79. Should Schools Run Ads In-House or Outsource? with Liz Zweigle

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Aubrey: Welcome to Mindful School Marketing. I’m Aubrey Bursch. 

Tara: And I’m Tara Klaes. Today we are joined by the wonderful Liz Weigel. Liz is Director of Marketing and Sales for TruthTree, a digital marketing agency supporting private schools in their digital marketing efforts with data driven research, analysis, and testing to engage with prospective parents.

Hi, Liz. Thanks for joining us 

Liz: today. Hey, you two. Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you both. Thank you. 

Aubrey: I’m so excited that you’re here, Liz, cause I always enjoy chatting with you, but I’m also excited about this amazing topic. We’re going to dive into today, but before we get started, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and 

Liz: your work?

Yes. Interesting, tricky question. How you think back on your career and your life and you’re like, how did I get here? It’s interesting. I started out in nonprofit marketing. I, out of college, I was like, got the job director of communications at the American Lung Association in Chicago.

Like I’m like, who gave a 24 year old that job? But you can imagine, right? I learned so much. This is back in the day when you built websites using HTML. Like I taught myself HTML anyway learned a lot then landed at a university, the university of Illinois at Chicago really was an exciting job at a major institution doing marketing for the, the large university and then started, moving into private school, K to 12 marketing and admissions.

I did some charter school marketing pre K to eight. And looking back, I’m like, wait a minute, I’ve been doing like school marketing my whole career. So it’s funny how it just happened that way. It was never like, Oh, I’m going to be a school marketer, but your journey takes you where you’re going to go.

And now working at truth tree, it’s been fascinating because now I work with. hundreds, tons of schools. I talked to schools all over the country and it’s cool to hear their problems, their challenges, their joys, and to be able to support them and help them. So I feel like I’m working in all sorts of schools now, which is cool.

That’s great. 

Tara: We are really happy to have you here today and for our audience who might not know what digital marketing is. What is it? Is it advertising? I think we hear this a lot. There’s a lot of confusion around it. What is it encompass? And where should the school start if they’re thinking about dabbling into it 

Liz: once they figure out what it is?

Yeah, I’ll just say it’s confusing to people because it is confusing. So let’s just be real. It’s a lot and it’s changing. I would say, I don’t want to be alarmist here, but every week there’s a new thing that’s popping up. We at truth tree are like seriously looking at chat, GPT and AI and pie and.

Is this going to be a thing that parents are using in the future to find a school for their child? Like it’s constantly changing. So I hear you that it’s like, what even is it? Because it is a lot, but typically how I would describe digital marketing versus, and I’m using my air quotes, like traditional marketing Traditional is the things that at schools we’ve been doing a long time.

We’ve been doing, the ads in the magazine maybe some direct mail. Some schools have done television or radio. I heard of a school that was doing billboards in the airport. So things like that are quote, more traditional. Digital, I hate to sound pedantic, but it’s being on the internet.

It’s being where parents are digitally. So that could include online videos, Google ads, search ads, display ads, Facebook ads, your organic social media sites. stuff, your Tik Toks that you’re posting, your Instagram feeds that you’re doing. It’s a lot of different email marketing content marketing inbound.

So there’s a lot of like buzzwords and things. But it’s really all about getting in front of that perspective parent, getting your school, that kind of digital brand visibility. And there’s infinite numbers of ways to do that. So it is a lot. But it’s really where parents are now. Parents, they’re apparently people are still having babies.

I haven’t had one in 15 years. I’m like wait a minute. So parents it’s, parents are getting younger and younger. The technology is getting more interesting. It’s where parents are. Finding that mix of should we be in traditional marketing? Are our parents there? Is this a board priority?

Cause the board really likes seeing the ads in the magazine and they’re really fancy and glossy or. Should we moving more digital? Cause that’s where the parents are hanging out. So it is a lot, but once you start wrapping your head around that parent and where they are spending their time, you start to get clarity about your investment in your time too.

