48. How Funnels Can Help Your School’s Enrollment Process with Jesse Meadow

Tara: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Tara Claeys 


Aubrey: And I’m Aubrey Bursch. Today we’re joined by Jesse Meadow. Jesse Meadow is co-founder and managing director of Schoolcraft Digital. Since 2020, he has been helping schools reach their prospective parents using long-term multi-channel digital marketing strategies and tactics. Welcome, Jesse. 


Jesse: Hey there. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. 


Tara: We’re so glad to meet you and have you on the show today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? 


Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you again. I’m very excited to be here as well and talk with the two of you. Myself, oof, where do I start? Father of two wonderful daughters that keep me entertained all day long. My lovely wife from New Jersey. We reside down here in Florida, so we live a little bit of a vacation life all year round. But yeah, no, I went to, private school boarding school when I was younger. Middle school in high school. It was big part of my life. And hence of where my passions were. I, I went back as an alumni, actually worked at the school for a long time, did some other things, traveled internationally, represented and got to meet a lot of other school professionals as well. And really just started to get my feet wet. And here I am years later, still in the industry, still doing what I love to do creatively finding ways to basically, promote the, the values and the that, private school education can do. Not just academically, but really, from my own experience, character and emotionally, I really believe in a lot of what they do. So it’s very fun. And now we do digital marketing. So we’re trying to bring schools from, the antiquated days of, prints and mailers and billboards, and trying to expand that a little bit into the parents of today and making sure that they’re getting the consistent, luxury item marketing that the rest of the industries are doing these days. 


Aubrey: That’s amazing. I love your story because you experienced what it’s like to go to an independent school and then you now have seen multiple sides of what that looks like. And I remember talking to you before the show about looking at it from a parent perspective too, because you’re thinking school for my daughters school. Everything like that. So different, multiple perspectives. So we’re so excited to have you on the show. And I’m excited to dive in with you with a topic that I think is somewhat misunderstood by schools at least when discussions that we’re having with them, and that’s enrollment funnels. So can you talk to us a little bit more about what is a enrollment funnel? Like how can a school use it effectively to really help their marketing efforts? 


Jesse: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. This has been a big educational piece as we go through the process of talking with schools as well. Typically in a enrollment funnel is essentially it’s the student journey or the family journey. 
 Prospect, inquiries, applicants enrolled. But in marketing terms, it generally follows much of the same thing as the sales funnel. We modified it a little bit, but basically you’re gonna have that brand awareness stage, getting your name out there, getting families to know that you exist and what you offer. Obviously getting them to take that action, the decision making. Okay, we’re going a little bit further down that funnel. On the conversion end, usually that it tends to be an application- getting that application in. That’s the strongest way to show that enrollment. And then there’s the advocacy part that’s really after the marketing piece. There’s a lot of marketing that goes into it. As far as us on the paid side, what we do, That’s really more of the schools, but that’s gonna be your, your attrition. How are nurturing the leads that you’re getting through the enrollment process, the current students you have, how are you nurturing them, giving them a great experience if they wanna return every year and really become advocates and ambassadors for the school. Essentially it follows a lot of the model of the sales funnel. But, using some of the key points I would say that an admissions or an enrollment manager might be able to use with, their normal enrollment season. I don’t know if that helps explain it for you at all. 


Tara: It does, it does. I I think it can seem overwhelming cuz there are so many pieces and how they fit together. What parts of the funnel do you think get the least attention or are the most challenging for schools? 


