Speaker 1 (00:00:10):
Hello, everybody. Welcome Sterling. How are you doing this morning? Doing great. Good, excellent morning. You're willing to, and open to sharing some tried and true insights in terms of the generation. And yeah, I think there's gonna be some great stuff for people that not only that they can learn from, but also they can take with them and continue to grow their knowledge and move forward with, from what we showed them today. Cool. And Tash welcome aboard. You're going to be called upon to speak to anything around lead conversion, specifically that that chasms of death, that's just where marketing ends and admissions begins. There's so much revenues is leaking and so nine ways to immediately increase lead flow during the pandemic. So the pandemic is a headwind as much, maybe not the pre pandemic per se, but what it's doing to labor markets, hiring markets, people wanting to go back to school.

Speaker 1 (00:01:14):
People retiring. The whole labor market is just moving. And in flux and career schools, we have both a challenges and a tremendous opportunity to go and really tap in to all this movement in the labor continuum. So we're going to go and give you some practical tips today and get your pen out or your pad or your remarkable or whatever you may have and just take tons of notes. And then at the very end, what we're going to do is for those that are interested, we'll just show you some software that will create an immediate lift in your revenue, your lead flow off your website. You don't have to hang for that obviously, but if you're interested, you can hang out after this presentation. So without further ado, we're going to move to the first. So what you see here is a website and this website came into us as a number of years ago, a two and a half percent optimizing your website. Jody, maybe you could ask all the folks to put their, put themselves on mute.

Speaker 2 (00:02:40):
Sorry. I had myself on mute trait there. Yes, please. Wouldn't mind hitting the mute button button because although I know we are all looking at making this a great experience. Sometimes things happen in the background that we can

Speaker 1 (00:02:52):
Like airplanes and Madonna is in the building or what have you. So let's proceed. So we're going to go through a number of these and you guys. The first one is, let me just ask Tash this dash, if you're taking a brochure to the printer, would you take that brochure to the printer without your phone number on the brochure?

Speaker 3 (00:03:21):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 1 (00:03:22):
Absolutely not. So I think if the folks who are on this call go back to their website, some of you may find detach that there are no, there's no prominent phone numbers. And given phone numbers convert at 15%, if somebody phones in on an inbound lead to me, it seems crazy. You want to speak to that?

Speaker 3 (00:03:48):
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you want the opportunity for live contact, you know, how much of us, you know, get frustrated with all the chase, all the chase, all the chase, and here you got an opportunity to have it come right in edge.

Speaker 1 (00:04:01):
Yeah. And they make people work their butt off to go and have the privilege of giving you $20,000 to go to school with it. That's sarcasm by the way, everybody. So number two this is a bit of a head fake and and number two is actually not this headline Sterling, but it's the word get? So folks, the story is, is that we, we tested KTL and Humphreys was testing landing pages and she's she tested the word, get, get the skills where versus, Hey, become this or different phraseologies to talk to people about getting into medical billing and coding as a profession where get so Sterling, what happened to the, the unique visitor to lead ratio when Katie added in that word get to the headline?

Speaker 4 (00:05:04):
Well, yeah, w we saw a measurable, significant increase and it's crazy because get, seems like such a basic word, but it's a powerful word because it tells me it's a is action, action word, right. Tells people what will happen. And the, just to take a step further, I love this headline too, because you're able to use the outcome in it, the program in it while at the same time as a hundred percent compliant, because you're not guaranteeing anything you're talking about getting the skills to be. So that's another reason why that's such a powerful headline. You've got the conversion improvement and the fact that it's so strong headline that is a hundred percent compliant.

Speaker 1 (00:05:41):
Right. And so Tash, what happens is there there's a, the stat on that is, is 29 to 37% improvement in unique visitor to filling out this form on the right hand, top right corner. That's crazy. Hey

Speaker 3 (00:05:59):
That sure is. And I think what you said, that's so significant is that this is tested and we make so many decisions and they're just based on our gut or instinct, and they're not based on science and data. And, you know, w what you're seeing here, this is all science, this is all what actually happened and what actually worked. And that's powerful.

Speaker 1 (00:06:23):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So, folks, if you do, if you put your phone number up on your website, prominently, you use the word, get, go through all your headlines and look for ways that you could use that word in a, in a non-contract way. And then over here on the form, this is what we want to add at the very top. You want to add in, I want answers. You don't need the exclamation mark and go white against red or orange. Coz we tested that white against red or orange outposts in the other color. And if you ask me why I have to say, I don't know, but we do know through our split testing that it does outperform. Now look just below here, everybody. Number four, what we've done here and test it. And this works really well. And I'm going to have to squinch up a bit is I'm the guy with the weak eyes, hold on here. Can I get financial aid? What am I career prospects? When does it start? You can have up to eight of those in a dropdown and people can click on those multiple items. And then what happens is when they do that, they're more inclined to fill out the rest of the form and hit the, the the, I want answers button. Isn't that crazy, but it makes sense. It doesn't necessarily, it's not spalling that narrative. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:07:58):
And not, not just the color in the language, also the location.