Ooh, this 

Aubrey: is so good. I love how you put this because, we have to think about our audience today. Our audience today is not what it was 10 years ago. So much has changed. So as you mentioned, there are tons of options in the digital marketing world. Now I will say, having worked with small schools and I do the small school leaders meet up monthly.

One of the hot topics is What do we do? We have limited budgets, resources, and everything. Where does a school start? Like an embarking in this 

Liz: digital marketing world. Yep. I hear it all the time too. It’s, I think schools are starting to see we have to be there. We need to be there, but it’s really scary and overwhelming and all of these acronyms.

There’s SEM, SMM, SEO. I don’t even know what these words mean. And I have to like, make a decision about. Doing that for my school. And I’m not feeling even confident that I know what I’m talking about. So it is overwhelming and it is a lot. So when I talk to schools and when schools are reaching out saying, we might need some help with this.

I really talk specifically first about. If you’re a school with a small budget, limited time, limited resources, what are your priorities? You have to start with priorities first. So I do a lot on a lot of my calls. It feels like a little bit of therapy because I’m like let’s be real. What do you, what’s really happening at your school?

Are you a hidden gem? Are you a best kept secret? Do you have a perception problem? Are you, I’ve had several schools say to me, the demographics. In our area have completely changed. We 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we’re fully enrolled. And now with the kind of the COVID people moving and like leaving and mass out of neighborhoods and communities and new people coming in.

I have schools saying we’ve never had a brand problem. We’d never had. Never had to do marketing. And now all these new people are coming in. They’ve never heard of us before. So really getting down to the crux of what’s happening in your market. What do you specifically need? Getting super clear about that priority, because again, if you have limited resources and time, you can’t do all the things.

Even if it’s, we need kindergartners or we need ninth grade boys being that clear and that focused is going to make sure that you are really setting yourself up realistically for what you can tackle with a small budget. And then you’re really zoning in and throwing everything at that specific priority.

The other piece around where should I start? We really like to think about, okay, if we put all the digital things in on the table, which one are we going to one or two, let’s say, are we going to start? Where are we going to start? And we know from our research we know that 70 percent of parents start their search for a school on Google.

Let that sink in 70 percent start. When they wanted, they’re saying, I have a kid that needs to go to a school. I go to Google first. 93 percent of them use Google at some port point in their school search process. So it could be looking for a school, assessing that school, looking at online reviews, making that final decision.

93 percent somewhere in that process, go to Google. Now, what that tells me is. Google is where it’s at. And if you think about your own kind of, I’m going to be crass here and air quotes again your own online shopping behavior, we all go to Google. Just think about your own let’s be real here.

Okay. A parent that’s looking for a school. They’re humans too. So they’re going to Google as well. So that data is really important. Even just if think about your own experience, that is, that experience alone is really important. So to us, that means we need to be on Google as a school, because that’s where the intention is happening.

There’s an intent to find a school. Parents are typing in best private school near me. I’m Top elementary school for my child with dyslexia. They’re typing into Google and they’re communicating with Google in a very clear, unbiased, direct way. Nobody’s looking over their shoulder to see what they’re typing into Google.

They’re talking to Google in a really authentic way. If again, you have limited budgets, limited staff, limited time. If you can spend time on Google ads specifically, you can get on page one instantly with a Google ad and you can get that brand recognition, that visibility, you’re going to get clicks.

You’re going to get web traffic to your website. That’s where it starts. And for us all day, every day, Google ads. Let’s start there. Let’s get it going. Let’s get the engine, the advertising engine going and start getting you visibility and clicks and traffic to your website when those parents are searching.

Okay. I got that 

Tara: message loud and clear. Google, right? It’s all about Google. So That’s really helpful. And I think it you’ve boiled it down to the basic fact here. It’s still overwhelming, right? Like I don’t even know I’ve tried doing Google ads myself and it is, it’s really a challenge.

Liz: So what, say more, what part of it just 

Tara: even where to start and how to do the, how do you set up an ad and how to know if you’re doing it right and and, it’s one thing to just go on. I’ve tried to just go on and do it, but if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s not going to work well and I’m not going to have a good experience with it.

