently on the edge of the AI revolution as well. And so so I’ve kind of always taken, you know, taken to that where it gets me excited. It goes back to being a lifelong learner. I I love learning new things. And and right now, AI is the new thing for me to learn.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. Yeah. I’m trying to constantly dabble and find new tools to make things efficient and better for myself, so I love that. And interesting you mentioned, Mendoza as well for, Notre Dame because I’ve had Brian. I he he probably wasn’t even working there when you worked with Notre Dame, but I had their director of admissions who’s responsible of their website on the show here as well. So Yeah.
Bart Caylor:
Yeah. Great great school.
Shiro:
Great school. And I know that the good work you left there is doing well because website is still one of its biggest lead generators. So
Bart Caylor:
Good.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. Well, great. Well, like, let’s jump into your book a little bit. So I did get to recap a lot of the the points of your book, recently. And, you know, I think a big takeaway for me was, you know, starting out with finding out what’s unique about your institution and finding your mission fit students. Are those the same thing, or which comes first, like, in your in your perspective?
Bart Caylor:
Yeah. It is kind of a little bit of a chicken egg thing, isn’t it? Where you kind of like, you know, hey. Do we find the mission fit students first or do we figure out who we are first? What I typically say and how I how I unpack it in the book is that you really have to start with who you are as an institution, and that’s already there. It’s just uncovering it. I think the problem is a lot of institutions, in in the in the desire and the run up to try to, you know, increase enrollment and and and kind of address the enrollment cliff. And, you know, a lot of a lot of schools, especially small to middle sized schools are really struggling with with hitting the numbers. And so in that rush to do that, they try to be all things to everybody. And so they just kinda cast this wide net to say, hey.
Bart Caylor:
Come to us for your MBA or do this or whatever. And the problem is is that if you’re just a part of the noise and so you end up competing against, you know, people that are, you know, you know, nothing against the big ones. But like Southern New Hampshire, you’re gonna start if you’re an online program, you’re competing against them all of a sudden. And if there’s nothing that’s differentiating you from them, it’s a race to the bottom because they’re gonna have more money to spend on their ads and their on their pay per click than than you will. And so I really think it’s worth the the exercise and a lot of it’s it’s a little bit branding. It’s a little bit common sense, but it’s kind of just figuring out what are we known for, what is the the thing that’s different about us. And, you know, I talked to a lot of small schools, especially small faith based schools, and they’re like, well, we are a, you know, we’re a Christian school in the Midwest that has a, you know, 14 to 1 student ratio, and we have community. And the the professors are like mentors.
Bart Caylor:
Every single school like you can say that. And they always think that that’s their unique selling proposition of the USP if you get into your your business background. And so what I try to do is I try to say, okay. Yes. That’s the way you might be separate from the community college or the flagship state school. But what’s the next level down? What what is it that no one else can say that that you do? Maybe it’s something special about some of your professors. Maybe it’s a tradition that you have. Maybe it’s your location.
Bart Caylor:
There’s a ton of different things. And so just kind of figuring out what is it that we have that’s our secret sauce. It’s our special sauce that that you put all this stuff together and that’s makes up who we are. And so once you figure that out, my belief is that once you figure out exactly who you are and you can start to articulate that through your marketing and your messaging, Well, now all of a sudden it’s like, okay, you reverse engineer and you say, what are the students who kind of want that? Who if I look at our alumni and everything else and I say those are the students that really have been the most successful students and you create personas around who they are, then you start to define who your mission fit student is, and then you can say, where are those mission fit students? What are their watering holes? How how do they think? What are they looking at? What are their parents like? You start creating really tight personas around those people. And now all of a sudden, instead of sending out to everybody, you might say, you know what? We know where the watering holes are for those students. We’re gonna go to those watering holes to start, you know, marketing to them only. Because a lot of times I’ll hear board members or some of the senior staff say, one, we’re not seeing into the advertising. We’re not we’re not doing enough.