Speaker 1 (00:08:03):
Yeah. Yeah. We use a heat maps and we found that the top, right. Or the top left corner is the best place to have a lead form. Okay. Let's go to number five. Number five, this lady, she's an attractive lady and she's got a lovely smile, but she's not a supermodel, you know, and what we found is these ad agency websites where they've pulled, you know the supermodel people with gleaming teeth and guys with no body fat and all these and the actual, when they use those people, those perfect people in those photos, it actually lowers conversion rate. And the reason is two reasons. One is that we've determined. And one is a theory that we have at ER, and one is that this lady on this particular website, she is relatable. So she's a attractive woman and she's relatable. Whereas the ones that are super perfect I, we had one of her staff say, you know, in my friend group, there's this one woman and she's perfect. And if we go to the nightclub, she gets all the attention and secretly, we hate her for like a half an hour. And it's like, I get that buddy of mine, Paul is like this perfect guy and we'll go to the pub and we just sit amongst yourselves and play crib or something. Cause he's just getting all the attention. We see her behave them as well.

Speaker 1 (00:09:50):
So Sterling, you know, you're relatable guy. Would you not agree with that or,

Speaker 4 (00:09:57):
Oh, Zach? Well, the thing that's important to me is that the visitor or the prospective student is able to put themselves in the shoes of the person in the hero shot. So if the person's unrelatable, I can't picture myself in there, but this person's relatable. I could picture myself there. And so ideally the image would be people who are in your target market. And so the majority of people come in and they'll look at them and go, oh, I could be there. So again, yeah, if it's a supermodel not relatable. If it's something else where you are not even using a person, the hero shot and going a different direction, that is also a negative, you want to be able to see their eyes because you can't relate to people without seeing their eyes.

Speaker 1 (00:10:39):
Correct. And we have learned also through our testing and photos, is that having one person looking at you is it out for sure. So there you go. Okay. Now let's continue on here, gang. What, here's a little clue in terms of the most important aspect in terms of graphic design is not for logos. It's not the fancy, beautiful little graphic production values. It's the layout. Okay. And so if folks here's a tip for you if you want to hold your ad, agencies feeds the fire pick go to a bookstore, pick the magazines that you love that are really popular. Let's think Oprah magazine, if your target market or the people that read Oprah magazine or go online and go to the Oprah website, take that magazine. Cause she spent literally millions of dollars to the layout and the type set optimized so that people will love to read their magazine.

Speaker 1 (00:12:00):
Now with every major magazine that has been done, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to get the topography. Right. And, and so rather than trying to make some stuff up, why not just take one of the top performing magazines in the world and just knock it off. So here's some, some little tips I'm just going to run through them really quick. And then I think we'll move on guys, because we have some really cool little tips to share. In addition to this key number six, right down here, you see caption underneath the photo. There's a caption. Now don't ask me why, but when you put a caption under the photos in your website, more people will fill out the lead form. Okay. Now the purpose of the headline is to get people to read the sub-headline that's its only job and that's item number seven. So, and the purpose of number seven hands-on health claims, cleric and medical coder training programs is to get them to read what Sterling number eight.

Speaker 4 (00:13:10):
Yeah. Well the, the idea is that the person has to buy in to that so that you they'll take the next step. So yeah, that's how you get them to go down to number eight and actually consume the content

Speaker 1 (00:13:22):
It's like cooking the frog. Right. So yeah. So there you go. You get your big headline, your, I scan it and then it's like down into the subhead and then the secondary subhead. And then from there a high percentage of people, number nine will start working in and reading the body copy. And then what you want to do, number 10 is you want to have what's called a section head every 25 lines or so just to reinvigorate the reader with a new focal point. Okay. And then we'll just finish with 11 here is get info. Now it was submit, we went through half a dozen split tests get info now is far and away. The thing that gets people to click the most white against red or orange. And why is red or orange dash? I don't know. But there you go. So folks, take a quick moment and copy this. What is that F six on your keyboard and then start chipping away on your website. This is our gift to you and you will get more leads like tomorrow, today, tomorrow, if you do this, that's my promise. Okay. Okay. Next slide. Tick, tick, tick Tash inbound. Digital leads should be treated like a phone call on hold. That seems like a crazy comment, but why don't you riff on that for a moment? Absolutely. I

Speaker 3 (00:14:51):
Mean, we all know a lot of the expressions, you know, first in the door first to score, you know, first to contact versus to contract. So you know, you have a opportunity to jump on them. So half fast are you able to move him? Are you staffed properly when your lead flows coming in? Do you have your rep staffed accordingly? Are you under a minute on leads generated to actually making the contact?

Speaker 1 (00:15:18):
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you said under a minute, that seems crazy. Why don't you speak to that? Sure,

Speaker 3 (00:15:27):
Sure. So how quickly are you pulling the trigger and is it your admissions advisor? Do you have some specialized roles in there? Do you outsource and you actually have a vendor that's assisting you with this. Do you have a centralized call center? If you're large enough? You know, how quickly are you able to reach out?

Speaker 1 (00:15:56):
So folks those on the call that have not muted yet, if you could kindly do so that would be lovely. Thank you. So, okay. So the, like there's a in San Diego, there's a company called speak to lead that is kind of like forces people to answer the phone on, on digital leads. We see we co-sponsored a, a study with Velocify a number of years ago. And the after I think it's five minutes, the conversion rate fell 400% after five minutes of a digital lead coming into your world five minutes. That's nothing. So my partner, Shane sparks co-founder he says that digital leads have the life of a fruit fly and you know, the analogy is dead on. And so folks give some thought to this. There's a here's a hack and then we'll move on. The hack.