Jesse: The biggest thing we’ve noticed with schools- they’re big on checking boxes. They are thinking that they’re doing full on marketing when it’s really just a few months out of the year. It’s really just going to be a few different advertisements or content pieces that they’re pushing out at certain times. Really they think they’re hitting this marketing piece where really what we’ve dubbed it is it’s more of a random act of marketing. Everything is really focused on the conversion. Hey, let’s put this out here. Let’s get registrations, let’s get applications, or let’s get inquiries, or let’s get tours. And that’s really it. I think for schools they miss a lot of the top of the funnel because it doesn’t have a lot of action to it. It’s really more about brand awareness. You’re not really looking for conversions at this point. So that top of the funnel, I think is non-existent. For many schools, it’s really action and conversion. And then in, the engagement part that we like to use or the advocacy part at the end I think schools are aware of it. And I think that they do their balancing acts as best they can on how to, get good retention and keep those families engaged. But I would say that top of the funnel, that, that brand awareness, that REIT stage of the funnel, Is pretty much nonexistent for schools, and the value of it, it’s obviously valuable in a long term marketing solution. You’re talking year over year. You want to have your name out there, you wanna build that brand recognition. But on the school’s end, everyone’s tight with budget tight with bandwidth, you’re talking extra effort, extra money going into something that, The ROI is not so directly linked, and it’s such a long-term part of the funnel that maybe it’s not the biggest initiative that, that schools will have when they set out their marketing plans. 


Aubrey: That makes a lot of sense. I’m curious, can you talk a little bit more like, how does one think about the top of the funnel? If that seems to be one of the maybe overlooked areas, how does one kind of look at it and maybe think about it differently in terms of how it can better serve their school? 


Jesse: So I would say, a lot of the mailers that actually go out that schools like to do they usually do it for, open houses or different events that they have. That’s a very top of the funnel kind of thing. I know they’re trying to get an action out of that but that is more of an awareness thing. A billboard that they put up, or some schools they have the movie theaters where they have the advertisements before the movies, maybe not so much anymore from, since the pandemic, but those are types of- magazine articles are great ones. If you’re in a magazine at all. Those are very top of the funnel things. That’s not something that’s gonna designate an action for you, but it is an awareness that when you come in with an action piece. That awareness is there, that research is there. And another thing I would like to say that’s very important on the top of the funnel the generation of parents today are digital natives. The ghost applicants that everyone has seen is only going to rise. They are doing their research before they get to you. By the time parents like myself or anyone else, they’re gonna be checking you out. They’re gonna be redoing their own research. The fact that 70, 70, maybe even 80% of that whole process is done by the time I contact you, means what are you doing in the beginning stages of that to make them aware of what your values are? What is your story? What are you offering? So I like to say, that top of the funnel is a great way to one, build the branch. If you got a great logo, especially if you’ve done any new projects or new branding that you’ve done, maybe an acquisition of another campus or another school, that those are great top of the funnels, just, get your name out there. But really it’s a supportive effort. So when you come in with those strong calls it’s not the first time they’re hearing about you. And like I said, that research portion of families, you really wanna be proactive in that and to think about it in terms of what are they finding out about us and what are we putting out there- you can control that and that’s really gonna be a lot of the top of the funnel, even if it doesn’t directly go to an application right away. 


Tara: That makes a lot of sense and I can see how that would be something that’s missed because it’s hard to do, yeah. But let’s talk about now another part of the funnel that’s hard to do and that’s conversions. So what sort of conversion should schools see at each part of the funnel to move them through it? 