Bart Caylor:
Well, if you’re not seeing pay per click advertising, that’s a good thing because you’re not the audience. I wanna only talk to, you know, 17 year olds that are in this watering hole on TikTok. If my board member doesn’t is isn’t like, hey, we need more billboards because I’m not seeing our advertising. That’s a waste of your money, and I get into that in the book. So you gotta be willing to kind of deal with that as well. But then the other the other flip of the coin on that is the fact that you’ve got to really start to identify those mission fit students and and be okay, you know, being very clear with who you are because you wanna make sure that the people self select. I mean, if you’re a a faith based institution, you’re going after everyone and somebody shows up on campus and, wow, I’m surprised we got chapel. What’s that about? You wanna make sure that that you that you’re kind of authentic and going after mission fit students.
Bart Caylor:
You’re gonna have better yield and you’re gonna have a better experience for everyone along the path.
Shiro:
And I’d imagine, like, you’d make better use of your budget too because you know who you’re talking to. Your audience is defined. And so you’ll you’ll get more bang for your buck. Right?
Bart Caylor:
Yeah. And I and I believe that there are enough students out there that want to go to your school. They want what you have. The problem is they just don’t know about you yet. And that’s why, you know, marketing that’s gonna be discoverable, whether that’s in search engine optimization, whether it’s pay per click, whether it’s in, you know, social media. I mean, there’s a ton of different ways to get the word out to be discovered, but it requires being more creative and it requires to be a little bit more, willing to take some risks, calculated risks because it’s really safe to be able to say that, well, you know, nobody’s gonna get fired for doing this, but it it’s it’s ineffective. It’s not a good stewardship of the budget.
Shiro:
That’s that’s great advice. And do you, like, start right when you say finding the mission fit students or the the students that reflect your school’s identity and brand? Like, does that just start with a huge survey process? Like, how do you, like, tactically approach that?
Bart Caylor:
It does it does start with, survey. It starts with asking current students. It’s asking, you know, those seniors that are graduating, hey. What what did you like most about this place? What what drew you here to begin with? What what do you feel like as you walk away that you really got here that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere? It’s it’s just asking a lot of questions. I mean, and I think sometimes people get scared when you talk about surveys or research or market research. It’s like, oh, we don’t have the budget to do that. Actually, you do. It’s it’s a matter of just going to the dining hall and asking people questions.
Bart Caylor:
It’s it’s having conversation. I remember on my Yeah. On my, podcast, we had Mary Barr, who at the time was the vice president of Ball State University. And one of her things that she would do every year at orientation and first time that students came on campus is that she would pull about 20 of them aside, have pizza for them, and just ask them questions. Why did you choose us over somebody else? Why did you do this? You know, she would actually just ask them questions. It wasn’t formalized. It was just a conversation over pizza. But she said every year by doing that, that helped her hone her message even tighter because that’s as as soon as they are there, that’s as raw as you’re gonna get them to be able to articulate why they decided to come here because they haven’t started classes.
Bart Caylor:
They haven’t started anything else yet, but you can actually start to figure out what is it that they think about you that they that has drawn them to you.
Shiro:
Sometimes I do think. Even working in digital marketing myself, like, we always overthink the problem. Like, oh, like, we don’t know which ad set we’re gonna test out, and so we have to, you know, spend all this time strategizing and seeing you know, thinking of what’s gonna work best when we could just make, like, a free organic post and it costs nothing, and we can, you know, figure out things by just asking people what they think. And so that’s that’s fantastic.
Bart Caylor:
Great.
Shiro:
Switching gears a little bit. Right? Still focused on things that you point out in your book, Chasing Mission Fit. But I I took 3 pillars from, your book out of the many points given, and they’re definitely gonna be focused more around the website because I love talking about websites. And I know that’s a fundamental part of Kayla Solutions as well. But I’d love to ask, you know, first, around enrollment driven websites. How critical is this to an institution, and what are some great examples of maybe clients you’ve worked with that, have done a good job at really driving enrollment through the website?
Bart Caylor:
Yeah. So let me let me back up for just a second because those three points are kind of you know, my my philosophy of of higher education marketing is kind of the 3 legged stool. I mean, everybody, it’s an overused analogy, but, you know, bear with me for a second as I kind of explain my my reason
Shiro:
for it.