Speaker 1 (00:16:53):
Is this have a cell phone, a dedicated cell phone, have an audible cue so that when the internet leads come in to your website, it goes on to that. That phone makes an audible cue. People pick up that cell phone and it's like a dedicated cell phone for digital Eads. And what you can do is take it home on the weekends and the reps can take turns and it works. It's inexpensive. It's just a cell phone and it's expensive, really expensive. You can, you can go and triple your contact rates. So right away you do that today. Tomorrow, you'll start to triple your contact rates with internet leads, digital leads, okay. Three, the first meeting. So this is an, a lost, pardon me, encourage the Explorer. This is what we call prospective students or leads Explorer to bring along their support team to a zoom meeting. So this is interesting. I haven't heard many people talk about this. You want to take a moment and just kind of you've had direct experience with this your career.

Speaker 3 (00:18:15):
Sure. So, you know, I think when, when we are, we're, you know, simply face to face and the objective was, you know, hit all your talking points on your phone script, you know, benefits sell the value of the in-person tour. And then at the end of that, there was always a section on going after the buying committee and asking for a referral. And as we moved to virtual, a lot of that discipline went away and we were able to engage with the prospective student right away. And we let go of some of our discipline of fighting the good fight to get the buying committee and get referrals, you know, on that call. So you know, the, the, it, it's actually easier to get somebody to show up for a virtual meeting with whoever their significant others are in the buying decision and you know, with friends or other individuals. So are you inspecting that, is that part of your process is, is that in your ear in, in, in whatever tools you're using to do your outreach.

Speaker 1 (00:19:34):
So it could be something simple, like you know, folks this is, Sally's a big life decision for Sally cosmetologists have fantastic careers and we expect you guys to be her support system as she dreamscapes and starts her new life here. Do I have your commitment? And so you kinda can do den den mother with that th those family members. And, and then we all know that like a third party lead generates around 1%, one and a half percent conversion, whereas a referral from a family member who's on side or a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or what have you, is that like 30 to 40%, right? Tash. Yeah. So that takes a lot of pressure off of admissions reps. If they can add additional referrals, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 (00:20:29):
And, you know, and I think we've seen start mix decrease with referrals. So, so maybe contactability is increased, but the, the referrals is a percentage of starts have gone down since we've gone virtual. And if we were disciplined, it would actually be easier to make it increase in for some schools that are disciplined or for some of your strong admissions advisors. You know, that that are just a cut above everybody else. That is the case there. They're seeing their referral per percentage of their start actually go up because they're not letting go of the reins when they're interacting with the student for virtually they're, they're sticking to the flow and the disciplines and the best practices.

Speaker 1 (00:21:17):
Cool. Okay. So Sterling, another area that's often overlooked is for various reasons, you know, people have to leave school, they leave school because they're intimidated, they're scared, they're overwhelmed, they're bullied there's logistical reasons. And, and often it's just like the school lets them go. And I think to Tasha's earlier, 0.1 has to be kind of fierce and cause you're not, you're fierce in helping people get a better life, help people go and create congruency between what they enjoy and what they do for work your fierce for them. And so taking the extra effort to reconnect and see if circumstances have changed. This, this tip came from Jody, who's on the call today. Jody just was doing some research and she went, you know, we really need to talk about this more. So Jodi, thank you so much. Do you guys care to just talk on this for a moment? This is a way to improve things in the pandemic. Go ahead.

Speaker 4 (00:22:32):
Well, what I feel about is you've already spent whatever, marking on getting this person into your system, getting them into the school and for whatever reason they don't continue. But you could con that instead of spending money and effort, getting new leads, go to these people because like it says, their circumstance could have changed at one time, this was the right fit for them. Something changed in their life, but it can be the right fit again. And it's more likely that someone who was a false start or when partway through and something changed, it's going to be more likely or a lot easier to get them to take that step again for than a brand new lead from scratch, which you have to acquire through marketing. So if you have a number of these people, they should always have different touch points where you're reaching out to them connecting. And it could be just a, you know, a quick little ask how they're doing a quick survey, email touch points, but they're still viable. And again, it's, it's a source of people who you've already spent the marketing to get. You keep trying to cultivate them.

Speaker 3 (00:23:32):
Jodi.

Speaker 1 (00:23:33):
Awesome. Jody, are you on the call right now? Can you unmute? Oh, excellent. Would you go so far? This is just decreasing. Would you go so far as to bring a couple big grocery bags of organic fruits, vegetables, quality foods to that person who's disappeared and knock on their door. I'm not sure what's going on, but you know, we thought I'd bring you some food now, if they don't need the food, if it's all cool, it's like what a nice gesture. And if they do need the food, right? Cause it's starving. Students is not a saying that comes by at a vapor, right? So if you're eating ketchup soup or too much or whatever, Jodi, do you think that's crazy? Or is that over the top or?