Jesse: That is a a very good question and it can vary a lot depending on what your campaign. We always talk about what are the goals of the campaign. Some of them can be a little bit more specifically, some of them can be very broad. We’ve had campaigns where the goal was to- their school was filled up, but it, they used a lot of financial aid to get there. So we were supposed to be getting attracting a lot of higher thresholds higher income threshold families. So those goals and conversions will be different from a general one. So that will depend. I would say on a general basis, if you were to think of the stages as what they are, then whatever your specific campaign goal is, it will fit inside of that. For example, the reach stage, your brand awareness stage, this is when they’re gonna be researching your school. This is when they’re gonna be trying to find out a little bit more about you. Metrics that revolve around research are gonna be great conversion metrics to look at. How long are they spending on whatever landing page that you’re sending? If you’re bringing them to your website, are they going to multiple pages? What is their exit rate? Obviously whenever you’re doing paid marketing, you wanna look at, your click through rate. Is this actually, is this message actually working with our audience group? But really it’s gonna be those, how many new users- are we engaging them? How long are they spending? Are we seeing that they’re looking at different things? That’s gonna be great conversion metrics for a brand awareness stage. When you get down to an action stage, you know that decision making. These are smaller actions. This is not what we’re talking about- the application, a tour might be involved in an action stage, but definitely open house registrations. If you’ve got a special event or a carnival or something that you’re opening up to the public, what are the registrations for that on? If it’s simply just to fill out an inquiry form or to get some information, download the digital brochure. Those are all tiny little actions that require the family to give some sort of feedback. Usually first party data, like an email address and name. But those are gonna be very key metrics. How many conversions did we have on those small little actions that we took there? I would say sometimes with this stage bounce rate is gonna be huge for the action stage because, bounce rate is really going to be, they went to whatever page we’re driving them to and they took an action, or they didn’t take an action. And the whole point of this stage is for them to take an action. So bounce rate’s gonna be a key component that’s gonna be added into this decision making stage. Keeping an eye on that if that starts to get a little bit higher, you may wanna look at the design layouts, is your call to action clear enough? Is it easy enough to find? So things like that, I wouldn’t say time on page is gonna be the hugest thing, like it is in brand awareness because you’re asking them to do a direct thing. And if you’ve done your job you’ve taken them exactly where they need to go, so it shouldn’t be too time consuming to do. And then when we get to conversions, obviously this will be defined as what whatever, your goal is going to be, whether that’s an application, a specific type of application, which type of family. And tracking those goals along the way, how many did that happen? And then obviously when you get to this stage of the funnel, What kind of cost did it take to get here? How many did we get? And now you can do your cost per leads. You can really get into a lot of the ROI during this stage. Your engagement, like I said for us it’s really more on the school. But the school themselves, they can look at their retention pieces. How what is our attrition every year? Are we taking some intentional actions? And then what were the results of those actions that we’ve gotten from our current families? This could be in a in a lot of variety of forms. Parent surveys could be great ones as well to get some feedback and get some metrics to using that engagement stage. But really it’s all about the advocacy. You’re trying to build the advocacy. You’re trying to get students to re-enroll year in and year out until they graduate. Comeback as alumni like myself become big donors, the whole full year cycle. So a lot of those metrics are really gonna be geared towards engagement and retention. On that end piece side, if you wanted to get specific and maybe a little bit smaller picture. You could definitely use an engagement metric of, a lead comes to the admissions officer, to enrollment manager. How many of those qualified leads or maybe even accepted students ended up converting into enrolled students and filled out, all the matriculation, paperwork and everything. Because that could tell you a little bit about your process from bleed nurturing, now you get the lead to the emissions office. Maybe there’s some hiccups or some process steps that we need to fix and work on for families to really take the big step into enrollment, the final end goal there. 


Tara: Yeah. I had two things I wanted to ask you about, but I’m gonna start with Google Analytics because all the things that you’re talking about, I would hope that most admissions people who are working on digital marketing are looking at their Google Analytics. All, I just wanna make a reference point for people that these, this information, these metrics and data that you’re referring to, in case they’re not aware of it, that’s information that comes from Google Analytics and Google Ads. 


Jesse: Right. That’s right. 


Tara: Is that, am I correct? Okay. 


Jesse: That’s right. And Google Ads, obviously, because they’re synced with Google Analytics, will be a lot more detailed than what you might get with like your Facebook ads or anything of that sort. But the Google analytics side of things does track anything that’s on the website. So even if you’re doing separate campaign ad hoc campaigns on different platforms All of that detail will still be getting built up and the data getting sent to you via Google Analytics. So if you go in there, you can look at behaviors you can look on the acquisition side and that will really give you a breakdown of what you’re trying to look for. And like I said, when you’re looking at things, especially at the brand awareness stage, what are metrics that you would think someone that’s researching you what are those kind of metrics, time on page and things like that. All of that is in Google Analytics. Furthermore, if you really get good with it, YouTube, it’s very simple to do. It seems very difficult to conceptualize. But if you actually just take a, maybe an hour or two, You can really take a few short videos and figure out how to set up your Google Analytics goals. And really on that backend piece, you can say, Hey, my goals for this month, because we’re doing a brand awareness stage, are going to be at least two pages per visitor or this per, new visitors to the site. And you could have all of these goals just accumulating in the background, which might make definitely would make the analyzing the data that much easier. 