Bart Caylor:
So, you know, if you’re gonna do successful higher education marketing, you’ve gotta have kind of 3 legs to the stool. If you don’t have one of them, it’s not gonna work. So some people might, you know so the three elements are an enrollment driven website, and I’ll I’ll talk about that in a moment. Well, actually, I’ll talk about it now. Enrollment driven website means that everything on your website is focused toward the goal of driving enrollment. That’s not to say that you don’t have a give button. It’s not to say you don’t have alumni section. It’s not to say that you don’t have, you know, a a a current student’s area that they can go to in a portal.
Bart Caylor:
The the challenge is is that back in the day when I first started doing higher ed websites in the late nineties, the website was kinda like, oh, just put it up on the website. Just just throw it up on the website. It became the catch off for everything. Well, today, we have specific systems for a lot of different things. We’ve got SISs. We’ve got CRMs. We’ve got, you know, portals. We’ve got, you know, learning management systems, LMSs.
Bart Caylor:
And so there’s all these specialized areas, and so some content can go live in a different place and it doesn’t have to be on the website. That frees up a lot more of your website to truly be enrollment driven with the idea of driving net revenue. And so for the vast majority of the people that are listening to this as well as the small to medium sized schools in in the North America, that is gonna be driven on enrollment. The you’re gonna the net revenue is gonna come from enrollment. 95% of the budget is gonna come from enrollment, you know, and it’s supplemented by advancement. If it’s not if it’s not that high and you’ve got, like, a 5050, you’re not healthy because you’re you’re, you know, you’re under you’re not getting enough students and you’re relying on all your donors to support everything. So that’s the first is an enrollment driven website. The second leg is, a content.
Bart Caylor:
So content is kind of that second leg, and that content engine gets put on the website to increase search engine optimization, to increase to reduce the friction on the website so that when people are, you know, trying to answer the questions that they have, they can find those answers. And so we all start with a question. That’s why Google is so popular. It’s the number one number one page on the Internet is because people start with a question. What’s, you know, what kind of refrigerator should I buy? What’s the best deal for this? They they start with a question, and they do the same thing in higher education. They start with how much is it gonna cost? How can I can I afford this? How do I do the FAFSA? They have all these questions. And so if you can develop your content around answering those questions in the unique way that you do, all of a sudden, you become a helpful resource for them rather than just a list of facts and figures about your institution. And so content becomes a really important engine for the website and for other ways to get people to the website and to the content.
Bart Caylor:
And then the third element is some kind of lead generation or some kind of way to drive traffic and kind of move them around. And so, you know, pay per click is a popular way to do that. So driving people to the website and the content to help them take the next step. Search engine optimization. So there’s a lot of different ways of doing that. So so those are kind of the 3 ways. But kind of getting to your question about, you know, unpacking more about that enrollment website, I I think that once you kind of get the idea that, yes, we have to drive enrollment and the website is the number one way to do that. First off, studies and research and just common sense says that the website is your number one marketing tool.
Bart Caylor:
It is the way that people are going to either validate what they’ve heard about you. So if they’ve never heard about you and somebody says, hey, you ought to go check out x, y, z university. The first thing they’re going to do is go to x, y, z university.edu and check it out. That’s just the way it works. They I mean, they might go to the social media page, but more than likely, they’re gonna start with the website. They’re also going to, you know, go to the website if they’re trying to find an answer. So they’re gonna go there and do a search or they’re gonna use a chatbot or whatever it is. They’re gonna go to the website.
Bart Caylor:
The website is the number one place. And so if your website is subpar or has a lot of friction on it that causes too much frustration, There’s, you know, 3 basic questions people are asking on the website when they come to it. It’s like, am I gonna fit into this place? Do they have my major, and can I afford it? And there’s a lot of ways to get those those messages across through visuals, through video, through, content, through testimonials and social proof, all kinds of ways to answer some of those questions. But wherever you don’t answer those questions or whenever you start to create friction because you make it difficult to answer those questions. Like, one of the questions, can I afford this? But as soon as you publish all of your tuition data right out of the college catalog and it’s all in cost per credit hour, which nobody except academics understands, you’ve just blown it. You’ve just you’ve just created friction that wastes the time of the student. It’s kinda like, you know, go into IKEA to buy a table, and it’s priced at purse you know, the prices per square foot rather than just the price of the table and the chairs. Students want an education.