Speaker 2 (00:24:27):
Well, it's along the right ideas of, of what some schools are doing, figuring out why their their, their students who quit quit. Sometimes it's been three years, five years, six years since they stopped taking the program, life changes. They get children, they get new jobs, they live in a new area. So what schools are doing is they're, they're taking stock. They're going back to these students who, who quit to figure out what the barriers are. And within reason schools are implementing different supports, whether it's a flexible start times or sometimes like, okay, if you need to come back, we're going to tack this course on for free, because we feel it's very important for you to, to,

Speaker 1 (00:25:12):
Or, or here's a daycare credit we're going to give you, or here's an Uber credit. We're going to give you seek an Uber to school or because the bus routes have changed and know, or who knows. But I wonder if Jodi, if that's the, the job of the admissions rep to dig in and find out after the fact what's going on and see if you can use empathy to right.

Speaker 3 (00:25:40):
Yeah. I'd like to share a couple tips and a challenge.

Speaker 1 (00:25:43):
Okay, wait, wait, hold on. I'm looking at our clock. You have a inventory of one tip,

Speaker 3 (00:25:50):
One tip, okay. Structure in structured and put it on the calender, whether it's your admissions reps and your phone blitzing it, where it's all your, whether it's your program, you know, leads, deans, whatever you're calling them and they're doing the outreach. So it's coming from academics, not sales, whatever is put it on the calendar, build it. And it just can't be ad hoc and part of what we do structure it.

Speaker 1 (00:26:19):
Oh, that's an excellent thought obvious, but not obvious tip. So I'm going to speak to this when you guys green cherries versus red cherries. So, so often in education, particularly not-for-profit education the way recruiters and what have you work is visualize for a moment that you have a big forest of cherry trees and they the recruiters they go in and they see a cherry tree and they raise it. They, in other words, they go in and they just pick everything off the tree. So that tree is barren. And so they take the red cherries, they put them in their baskets, they're all, high-fiving each other. They move on, try to find another tree to ruin, but all those green cherries and the cherry buds that weren't quite ready to turn into red cherries are all on the ground and they're not being fed by the tree and they just rot.

Speaker 1 (00:27:34):
And what a shame. So would it not make sense to go and put a little picket fence around that cherry tree and attach a century and water and fertilize and nurture the tree. And then as the red cherries, they just drop it, just drop gently from the tree and then they get picked up. But that tree produces red cherries forever and ever, and ever just by taking a different approach. And so that one can go and one has to now really ascertain quickly where a prospective student or an Explorer is in their journey. And there's a huge disconnect where you know, these lead providers will go, oh, here's some leads for years. And the admissions people, oh, leads, leads, leads, but 70%, 75% of those so-called leads are in fact poor explorers that are just doing research. They're just wanting information.

Speaker 1 (00:28:46):
And they are at the Genesis of their journey. It's typically like a year and a half a year and three months from when the thought of going back to school, goes into their head to when they're actually ready to sit in class. And so if, if the the admissions people, the recruiters are trying to go in and make that green Sherry, that person who's just pondering a new life, a new career, make them do something that they don't want to do through manipulative communication, whether it be written or verbal. So it makes sense to in sales, they used the word qualification, but it is the good word. You stay objective, you stay bloody-minded, you find out how, where people are in this buying journey. And then you, you T you deal with them with respect and empathy and consideration. You don't want to make people do something they don't want to do.

Speaker 1 (00:29:46):
And people who are ready to go and entertain and go into the process are ready to do that. You just have to find out which path they're on. Another silly analogy I've heard is you don't pull carrots out of the garden to see how they're growing. Right. They do that. You get these stubby useless little carrots, so I'm guilty. Yeah. Sterling, you, you pull up the study. So I actually just last month, as I look at my garden, I was like, I don't know if the carrots are growing. I pull wine, does a check-in. And it was like that big, so too early, too early. Yeah. But, but if that was a, in terms of the economics of education, that little Explorer is dead to you now I've had a bad experience. And they're not, they're never coming back. So you've, you've burned off a prospective student. Yep. Yeah. Any, any final words on that? Is that, is that crazy? Am I being stupid or no, thank you. Right on, okay. Okay. Green cherries treat them differently. Okay. Testing ads always, always, always test ads, test ads. And so like back to, I'm just going to flip around.

Speaker 1 (00:31:05):
They get the word get is a test. We've given you some tests here that work you guys. So we're get, put a captions under the photos, test, switch out the supermodels for relatable people is a test. I want answers as a test and so on and so on. So there you go. There's a few to start with that you can do with program pages, websites, landing pages. And if you have a marketing company is attached and they say, oh, we were rather into the big idea rather than testing, man. My advice is run like, hell, because they're not servicing you. They're not serving you properly split test. So here's, here's one that's to do with phone messages. And so you guys bear with me and then weigh in and tell me if I'm not. So you have an admissions rep and they typically let's just pick a number, say, they're, they're making 30 outbound phone attempts a day.

Speaker 1 (00:32:03):
I'm just making that number up. It could be less or more. And and, and so they may leave voice messages, right? And they just are, are Pell Mell, arbitrary voice messages. Sometimes they're in a good mood. Sometimes they're in a bad mood. Sometimes you're clever. Sometimes you're not, and it's kind of uneven, it's a mess. And so what if one had the discipline to take a one approach with voice messages and leave a hundred voice messages and then collaborate how many actually responded? Okay. And if you do that different voice messages, different approaches, six or seven times, you'll find that five to 10% more people will return the phone calls. Now you go big deal. Greg it's 5%. Well, Josh and Sterling let's Jody let's do the math. 30 a day is 660 attempted phone attempts in a month. And 5% improvement is 33. What I would call synchronous conversations. And we all know that synchronous conversations. It's about one in seven of those conversations, turn into a student versus one in 30 where it's one in 50 when it's going back and forth by email. So it's a real game changer. So what is 15% of 33? That's like call it four or five students a month per rep that you'd normally not get by just simply split testing your voice messages.

