What’s New in Digital Marketing? 5 Quick Takeaways

My colleague Scott Jeffe recently asked me to do a blog for the upcoming newsletter. When I asked if he had a specific topic in mind, he said, “How about an update on what is going on with digital marketing?” To put it mildly, this is a pretty broad topic. As I thought about what would be most helpful for our readers to know, I decided to focus on a couple of the mega-trends that I think of as more “long-term” and a couple of the latest developments that I think of as short-term and tactical.

I had a great conversation with Scott in the “RNL@Home” interview embedded here, but I wanted to summarize some of our conversation as well:

• Many institutions and programs have changed their digital marketing priorities from a focus on generating as many leads as possible at the lowest possible cost to generating higher quality leads that are most likely to convert—even if they generate fewer and at a higher cost. This has had an impact on the systems that we have to have in place to track leads throughout the funnel.
• Digital marketing teams are much more focused on best practices in how to nurture each lead through the entire enrollment funnel to ensure that the largest possible percentage convert to enrolled students. This has made our teams think long and hard about those touch points that are most likely to move prospective students to the next point in the enrollment journey.
• Program guides, guides through the admissions process, and similar content are some of the most effective ways to keep prospects engaged with our client institutions. Genuine engagement is just as important in online nurturing as it is in the online classroom.
• Continuing to try to engage those that seem to drop out of the funnel is an important strategy. Those who submitted a lead that didn’t apply and those who started but didn’t complete an application continue to be rich targets for enrollment and strategies need to be in place to tailor engagement to their situations.
• OTT (Over The Top) television has emerged as one of latest highly effective marketing channel. In OTT, rather than promoting straight from broadcast television, we’re actually able to use the devices that are facilitating a television that has an internet connection (Xbox, Sling, Apple TV, Roku, etc.) They can actually get much more granular with our targeting that’s available when comparing to broadcast television. What makes this really cool is that, unlike broadcast television, we can actually tie engagement from our OTT campaign to what we’re actually seeing in the response and the digital efforts.

  This is even more important given stats on those “cutting the cord.” Over just this last year, there has been a 30 percent increase in cord cutters from 2020, and also an uptick of 49 percent in OTT CTV ads.

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