So with all that said. Because it is also expensive. It can be very expensive, right? Schools many schools have a limited budget and they maybe they tried to do it themselves and it didn’t work. And so they don’t think it will work or they want to try it again. So if they have limited resources how do you recommend that they start in order to, in terms of determining when they should run the ad themselves, how they go about that?

Or when maybe they should outsource. What does 

Liz: that entail? Yep. Yep. The big question, I know. It is. And, to your point, the Google beast, the Google infrastructure, I get overwhelmed when I’m in there too. There’s so many different buttons and options and then Google is making recommendations.

I don’t know. Do I follow the Google rec? I could push all the yes. Yes. I’ll do your recommendations, Google, but I don’t know. And for us at truth tree, we know Google’s a business. And so Google wants you to push all the buttons and say yes. Cause Google wants to blast your ads to all of the internet and get dollars, right?

Every time somebody clicks on an ad, Google gets paid. We at Truth Tree know that we don’t want the ads all over everyone on the internet. We are talking about a private school within a certain market. A lot of schools are looking for full pay families for specific grades. We’re talking nichey, nichey, niche.

ads, right? Not everybody on the internet needs to see those ads. So a lot of the work we do is fighting against the Google algorithm, to be honest, and making sure that the ads are really targeting the people that we want them to be targeting. I do hear you. There’s a lot in there. In terms of really just knowing where to start, what to click on, how do I know if things are performing correctly when schools tell us, we’re going to, we’re, we’ve tried it on our own, or we’re going to give it a go.

We really do encourage there’s a way to think about this. Do I do it the DIY route or do I outsource it? And what it really comes down to from my experience in the schools that I talked to is time. We are all crazy smart people. We could take all the Google analytics, Google ads certifications.

We could take a summer. I was always like, oh, in the summer, this will be my summer project. We all know how that goes. So it really, we could do it as a school, as school marketers, school admissions folks, board members, whoever’s listening to this, you can do it. You’re a smart person. And Google wants to make it, quote, easy for you to do it.

It really comes down to bandwidth and time. If you feel like you can commit the time to learn how to do this, I encourage it. It does require, there’s a ton of free content out there. Truth tree has a ton of DIY videos on our website. There’s a lot of ways that you can learn how to do Google ads, but you’re going to need to learn how to do it and then, build in the time for checking.

making sure the data looks good. How do I know that the data is looking good? What are industry standards for a school, a private school digital ad that’s going to be very different than a, an ad for selling sneakers online, right? The metrics are going to be very different. For me, if you can make the time, if you can, dedicate it and hold it.

In your life and in your calendar, it is possible. We see schools really struggle with that because they’re wearing, everybody’s wearing 17 hats. They’re covering recess duty. They’re the school photographer. They have morning carpool duty. There, there’s just, A bandwidth time problem for most school administrators.

There’s just not enough hours in the day. So I think that ends up being the question is, can I realistically do this on my own? I’m a smart person. I could figure it out, but do I have the time? And if not, then is there someone I can bring in that could really, that does have the time, that does have the expertise that could really support me in that space.

Aubrey: That’s so true. It does come down to time, right? I think about this in every part of my life, right? It’s either time or money, right? You really honestly need. One of those two things. And I often see that the struggle with not only running the ads, but also understanding what it means. Like you said, it’s a whole different thing.

And it’s constantly changing. And also staff at schools is constantly changing. So there’s that so if one person learns and then leaves, there’s not another person to take over. So all things to consider for sure. Now. I love talking about this next piece, which is, as we’re thinking about ads are there certain times of years to focus on ads?

Especially if you’re trying to say, okay, where do, when do we invest that money? And what does that look like? I’m curious to see what you have to 

Liz: say about this. Yeah, it’s a great question. We hear this a lot too is, we don’t have, all the money in the world. So what, when are we going to get the biggest bang for the buck?

And when do we turn the ads on? When do we turn them off? A lot of this comes down to your kind of School’s admission cycle and when parents are searching in your kind of region and that varies across the country. On the East coast, the, the big pushes in the fall when there’s a lot of volume of parents looking at schools on the West coast, it’s a little bit in the new year is when that things, when things start to pick up.