Speaker 1 (00:33:52):
Crazy. Jodi. No. No. Okay. Sorry. My, my wife was searching technology to see if she could put a mute button, like an implant on me so she could just shut me up. But when she, you know, I can't comment on that happy wife, happy life. Okay. So the other thing I'm going to get to talk briefly about, and we can get into this later if you want to set up a little 20 minute session with one of us, here's a formula that works really well for creating really good communication. So you start, and I don't have the examples here, but happy to do so later you start by provoking oopsie, you provoke, and then you agitate to go and really articulate the, the problem or the agitation or the frustration someone's feeling. Often like with massage schools an example would be, there are people working in offices on their all day in the insurance office, going crazy, crushing their soul.

Speaker 1 (00:35:11):
Yeah. That's an example of provocative provocation and agitation. So wouldn't it be better to be doing something physical healing people. That's the, that's the solving the problem. And then you have to, because people generally believe that advertising is dishonest. You have to prove. And, and one place to go is like the department of labor in the U S they have what's called ONAP. And they say, you know, and you can bring up stats and say, massage therapist on average, make this much money. The the department of labor anticipates 138,000 massage therapists will be needed in the U S in the next five years. And their quality of life is reported in at 8.7 out of 10. And so those are proving points, closing point, ideally his phone and asked for Sally Anderson. And she'll be happy to send you her free career starter kit.

Speaker 1 (00:36:09):
It's much more travel. It's much more connecting. If you ask people to phone in and a little trick is Sally Anderson is a name, and then a person who answers is, I'm sorry, Sally, Sally's not available. I'll get your information and they'll get you out that, that starter kit. And then you just go and you can actually count up all the times that people ask for Sally. Now that's old school, you guys, but that's a formula to create a killer ad. You take that formula and start playing with your, your landing pages. You can have, if somebody comes in for a visit and you have a a letter from the president four-page letter, just rolling this formula four or five times, you'll have tremendous, tremendous upside. Okay? So this is from Tammy miles who can't be on our call today. Sterling, you can speak to this if people have a finite budget and you're on Facebook or Google ads, or what have you you want to turbocharge the budget. And, and so if you can't increase your budget, what you do instead is what Sterling,

Speaker 4 (00:37:27):
Well, you want to filter out the low quality traffic, because even a good Pacers campaign, you're converting at maybe 10% of traffic, which means one 10 people that you're paying for is becoming a lead or an inquiry. So you think about that 90% of those people aren't converting. And what we want to do is we want make our,

Speaker 1 (00:37:49):
Oh, wait, let me jump in. So what is the correlation? If 90% aren't converting against like weak, watery, crummy, keywords, or phrases, is there a correlation there? Okay,

Speaker 4 (00:38:02):
Did it? Yeah, there's definitely a correlation. If you're using the wrong keywords, some keywords are great for driving traffic, but not conversions. So if you go into Google analytics or Google AdWords, you can see keywords that might have tons of traffic. You might rank very competitively for you're paying for them in the ads, but they're not converting. So why pay for those if they're not converting? So it's a great way to refine. Also. I like to use my ad copy to be exclusive. I don't want to include that when I have an ad showing I money. Every time someone clicks on my ad, I don't want the ad just being as inclusive as possible. Everyone clicked this ad it's cost me money. I want the ad to be exclusive. I want people to read it and qualify themselves out. So the ones who are actually high quality and value are the only ones clicking it. So

Speaker 1 (00:38:53):
You could do is have there's. If somebody has a finite budget and they have 120 keywords that they're running, let's say with Google, you get rid of the 80 of the really weak ones that create traffic, that don't convert to people viewing the ad or, or creating a an inquiry then. And you, you, then you double down and put all that. What you have into those 40 keywords. Is that kinda what you're getting at?

Speaker 4 (00:39:21):
Yeah. The 40 keywords are converting. Then you could build on those. You could look at more iterations of them, go a little deeper, go into your search term report, which is a search terms actually trigger the keywords that you're bidding on and look at what's there and try to build upon that. One of the things I always would do when managing paid search is look at the last year and depends on your sample size. Maybe even a couple of months is enough data, but I usually look at last year and it's all leads or sorry, all keywords that had more than a hundred clicks and no conversions. And if there's no conversions on a hundred clicks, that's a good sample size. That's might be enough for me to say that. So you're just saying convert.