Bart Caylor:
They wanna know, hey, I’ve got money. I wanna know what’s it gonna cost per semester or for the full year or per term or whatever I’m doing. They don’t wanna figure it out based on doing math. And so you’ve gotta make it really easy. And so when I look at at websites, I always look at those things of how how am I answering those questions? Is it easy? Is it is it also, you know, designed and created in a way that is for the end users? So most, you know, most colleges are gonna be serving traditional undergrad students. And so you’re talking about Gen z’s and Gen Alpha’s. They don’t like to read very much. Video is their preference of ways to consume information.
Bart Caylor:
If they are gonna read, it’s and everybody likes to read with bullets and be able to scan. People don’t read websites. They scan them, and then they go back. If they found the information, then they’ll go back and read it in more detail. So you can’t have really thick, long paragraphs of content. I mean, the last thing you wanna do is ask your faculty to write your your blog your pages or a blog post for that matter. You it needs to be marketing. And and one thing that I’ve been teaching people is like, hey.
Bart Caylor:
If you’ve got faculty written content, create a a custom GPT and run it through chat GPT to summarize it and get it down to bullet points so they can be, you know, sub sub bullets and subheads and all that. So so those are some of the successes that I always look at when I when I’m, you know, either analyzing a website or assessing 1 or actually having our team put one together is we always like to make sure that we are focused on the end user and we’re answering those questions and that we’ve got plenty of social proof, and and it’s very easy to to navigate and get around.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And is the idea that if you have those three things in place, right, you’re answering questions, your content’s, stellar, and you have the information that people are looking for, what if your traffic to your website isn’t, like, where you want it to be? So, like, the con no one’s seeing this content. Like, how do you figure out what content to market to students from your website? Or maybe you have to create new creative, but, like, moving beyond just what’s located on your website, like, how do you get more people in the store, basically?
Bart Caylor:
So it gets back to that 3rd leg of driving driving traffic Yeah. Lead generation. And and that’s a really good question. I think that a lot of times, people underestimate the power of regularly updated content on your website. Google’s algorithm rewards websites that update content regularly and that the content is around a central subject. Every every university has a central subject of learning of of education. So you’ve already got that part done. The point is is that most schools don’t do the discipline of actually creating regular updated content.
Bart Caylor:
And when I talk about regular updated content, I’m talking about, like, in the form of a blog. And whenever I talk about that to to schools, the first thing somebody says, oh, yeah. We tried a blog a few years ago. Nobody read it. It’s like, well, I don’t really I’m not creating a blog. I’m creating updated content because at the end of the day, I don’t really care if people read it. I care if Google reads it. And if Google reads it and puts it at the top of number 1 on the on the page for that specific keyword so let’s say that you’ve got a criminal justice program and maybe you have something very unique where you’ve got a partnership with the FBI.
Bart Caylor:
Figure out what is the question people ask about criminal justice. You know, write a blog post answering that question. You know, check off all the boxes of how you write the blog with keywords. I mean, if you’re using a tool like WordPress, there’s there’s tools like, Yoast SEO that basically is kind of like a, you know, red light, green light that, hey, I’ve got all the right things in my blog post to, you know, check all the boxes for Google. Once you do that blog post, we’ll just keep doing that on a weekly basis. I mean, one one idea I give a lot of my clients is, like, sit down with your admissions team and say, what are the top fifty questions people ask us about our institution? You can do that over lunch, and they will give you that in 20 minutes. Then you’ve got you know, you just flip it around. You write an essay about each one of those using, you know, using keywords and some some, you know, very, you know, bulleted language and everything that’s scannable.
Bart Caylor:
You’ve just done a year’s worth of content because you just publish 1 per week. And I’ve I’ve worked with clients that have done that strategy, and then, you know, after a couple months, you’re still showing up as number 1 on Google for those those questions people are asking. You’ve got the answer. You put a nice real good call to action at the bottom of that blog post. Now you’ve got people discovering your institution through your website and through your content, and they can have a very easy way to take the next step. Maybe there’s an incentive to take the step. Maybe there’s something else, but that discoverability through search engine optimization is the way to do it. And I so many times I talk with schools that, you know, they are hiring these big search engine optimization firms that are, you know, fussing around with the back end, you know, constantly.