So really it depends on what’s happening for you specifically. The other piece that it’s really connected to is. What openings do you have for next year? Do you have clarity around that? Or are there deadlines that you really want to push in your ads? Do you have events that you want to promote and you really want to put some advertising dollars behind those?

You’re going to want to think about kind of those moments in time where you want to push hard, and then times when you might want to pull back a little bit. So The big piece to Google ads is that parents are searching year round right now. I’m actually working on a blog post right now about how the admissions the cycle has changed.

Parents are doing so much online research and doing all the due diligence, reading all the reviews, talking to all their friends. They’re not inquiring anymore. They’re going straight to the application. So Things have shifted in terms of how parents are looking at schools, when they’re going to make themselves known to you, how they’re going to make themselves known to you.

And so they’re looking in addition, they’re looking year round. So we really talk a lot about that seasonality, but also if that parent is searching for a school in July and you have openings, you want to be You want your ad to pop up because that’s again, a parent searching and you have an opening.

Let’s make sure we get that click and that visibility. So for us and for Google, unfortunately, I hate that, Tara, to your point, it’s like Google all day. I hate that we have to feed the Google beast and like Google’s running our life, but it is what it is. Google, penalizes you for turning your ads off.

So we really encourage schools. If you have 5 a day, okay. If you have a little bit of money, you want to keep your ads running year round again for that obscure parent that might be clicking and looking for you. the brand awareness alone, the impressions, getting your name out in front of parents when they’re searching, and then also not having the double whammy of having to restart your ads again.

Google has to relearn all of your ads. You have to redo all the things. It’s better and your ads perform better. Google blesses you gives you some good feedback if you keep the ads going. And so the ads actually do get better over time. Because more parents are seeing them, we’re clicking on them, you’re tweaking them, and the machine is doing the magic in the background.

You want to turn it what I, the theme is turn it up when you need to like to do a big push, turn it way down when you can. So you can balance that ad buy over the course of the year. We know, over winter break, not a lot of parents are searching for a school and it’s super, super expensive to run ads.

Think about, All of the big box in the retail that are also targeting parents with their big ad dollars. So maybe winter break, you want to scale it down. We also know, this is a funny one the week of July 4th is a really low search week for whatever reason. So maybe you scale it down that week.

So it’s, you’re going to turn it up, turn it down, but it can be in response to what’s happening for your school specifically. So 

Tara: interesting. And so frustrating that you get penalized for turning your ads off. Jeez. So many things, right? How does anybody even know that? Okay. So this is so helpful is what are some must do things.

So if you’re going to be doing this yourself, What are some must do’s? And I’m going to throw in here something because I see this. I get contacted by your team and other digital ad teams because schools come to them to run ads and their website is slow or their website is really out of date. I’m going to start just by throwing that in there that a must do right is to make sure that whatever landing page or website you’re going to is good that’s probably a must do before you and run ads, you got to have, you have to have a school that’s delivering what you’re promising.

And you have to have a website 

Liz: that’s displaying that. Yes. But what else let’s start backwards. I love that. You have to have a school, a program that parents want, right? If there’s something happening within the school, there’s a perception thing. If your fourth grade math program is. is not what it should be.

We got to start there, right? We have to deliver a program that parents are excited about that your current parents are raving about and that you can promote and that people want. So good. I love that Tara. Then yes, you can have the most beautiful, the most engaging, like you’re getting all the greatest Google clicks in the history of the world.

And if they click on that ad and they go to your landing page or they go to your website And there’s a mismatch of content. Like the ad is saying something really different than what happens at the school. Or let’s be real. If it takes more than a second, I can’t remember the milliseconds. Do you know this Tara?

Three, three seconds, three seconds before, if you’re, if your website isn’t loading in three seconds, you get penalized and they’re out. And think about, again, I keep going back to our own behavior. I will not wait long for a site to load. It’s over. I’m gone. There’s something wrong with this website.