Speaker 1 (00:40:00):
Well, you're just saying, get rid of them,

Speaker 4 (00:40:03):
Get rid of them. If you think it's a great keyword, it's driving traffic, then take another step and add negative keywords to the ad group so that it doesn't show when in conjunction with the negative keywords, or you could bid it down and try to work on the ad copy and try to make the ad copy more exclusive. But that's what I try to target, targeted things I could try to eliminate that won't hurt performance,

Speaker 1 (00:40:27):
Another little side, tip all those top performing keywords that convert use some of those phrases where you can in the pages in your website, let's call it in page search engine optimization because, because they convert well Google will pick up, like, for instance, if you can take a top performing keyword get the skills to be a webbing and a phlebotomist, and you can use that on a landing page and the subhead, or what have you, Google will reward you for being relevant. And so that helps with your, a little bit of your, and it's an easy thing to do. You could, that's like a two hour project, so, all right. So salt Peter compacted into a little tube makes dynamite focus, the salt, Peter. Otherwise, if it's all spray, all are sprinkled around loosely. You put a flame to it and it crackles and sparkles, but it makes it's useless. Okay. The last here is a bit in the weeds, but this is something you can, this is really important.

Speaker 1 (00:41:45):
So if there is an intake of let's say, 20 people for a class, I'm just making that number up and the break even point ensuring that your, your advertising budgets are not crazy is 12 students. Okay. Then you have all kinds of things you can do that are inexpensive, like a number of these we've just gone through optimizing your website, using things like Craigslist to promote, start dates, things that are what I call guerrilla marketing referrals. So attached spoke to so once you hit those 12 students, you know, that that hotel is breaking even, but there's still a whole bunch of hotel rooms that are vacant. So the question is you can have a really low advertising rate as it relates to your P and L and forego a bunch of opportunity and not having all those those seats full, or you can kind of split it into two and you're going to go, I'm going to have inexpensive marketing tactics to get to my breakeven point.

Speaker 1 (00:43:07):
And once I hit there, then I'm going to look at things that are gonna really go make my advertising budgets go high, like radio time time-sensitive radio campaigns. Okay, this is a bit controversial, but taking on people who really want to go to school, but have weak FICO scores, because you know that there's going to be bad debt, but if you have a $20,000 program and you have with those remaining eight students that you fill up, I'm going to use that example. You lose a a third. Now that's going to hurt your regulatory ratios. If you're, you're doing title four funding, but point being is, would you rather have $12,000 of, for eight students of those vacant chairs or would you rather have a hundred percent of nothing or conversely like the, the bringing a student in a board by way of radio, it could be like four or $5,000. So w is $15,000 times eight, and it kind of butchers your marketing budget, or is it better to have a hundred percent of nothing and have that those ratios look really good. So what do you, what do you guys think this is our last tip for the day? Anyone want to pipe up on that one?

Speaker 3 (00:44:34):
Well, I think once you're past break, even of course that changes, you know, how you're dealing with risk and you can, you, you have more wiggle, you have more, you can experiment a little bit more, you can try, you know, a few different things where when you're not at break, even, you know, it's just, so that's a very different feeling.

Speaker 1 (00:44:58):
Yeah. It's a different feeling

Speaker 3 (00:45:00):
And it certainly creates top-down pressure, you know, when that's happening.

Speaker 1 (00:45:05):
Yeah. And you hear these horrible terms, like asses in glasses, people from all this kind of awful stuff. But I think to your point, Tash is that okay, here's the ethical point. You, you, you bring on people with low FICO scores, but who desperately could benefit from the improvement of the quality of their life by having a better career. But it's going to hurt your stats, you know, as it relates to repayment, rates, cohort, repayment, rates, and all that stuff, the pinheads and government forced upon the schools obviously have a bias in that regard or so you don't want that grief. So what you do instead is you, you, you, you load on radio advertising because at least then they're not going to hassle you, but you're not going to get those people that actually need the education. So it's it's an ethical consideration. Hey, Jodi, Sterling, you wanna weigh in on that? Well, Jodi on some backend logistics.

Speaker 4 (00:46:24):
Yeah, well that does, I was actually going wait on something else. Is a time drag guys would say Jody, right. To submit a survey for everyone quickly, just asking you, what was your favorite tip? So we'll be doing that shortly, just so everyone could this.

Speaker 1 (00:46:40):
Okay. Well, that's a good Dodge on my ethical question. Let's go and do that. Let's do our, our pull. Jody, do I a Brit bring this back to you or, oh, here it is. Okay. Everybody on three, let's go and vote for your favorite thing.

Speaker 1 (00:47:04):
Now, while we're voting, I will say that if any of you have any questions and you want to book a time 20 minutes or so, just to riff on a question that you might have or clarity on anything you've learned beyond any questions that we take at the end here there's, there's over 60 ways that a school can leak revenue in the enrollment management funnel. These little leakage points are everywhere. Visualize a hose with little holes in it. And every hole that you patch improves the water pressure in terms of the, the viability of your, your career school cause you have to stay viable. You have to stay afloat. You have to have high water pressure in order to help people, help people improve their lives. So that's a, that's one thing to ponder.

Speaker 1 (00:47:55):
You know, people are different now explorers before it was, oh, there's an ad, oh, I pick up a phone, oh, there's a five minute little thing and then come in for a meeting. But now half of that whole enrollment funnel from marketing into admissions is people do it on themselves or on review sites or calling their friends on Facebook. They're contacting alumni all without the admissions rep, having a clue what's going on. They're halfway through the funnel already. And the poor admissions rep has to sort of unspool some of those incorrect assumptions that they built up through their own research. That's why remote admissions is absolutely crucial. So at the end, for those that are interested in, we're going to do Sterling. It's gonna take you guys through a a little five minute user experience demo on virtual advisor. But in the meantime, we're going to share the results of our poll. Hey Jodi. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:48:53):
Yes. And if we have a couple of times, it looks like optimizing your website was one of the ones that people found most interesting. Not sure if you wanted to take a couple minutes. I know we only got to about number 11. Maybe we can finish numbers 12 and 13.