Tara: Yeah. I love working with goals in Google Analytics. It’s a, almost like a hidden treasure there. I want to also dive in a little bit to the other part that you mentioned. You talked about lead nurturing, and we’ve talked to a lot of guests about that relationship building and how that can often fall off for schools because they’re not managing. Once the leads come in, they’re not managing those. Do you consider that part of the funnel?

Jesse: I would, and I would put that more on the engagement side. I don’t really necessarily think that there’s any brand awareness that’s going on with that. And obviously it might get thrown into the action if you’re trying to get them to take an action, for example, if they haven’t, if they filled out an inquiry form and you’re trying to get them to come on campus for a tour- could fall into, the action stage for sure. But generally speaking, that lead nurturing, what are the processes? What what sort of automations do you have to try to engage them and try to get them to complete the process? For us, that really falls into an advocacy part because if you can make that, that, that family journey from first touchpoint brand awareness, they come, they, it’s easy to find information, it’s easy to research about you. Okay, now I want to contact the school. They get in touch with you. And then from that point on, You’ve been in contact, you’ve given them easy instructions, they’ve got a nice clear path to enrollment. You take that one step further into now you’ve given them a nice, smooth, clear path towards registration day, making sure they have that all the information they need for the start of school, which is a very nerve-racking time. Especially if they’re not familiar with private schools many families over the pandemic had made that switch from public to private would. That’s all part of that advocacy, that’s really building what they’re gonna be able to think about the school, how they’re gonna think about coming back the following year. It really does start with that first touchpoint. And for sure you can make things up on, on the backend, after they enroll. There’s a lot more people involved on campus with that experience than in just the emissions part. But that emissions part, once they get that lead it’s crucial- the impression that you’re giving them the perception that they’re getting about how you operate as a school. 


Aubrey: I really appreciate you explaining all that cuz it, it can be a little overwhelming for people to understand all the different, things to think about. And that kind of spurred my next question, which is, so we have a lot of people who are small shops or one person shops. Like looking at all of this, like where did they begin? You mentioned YouTube and you mentioned some other tools how can they like start tracking or what tools could they use to supplement the fact that maybe they don’t have a larger team? 


Jesse: Yeah, I would say, starting with the funnel process if you haven’t, if you don’t have one built already I would say that starting larger and more broad is a very is the best way to go about it. Instead of getting into specific niche areas of enrollments maybe jump to enrollment overall. Okay. We need to have. Campaign message that’s gonna go out, here’s our theme for the year, or slogan or catchphrase and maybe multiple years, but this is who we are. Who are we talking to? Defining their audience, obviously. And then from there you can plan out, okay, what is the content that we’re gonna push out at each one of these stages? That can formulate a nice simple plan. It’s a very broad reaching plan. It’s not really focused on any specific niche area that will be very time consuming to dive into individually. And then it’ll also build the habits and the processes that will be efficient for you to get into those specific areas there. As far as the data I would say Google Analytics is gonna be your best friend here. Keep it simple. Your cost metrics are gonna be if you keep it on the broad basics, cost per click. Cost per thousand impressions on that reach stage, that you’re getting. And then, really, your ROI at the end result. You can formulate a lot of those. Outside of that, everything else should be available in Google Analytics. If you wanna be keeping on a broad level, you know who’s coming. Okay. We were starting to target this area. Where are these people coming from? Google Analytics has geography on there, so you can take a look on the map of where they’re coming from. You can definitely take a look at how long they’re staying on pages, how many new users when you get into the later stages, how many returning users are, and it’s literally just a click of a button on your Google Analytics. So I would say if you can get familiar with Google Analytics first and build out a very broad annual plan that’s really the only way you’re gonna be able to really setting up the stages of the funnel. Because if you’re only thinking about a certain time of the year, you’re not gonna be able to do a whole funnel in three months. It’s gonna take a little bit longer than that for families to move, move through the cycle. I would say keep it broad. Work your way down to more specifics as you get more comfortable and really familiar familiarize yourself with Google Analytics that’ll help you out a lot. 