You’re going to make that same assumption about a school. This is not a legitimate school. If they can’t have a website that works, I don’t know about the program. It just starts to beg lots of questions. So yes, the landing page, the website has to be engaging. On point, no bugs, no issues. And they’re seeing that ad on the internet for, a millisecond.

They’re clicking on it. That landing page has to really start to tell the story. They have to, you have to start emoting and connecting and engaging with that perspective parent, because they’ve never heard of you before. And they saw you on the internet. And now I’m like, sorta curious that landing page has to really do a lot of heavy lifting for you to really get that engagement and get them through it to the next step in your process.

And what that looks like could be Email marketing, right? They’ve been to your landing page. Maybe they filled out that form on your website. Probably not. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about expectations for your landing page form. We see about a one to 2 percent conversion on that form.

So meaning if a hundred people click on your ad and go to your landing page, You should expect one or two people to fill out that form. Now I know that hurts your baby heart. It hurts my heart too. That is not a lot of form fills. Now the reason this is happening is because again, they saw you on the internet on Google for a couple seconds.

I am not ready to give you my email address. It’s not happening, mostly because this is a very expensive purchase. Now your tuition could be 5, 000 a year. It could be 60 grand a year. This is a big investment. It’s a lot of my money. So I’m not going to give you my email out of the gate. I got to do some research here.

The other reason you’re not going to get a high form fill rate is this is an emotional purchase. It’s my child. So I’m for sure not giving you my email until I know that this is something I really want to pursue and that I potentially can afford. So that landing page really starts the conversation.

it’s going to move them to get to your website and start doing going down the rabbit hole with you more. But it’s the conduit to your website and it really needs to help tell that story and get them curious and doing more digging and do more research too. So those are some do’s and don’ts.

I think another big don’t is. You can’t change, don’t change your ads all the time. You might get a board member or somebody say Oh, we need to change our ads. They’re not working. Or I don’t like it. Really an ad campaign should run a minimum of two months. And I know sometimes that feels scary.

Cause it’s I need to know how it’s going, how’s it performing and you can see the data, right? You can see what’s happening, but it does take a while for the Google machine to really make sure the ads are getting in front of the right parents for you to see the keywords that are coming back. What are parents using?

What are the words that they’re typing into Google? So if you change that. Every week or every couple of weeks, you’re not getting the data. You’re not getting the traction. And again, Google starts to ding you. They’re saying there’s something wrong with this place. Why are they changing things all the time?

This is not a good ad that I would want to put out into the world. So you do have to like, let it burn for a little bit. And we see schools a lot, just changing, and you’re just not getting the traction that you should be. So we really encourage schools to think of a, like a two month campaign and start thinking, okay, what’s happening in two months?

How can we start thinking about our next ad set? What do we want to think about, in March, in July, in September, and really start thinking of the long game and planning multiple months in advance around your strategy. That’s so 

Aubrey: good. I love that because it really is, especially the board who’s Hey, we don’t like that ad anymore.

Or, all those things. That brings me to the next question, which is, so you’re running your ads or you’re getting feedback about change the ad. How do you. No, like what sort of tools are out there for best determining if your ads are actually doing well with all this stuff going on and people questioning, if this is the right thing, it’s good for you to have tools that can give you the data.

So could you speak a 

Liz: little more about that? Yes. So if we stay in Google land Google analytics, which is, it’s called GA for now, they just did like a whole new revamp of their analytics. We, there’s so much data in there. And again, this can be overwhelming. So the key things that you want to look at are what does it cost per click?

How much are these, each of these ads costing? How much new web traffic am I getting? We don’t really care about current parents and, checking out the lunch menu or the calendar, how many new prospective parents are coming to the website. What pages are being visited on the website and where are they bouncing off?

Are they leaving on the tuition page? Maybe we need to add different content to the tuition page. How can we keep them engaged on those specific bounce pages a little bit longer? So there’s a lot of data in GA4 that will help you see a story and see. opportunities for making changes. But you do have to have a sense of what is good?

What is good data? How do I know if this is appropriate? So one thing that TruthTree just we’re rolling it out probably in the new year is a tool called enrollitics. And we were seeing from small schools specifically who were doing the DIY that just don’t have the budget to outsource.