Speaker 1 (00:49:10):
I think what we'll do is we'll just take people. They can contact us and rather than doing a theoretical thing, we'll actually go through and analyze their specific website and just, they can just take notes and they can either do it themselves or we can help them either. Or I think that's a better way to go. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:49:33):
Everyone, you could we'll put our emails down and just email. And if you want us to do just a one-on-one session, I'll do a quick little audit of your website for you and just let you know, quick little wins that you can do to improve it. So se

Speaker 1 (00:49:46):
Jodi, Jodi, any questions in the chat bar or before we say goodbye?

Speaker 2 (00:49:54):
No, actually we were having a great chat about different websites and CRMs back back in, in the chat, which is why I think Sterling and I were a bit distracted. So yes, if everyone wants to take a peek at the chat, we were, we were talking about small schools and CRMs.

Speaker 1 (00:50:12):
Okay. So this is the break point. Now in the formal part where we've taught you guys some stuff, and those that are intrigued about our virtual advisor software, it's about 120 S school systems we have on it. And it works quite well. You know, those that aren't interested, we'll see you guys again soon, or I'll see you at caps with Scott's Potomac in California or at the Orban, the user conference in later in October. But if you guys want to get a quick demo, feel free to hang out and we'll see you again. I hope you've learned some stuff. Thanks. So,

Speaker 4 (00:50:53):
All right. So, all right, what I'm going to be bringing up for you guys today is the virtual advisor and the main core pathway, the career readiness quiz. So all of you who are current clients of ours are still on this. You know what this is because you're using it for everyone who this is the first time or one of the first time you've seeing it. I'm going to just do a quick little five minutes on showing you what it is and the value of it. So what you see right now doesn't mean anything. It's a splash page, but what it is is this the actual log-in page that someone would engage with when they see this on your website the way they engage with it is just the same as the websites we showed for the optimization. It's one of the elements that we have in the optimization now.

Speaker 4 (00:51:36):
And it would be Lincoln, multiple parts on the website that would say something along the lines of is a career in XYZ, right? For you take the quiz to find out, or if you're a school that has multiple programs, it'd just be as career education rate for you. But if you have specific programs for your school, we can be more specific with those call to actions and then someone clicks on this and it brings you to this quiz page. And so what the, what this is, is an engagement tool where the student clicks on it because they want to get more information. It's generally finding people in the middle stage of the buying process. So someone who has a basic question generally go towards a contact form or contact us page someone who's deep in the buying processes, right to apply or enroll would go to apply online enroll now, or maybe even book a tour.

Speaker 4 (00:52:20):
This is for the people who are in the middle stage, which my data shows us around 30% of people, but only represents usually 10% of leads on a website. And the reason is because most websites under service, these people. So when you have a call to action, speak to them, these people who normally in the middle stage get under-serviced and leave your website. They actually have a collection that they engage with, which is, is this right for you? Because this middle stage, generally people who have an intrinsic internal question about their if they're right for this, or if this is going to be good for them. So just keep that in mind, you have son who normally would not have even filled out a form on your website because you don't have a call to action, speak to them. These are actual additional leads.

Speaker 4 (00:53:03):
Or I don't even like to call them leads because they're such higher quality. We call them registrant's. So I'm just going to fill this out as if it's me and use my, even my personal email for this and then get started. So as I get started here, it starts loading the actual pathway for me to answer my questions. But if you can see over here, this is the advisor back end user interface that all schools have access to. And of course you only have access to your own schools. And here's me taking the quiz right now in real time. So as you can see, we we've already collected my name, email phone number. So this is what constitutes an actual lead. We have everything that constitutes a lead. Plus we go a step further and we pull in any social media accounts are associated with the email address.

Speaker 4 (00:53:49):
So here with my email address, I have a LinkedIn account and I can even click on this and I'll load my LinkedIn account. So you can learn even more about the student before reaching out and then taking a step further, pulled my profile picture in. And so if they have sharing set for that, it could pull the profile pictures in and you know, so much about this person. And I haven't even filled out anything in the quiz if I decide to quit and I don't want to complete it. Our data shows that someone who starts the quiz, even if they don't complete, it is 27% more likely to enroll than someone who fills up a basic contact form. And the reason is the person who starts this quiz or pathway, they had higher intent, even if they don't follow through and they drop off early, their intent was there and it took a deeper call to action.

Speaker 4 (00:54:32):
So just the nature of them starting this they're 27% more likely to enroll. So yeah, anyone who builds out early, it's still high quality and a great person to reach out to, but I'll take you through the actual quiz. Quickly, only got a couple minutes and it'll show you the end result. So the secret behind the quiz is not only are we learning about the student and the student is going to learn about themselves and if they're a good fit for this program, but the secondary secret is every question secretly a piece of information that helps the admission reps. And then we train the admission reps before going live on a sales training on how to use the information to give you an advantage when reaching out. So I'm not going to go through each question because it's there's a lot here.