Aubrey: Yeah. Thank you for that. And it’s always good. A lot of times I think we’re just, in general, people are hesitant to try new things and to fail and I think this is a good time. Google Analytics can seem very intimidating, what, just try it. And ask questions and yeah, you’re not gonna get it right probably the first time, but that’s okay cuz that’s part of learning and that’s part of frankly, marketing is a lot of that. I appreciate you giving them some tools and suggestions. Now I’d like to switch gears and ask you, 2023 right around the corner, what sort of trends or things do you think are on the horizon for 2023 and beyond? 


Jesse: Man, in digital marketing, it is , it changes every week. I feel like I have to do some more research every week because, Facebook or Google changes something, I think that this next year coming up I think the importance that schools really should understand is first party data is going to be coming pretty much next year. It’s already starting with a lot of platforms- apple Facebook they’re already starting to have a lot of regulation. The data, personal data is a very hot issue. You can see the regulation that’s going on in Europe. These things are trickling down and it’s really finding their way into our market as well. So when you’re talking about getting out in front of families, and being able to have data that you can use and work on. It’s really gonna be the first party data. So I would say, in digital marketing in 2023, anything that you can do to get someone’s email address it doesn’t have to be real detailed stuff, you can do a lot with an email address as far as building audiences and looking like audiences. But, names addresses, phone numbers email addresses. This type of information is gonna. Pure gold in the upcoming years, just because that’s really gonna be how you’re gonna use a lot of your outreach efforts in the future. 


Tara: Thanks for that. I love learning about what’s coming down the pike and hearing predictions for what’s next. Who knows what’s around. 


Jesse: Ah, and I wish I had a crystal ball but you know, sometimes you never know. That was actually supposed to have already happened. Google’s pushed it back a year. We’ll see how it goes. But digital marketing, it keeps you on your toes all the time. And, I will say this on a personal level, like a organizational level. One thing that I have noticed that I feel is happening with schools from the conferences and the people I’ve talked to, there seems to be a very big understanding now of the importance of digital marketing and even more than that on a broader scale, the importance of the admissions department and communications department talking together. That, that seems to be can’t even tell you how many conversations where I’ve been, like, this is great. We even went to the conference enrollment Management Association, EMA conference recently, and they had communications people there, the admissions team brought them so that they can understand, hey, this is what we’re seeing, this, these are the trends, these are where we need to be. So that communication and that that marriage between the two really comes together. And I, I feel that organizationally, That seems to be a great trend and I hope it keeps going and I will be a proponent of that any way I can. 


Tara: Yeah, for sure. I wanna move on to a question about mindfulness, because we always ask our guests about mindfulness. It’s something that we pay a lot of attention to, and that applies to all aspects of life, depending on how you define it. So can you share about what, how you define mindfulness and how you might apply it to working with digital marketing? 


Jesse: Yeah, I mindfulness you can’t really see it here. I got a little corner, my little cubby corner over here. That’s my mindfulness corner right there. I’ve got all my, my little incense and everything. I go over my reading nook is over there with my my big library. For me it’s really about awareness, you know, keeping perspective. It’s very difficult to do. And, what I’ve learned really working in schools when I, that was probably the the first job where I had to wear, like 10 hats at the same time. It was fine so much when I was the nine to fiver, and then I jumped over to, residential life where we had the boarding population, and it just never stopped. So making sure that you’re, you know, and now where I am now trying to run the digital marketing agency, it’s very difficult to keep mindfulness on the forefront. For me, I literally schedule blocks for reflection. You might not need to go that far. I feel that reflection is huge. And that could be, I do that in my personal life but I also do it professionally in my work life. Hey, what did we do here? What did we want? What ended up happening? For me a lot of what I do is build out processes so you know, what’s working well, what’s not working well, is this helping to achieve. In, in digital marketing mindfulness for me is, hey, try to take a break. There’s a lot that can, that there’s a lot of rabbit holes you can go down and fill your entire time. But sometimes take a step back, have some reflection about what’s happening, where you’re trying to go and really nail in and hone in on, on what’s working well from that reflection piece. 


Aubrey: That’s great and so powerful. Taking a step back in general just sometimes gives you perspective on where you need to go, so thank you. That’s really helpful. So we’re gonna transition into our rapid fire questions. Are you ready? 


Jesse: I hope so. 