We were seeing that. There still is a need to understand the data. And that was a hole that we were seeing in schools is how do we know what we don’t know? And is it, how do I tell the board that these ads are going well? If I don’t really know. So we actually developed a, it’s an online dashboard where you can plug in all your digital marketing.

So if you’re doing Google ads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. I think there’s like endless like widgets that you can plug in. So whatever you as a school are doing, which is cool because every school might be trying something a little bit different. You can plug it in. And the neat thing about the dashboard is once everything’s plugged in, you just start to see the data coming in and it gives you a snapshot kind of platform by platform.

How are things performing now? You can get that data on Google analytics, right? You can log in to see how things are performing. The thing that I’m obsessed about in these reports for enrolletics is that we actually have built in probing questions that will guide you to assess the data a little bit more.

Kind of, it’s has a built in tool to help you understand what you’re seeing and how to make adjustments. So questions like, do you see significant differences in the user and where they’re coming from? Are you seeing like different places that they’re coming from on the internet that you like, or you don’t like like I said before, how can we keep people more engaged on these pages specifically, is there a way to do that to keep them from bouncing off those pages?

Are we spending too much money or too little money on some of these leads? And are they good quality leads that are coming to the website? What this is big, what channels, so Google. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you’re hanging out, which have the highest engagement rate, that’s going to tell us, maybe we want to prioritize something a little bit differently in the next quarter or next year.

So there’s a lot of great juicy kind of questions that give you and your team an opportunity to do to look at that data and not only just see it, but understand it more and make more data informed decisions about how you want to use those limited budgets, where you want to prioritize and where you want to focus to.

That’s 

Tara: great. Yeah. I was just going to ask actually, about Facebook. Because I know Facebook also wants you to advertise and they want you to promote your post. And they’re all like, what’s the difference between promoting your post and running an ad? And so I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole because I think, the Google focus is clear.

Can only get the message. I know that schools also explore the idea of Facebook. So Since you touched on Facebook in terms of engagement can you just speak for a minute 

Liz: About Facebook ads? Yes, definitely. We actually see, it’s really interesting, I think a lot of schools gravitate towards Facebook and Instagram ads because they’re really familiar with the platform.

To, to the kind of conversation we’re having is Google’s really overwhelming, but I feel really good in Facebook and Instagram land. I’ve spent a lot of my personal time there. I can, I understand the interface and I can just bop in there and get some ads going. The. The tricky spot about that is schools are focusing on Facebook and Instagram ads, which are great for brand awareness for getting in front of parents.

But nobody’s going to social media to find a school for their child. They’re not typing into Facebook, best school for my kid, right? So we really see the need to, again, flip it. and really see that there’s going to be different metrics and different strategies on social media and doing ads there than there would be on Google.

Social media ads are going to be more about trolling them around the internet hey, remember, Truth Tree Academy, you clicked on our ad, we have an open house coming up. Or We have this great testimonial. So it’s really more about that remarketing and getting in front of them after they’ve already discovered the school.

The ad buy is going to be different there as well. And the return is going to be different too. You’re not going to get a lot of people. identifying them schools as a prospect for you, because again, they’re not looking there for a school. That being said, and Aubrey and I, we, I think we’ve done a session on, I know we’ve done a session on this around social proof.

We really see Facebook and Instagram as a way to, when those prospective parents go to your social media, which they will do, they’re going to go scope you there. They want to see is this a place where my kid would. Thrive. What’s this, what’s the vibe like here? What I like to be in this community.

Do people like this school and so that social proof becomes an extension of that word of mouth that in the old days was like my neighbor telling me about the school. Your social media becomes your, a branch of your word of mouth. And so making sure that your social media is strong, that your current parents are engaging so that when prospects do land there they’re getting a sense of the program.

And one other tool that we have seen some schools do really good work with is boosting some posts. It’s different than doing an ad on Facebook and Instagram. Let’s be clear. It’s not the same. But if you have a great post that your parents have blown up with engagement with, likes comments, there’s something like really juicy happening with that post, boosting it is a great way to get that higher in the feed for prospective parents.