Bart Caylor:
And nothing against those guys. I mean, I know that search engine optimization is made up of 3 points. It’s made up of content, you know, technical aspects and backlinks. Google puts the most weight on content, And you don’t have to hire a huge expert to do that. You just you just have to be disciplined to do it. And so that’s one of the ways that you can drive it. Another way that you can drive it is through pay per click, obviously. That’s my last selection sometimes because I think it is the fastest way to go.
Bart Caylor:
So if you don’t have the time to build organically and you gotta do something fast, pay per click and and, you know, Google Ads and and social media ads, meta ads, that’s the way to go. I I really like to do that to drive drive traffic as well. Sometimes I think just kind of creative, ways of doing it, some guerilla marketing. You know, I was talking to somebody this week about you really wanna try to zig when everybody else is zagging and and or zag when everybody else is zigging. Whatever that is, you wanna do something different. And so if you can do something that’s disruptive, I mean, next time you go to a college fair, what if you put your table at the back of the booth rather than at the front and you don’t sit behind it, you stand beside it? Just that alone is gonna change the dynamic of your booth compared to everybody else. Maybe make it a little bit more inviting. Maybe you make it a little bit friendlier.
Bart Caylor:
It’s just trying to differentiate yourself not only in who you are, but also in the way you present yourself. So there’s just a ton of ways to do that, and I think that I think that getting creative, you know, talking with with partners, looking at resources, whether it’s my book or blog or podcast or your podcast, just trying to constantly stay fresh and up to and relevant is really what’s gonna help people kind of survive the enrollment cliff and and kind of make make a difference in your marketing.
Shiro:
Yeah. There’s so much to unpack in what you just said. I mean, in regards to SEO, I think Semrush, like, one of my favorite SEO agent or tools out there, releases a publication around, like, what they think affects SEO ranking the most every year, and the top three lines are, like, web visits, engagement rate, and, like, content. And the technical aspects are far, far below. Like, they do make an impact, but if you’re dry able to drive more traffic, create good content where people will stay engaged, like, time per time on page and pages per session, that will boost you up on the ranking according to Semrush. And so, like, again, to what you said, like, focusing on those pillars will help you improve your SEO without having to, you know, really, like, try and focus on technical little adjustments that I feel like in the long run don’t make as big of an impact. So that’s great. And asking questions to your faculty, like, I think you had the example to ask 50 or ask your staff to come up with 50 questions, write blogs about that, take that top performer, and now you can probably turn that into some sort of paid acquisition ad as a topic because, you know, your your students are asking those questions.
Shiro:
So maybe you can take that same process of asking questions and formulate a a a PPC plan from that as well.
Bart Caylor:
Oh, yeah. And and one of my favorite things to do with content is is to, make sure it’s evergreen and then syndicate it. So, I mean, once you have, like, a blog post, take 5 blog posts and turn it into an ebook. And then, you know, take 6 ebooks and turn it into a printed book. I mean, you can take a podcast and turn it into a blog post. I mean, you can start shuffling things around because they they’re dynamic. If they’re evergreen, you can kind of recycle them over and over again and turn them into new things as opposed to I mean, you can take a long form video and run it through a tool like OpusClip and turn it into, you know, small vertical, you know, social media posts that go viral, you know, with a push of the button now. So there’s there’s no reason not to be able to kinda keep delving deep into content.
Shiro:
That’s amazing. Well, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap things up. I’m wondering where our listeners could connect with you and learn more about you, Bar, as well as where they can find your book as well.
Bart Caylor:
Yeah. So, probably the best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn. It’s just Bart Koehler. You can also follow Kaylor Solutions and and the higher ed marketer there, but Bart Kaylor is kinda my where I publish the most and, and and have a lot of followers there. You can certainly reach out to me at kaylor@kaylorhyphensolutions.com is my email. And I think beyond that, you can get my book just about anywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You could probably order it through your campus bookstore. It’s just about anywhere you can get, your books.
Bart Caylor:
We do have a study guide coming out. We’ve got a lot of schools that have been reading it and, been asking for a a study guide that they can do as a group project this summer. And so that should be available here in the next week or so as well.
Shiro:
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much again for joining our show, and thank you for our audience for listening in. Please catch us in the next one.
Bart Caylor:
Thank you.
