What are you using new marketing data to get a better understanding of?

Video Transcription

Joe Charlson : I’m using new data to better understand our markets, our market opportunity, our return on our marketing dollar, but also how to make our students more successful. We continue to evolve in new and interesting ways to say where is the best location for Brown Mackie College. Where’s the next best location for South University campus in Art Institute satellite or new market opportunity.

We’re using it to understand which program should we roll out and introduce in which markets, so trying to in a virtuous cycle match employer demand with student interest. We’re also using it as I mentioned to say where is the next best investment for our marketing dollar in the classic marketing pipeline from awareness to conversion. There’s a plethora and we use it to optimize. We are direct response marketers, but we also spend money on brand, building awareness and we’re using it there. And finally and most importantly, to help identify which student segments could be helped and assisted by differential application of student support. So, looking at for at risk populations and figuring out new ways to help them be more successful in their pursuit over academic degrees. So, persisting, graduating and achieving their goals.

One of the more important way of using new data is to understand the effectiveness of our advertising efforts. Traditional direct response marketing has focused on the last conversion point in given full attribution to the last conversion. But we know that education is a highly considered purchase, it’s among the most considered of all purchases and it’s one of the most important investments that a person can make. It’s important for us to understand, how did the person first hear about us and what interactions led to ultimately engaging deeper with us in a deeper conversation and ultimately becoming a new student. So we look at the variety of metrics and try to get at understand assist behavior and truly what’s working and what’s not. This involves new levels of data sharing with our partners, new levels of data generation, lead scoring models, predictive analytics.

There’s a whole lot of special sauce baked into how we best optimize spend.