Aubrey: All right. This is one of my favorite. If you could put one book as mandatory reading in the high school curriculum, what would it be? 


Jesse: It’s got, you know, listen I, I finished a book, the last book I finished in September. Atomic Habits. It’s gotta be it’s gotta be Atomic Habits. Yeah. I just, it blew my minds. It’s changed every, ever since September. My whole life has been different from this book. And it’s for a curriculum piece. If you can build something around, if you can get kids I, if I had the those habits and tactics and mindset at that point, the sky’s the limit for what I was able to achieve from that age. So I would say atomic habits is I think it’s- 


Tara: James. Clear? Yeah. Yeah. We are fans of that book. I also like a disciple of that and it’s been mentioned by many of our guests. So we do have a good reads list that I like to plug where we have just a fabulous list of great books to check out and Atomics Habits is already on it. 


Jesse: Okay. Sorry, I couldn’t add more, but- 


Tara: It’s okay, no worries. 


Jesse: One more vote. It’s Hey, which school’s gonna do this first? 


Aubrey: I’m going to recommend my children’s school. I’m going to send them a copy because I love how you said weave into the curriculum. I was like, oh, we could I meanwhile was just gonna force my children to read all these books, but what if my school could weave it into the curriculum? 
So I like your thinking. Thank you. 


Tara: Yeah. The next rapid fire question is, what’s one app you could not live without? 


Jesse: Oh, man, right now. Right now, TikTok, come on now. It’s just so much fun. And when you need the break, it’s there. I hate that sometimes it takes more time than I want, but it’s great. But no, in all seriousness. I probably would be Slack to be honest with you. I know that’s a weird one, but, we’re remote work we’ve got employees all over the country. For us, Slack is, I just couldn’t be without. Everything else on the social side, I grow up my ADHD kicks in, I move on to something else. But Slack’s always there. You, I can’t get rid of it. Can’t live without it. 


Tara: Knock knock sound. 


Jesse: That’s right. Yeah. 


Aubrey: I, I, we use Slack too and I love it and I’m surprised more schools don’t use it cuz school teams could really benefit instead of sending each other emails all the time. Yeah, thanks for that. Now, you already mentioned Atomic Habits, but what are you reading right now? 


Jesse: Oh man, I’m reading. Never Split the Difference. It’s Chris Voss book and I gotta tell you it’s been great. I like that one too. It’s basically a former FBI agent talking about negotiation tactics and a lot of the references that he uses are obviously based off of hostage situations or things like this, but the strategies and the mindsets behind them can really be applied to so many different things. And, just a funny story really quick. I remember reading it, I think it was actually just a few weeks ago, I was in bed. My wife was actually TikTok-ing and I’m reading this piece. I finished this paragraph. I take a deep breath. I look at my wife, I say, this book is not good for you cuz this is teaching me exactly how to plan, how to get what I want and how to really organize this thought process. I said, I need to put this book down or we’re gonna get into a lot of fights. 


Tara: Oh my gosh. That’s funny. 


Aubrey: I love that book. I also watched his masterclass, which was intriguing 


Jesse: Oh, I didn’t know. I’ll have to check that out. Good to know. 


Tara: Yeah. All right. We’re gonna wrap up with our last question, which is, what is one great piece of advice that you’d like to leave us with, Jesse? 


Jesse: Top of mind- it’s focus on the process, not the end goal. Something I learned from Atomic Habits. End goals are very important to have. Your focus day in, day out. It really should be on building the habit and building the process. Cuz in the end you’ll reach your goal and then what if you have a good process, if you have good habits, you’ll just continue to have new end goals to continue to climb that mountain. So I would say focus on the process. 


Tara: Great. Thank you so much Jesse. We really appreciated your time. Where can people find you online? 


Jesse: Sure, yeah, we’re available on any of the social media platforms, Schoolcraft Digital. You can look us up. We’re also at www.schoolcraftdigital.com. You can reach out any which way that you have there. We have plenty of ways to find us on that website. 


Aubrey: Thank you so much, Jesse. We loved having you here, and I know our audience will find this conversation very valuable. 


Tara: Thank you. 


Jesse: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 


Tara: Thanks. Bye-bye. 


Aubrey: Bye bye.