Speaker 4 (00:55:15):
But we're learning about where they are in their buying process. Now we're learning about what w what pain points are in their life they're working. And these are the pain points of their job, learning about the competition. They inquire with ABC school down the street, and we actually get the level of urgency. Then we go into a quick little thing on there. What goals they have, this is pretty straightforward, but I love learning goals because I drop these on voicemails. If I have to leave a voicemail for someone I'm going to use their goals as my hooks on the voicemail, because they should resonate. Those are things they actually identified. And then we get us a quick little disc test, or Myers-Briggs, it's really just a personality assessment. And I want to show you this because when we do that, the student learns their personality.

Speaker 4 (00:55:58):
I learned I'm amiable or amiable. But really the secret behind this again, is as a mission rep, we in our client, knowledge base have techniques are assigned by personality or social style. So now that I know this person is amicable, I, here's a quick little sheet that I recommend all reps have on their desk, because you could quickly look at the do's and don'ts when you call them. But you, we go into much more detail. So a rep now know so much about this person. I know their personality. I know what their goals are. I know where they are in their buying process. I know what pain points they have that might prevent them, or be able to use to motivate them to move forward. So now we go through the back end of this, we're just wanting to mind for what features and benefits do they care about?

Speaker 4 (00:56:42):
This allows a rep to know, you know, what to talk about on the call and what not to, because I won't mention features. They don't care about this is more of a qualification step list learn when they graduate, or if they even have a GED transportation might be applicable children. Anything else some schools ask about like criminal records or anything like that, whatever you need to know about them, this is that step. And then finally, we're just going to find out who we want to invite along. As we mentioned early, always invite supporters along, and then we ask a final few questions, which always should be asking, well, what might prevent you from moving forward as they were not supportive? So as we finish this, and I just want to let you know, this has an 83% completion rate. So 83% of people who get here, I S R a through present people who start it, get to this page.

Speaker 4 (00:57:27):
So we only have 17% of people do not complete it through this point on average. So now this is where the 83% of people got two and they get a score and a real readiness report, the prize of information about them, about their next steps or type of learning. It's all about them. It does more than just regurgitate their answers. It actually draws conclusions, and it can actually draw some sophisticated conclusions as well as recommending different programs and doing a lot more critical thinking. Before the nature of this one is just a report telling them about themselves here, their social style. And as you'll see at the top, it congratulates them and prompts them to a book, a personalized tour. Again, this would be whatever the school is. It could be a career planning session. It could be a zoom call. It could be whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 4 (00:58:14):
And this is actually one of our biggest split tests. At this point a few years ago, we would prompt people to take the next step. And you suggest, say, take the next step and book. And 45% of people would do that, which is awesome because this is the call to action. So this is where we expect people to get to. This is all we can ask for in the link. They click anyone who does anything further as a bonus. So what we had was 45% of these people who completed would book a tour. And so we just split test. We congratulate them because the scores are actually could be true scores, but no school wants to give negative feedback. So we have it sort of like a score is relative and it generally is pretty decent. So because we know that we just changed it to congratulate people on their and they qualify or personalized to it.

Speaker 4 (00:59:04):
And when you click through to the next step, we keep that narrative per talking about the personalized tour custom campus tour. And we take everything that's done in a normal tour and make it so they're check boxes. So someone gets that illusion of customization. Well, what that did was increased the rate of people, booking tours from 45 to 60%. So that's a 33% increase. And that also proved to us that people trust the scores because of so many people booking the tours. And yeah, so that was just a really big split test. It very successful. And if you do the math 83 times 60 is 49.8, if I'm right. So that is amount of people when they start this pathway end up booking an appointment or tour with the school at the end. So it's roughly half. So you have half the people book a tour, 37% of them, if a third, sorry, 33% of them end up just getting a great report.

Speaker 4 (00:59:59):
And you've built trust and quality with who you can call to do a review of the report. And only 17% don't complete, but at 17% on average are more likely to enroll than you're normally. So yeah, so at the end of this, they could pick when they want them, and this could be all based off what the school wants. It could be checkboxes for days of the week. It could be open-ended, it could be a calendar, whatever you feel makes it easier for your students or prospective students. So I will, I request a interview for tomorrow. Then I confirmed my information was correct, and I could submit this and look my tour. And so up in here, when you're watching me take this, it now completed. And as a completed, it tells me when they asked for the tour, I have all this information.

Speaker 4 (01:00:40):
So as an admission rep, I sit down, I consume this information. I really build what my first my contest would be, has going to be the most impactful person, my contact. And then I make my reach out and really knowing this, we just have to confirm the appointment. And I actually had one of my clients, tell me, this is the layout. You could just call them up. They requested it. You just repeat the times they want it. And boom, they agree. So and that's the full process front to back. If anyone has any questions you can unmute yourself and ask right now, or you can follow up and shoot me an email@sterlingatenrollmentresources.com. And I could always walk you through a personalized one and show you in more detail. So yeah, I'll stop sharing my screen. If anyone has any questions, let us know. I know we're over time. So everyone who is still here, thank you very much for going over. It's more than we can ask of you, but now if you have any questions, let me know, shoot us an email. If you'd like to learn more otherwise, thank you very much, everyone. And hopefully you guys, aren't sitting right here.