So they do see that as well. So that’s one way of bypassing the Facebook ad. beast is by boosting, but it doesn’t have as much targeting. It doesn’t have as much reach. It’s one way of getting in front of prospective parents, but it’s a little bit of a different strategy than the full kind of ad campaign.

Thanks so 

Aubrey: much, Liz, for talking about that. Cause I know that’s on a lot of people’s minds. And I appreciate you talk about social proof because, I’m so passionate about that as are you it’s so important for us to have that social proof online for parents to see. I’m going to switch.

Kind of our focus here. As we’re a mindful school marketing podcast. So the word mindful is in our title. And we talk about mindfulness and how it applies to schools. Can you tell us how you define mindfulness and how it applies to your role or to your work with digital 

Liz: marketing? I love this.

It’s a little tricky one. I think for mindfulness, to me, the root of it is intention and action. So for me, it’s all about my intention, my awareness, my focus, and then how that translates into planning and execution. If I had to translate that into like school marketing speak, I think it’s knowing what your intention is of your school marketing campaign.

If it’s to get more visibility for your school and grow your enrollment, like really getting clear about what that intention is and being super clear about it. So then you know where to focus and then you know where to take that action. So for me, it’s all about. that process of getting clear and whatever that looks like for you feeling confident.

Like I did my due diligence. I got my clarity, whether it’s through data analysis, conversations research, whatever it is about getting clear and feeling good and solid about it. And then for me, it’s all about running and going and pushing and making that intention actionable at the end of the day.

Thank you very much. That’s 

Tara: awesome. We love mindfulness and that’s, this is a perfect place to apply it. We are going to jump into rapid fire questions. Let’s start out with the first one. We’ll go rapid. If you could put one book as mandatory reading on the high school curriculum, what would 

Liz: it be?

I have no idea for real. 

Tara: That’s okay. That’s all right. What’s one app you could not live without 

Liz: then instead? Yes, I know that one. And I think Tara, you and I have an obsession with. YNAB. I feel like we’ve talked about this for the, you need a budget app. I’m obsessed. If there was a book for high schoolers on how to budget using YNAB, I think that would be a good book.

Yeah. I feel 

Aubrey: like everyone needs to be like, that’s my goal for my son. Please learn in high school. If not for me, how to actually do that. So good thing there’s an app out there. What are you reading right now? 

Liz: Oh, good. I don’t read a lot, like with my eyeballs, I’m a big podcast, audio book person, but a friend of mine just wrote a book.

So I was like I have to buy it. I have to support him. This is his book. It’s called undercover profits by Jelani Greenidge. He was one of my college friends and he’s a pastor turned Hip hop DJ turned stand up comic. So I’m very excited to read his book.

Tara: Fantastic. What’s the author’s name? I’m going to look it 

Liz: up. Yeah, Jelani Greenidge. G R E N I D G E We can add it to 

Aubrey: our Goodreads book list. 

Liz: Yes. The subtitle is Pursuing Stand Up Comedy to Talk About What Matters Most. Fun. Alright. Get behind that. Yeah, thank you. 

Tara: All right, Liz, last question. What’s one great piece of advice you can leave us 

Liz: with?

I think it’s to be brave as a school marketer, these jobs are no joke. There’s a lot of pressure. It seems to me the pressure is getting more and more every day. And I think for schools that are struggling with enrollment, if they’re the best kept secret school I think learning more about digital marketing, start to go down the rabbit hole, just yourself take a class, read some blogs.

There’s a ton of content out there for free. But start educating yourself and take that brave leap of faith. Instead of avoiding or being overwhelmed really put yourself in a position of power and strength and authority. And I think, A lot of digital marketing, because it’s so overwhelming and confusing, and there’s so many different elements to it, it can feel like a lot.

And not only educating yourself, but now you have to educate up the flagpole, right? You have to educate your head of school, your CFO, your board marketing chair. There’s a lot that goes into starting digital marketing. And I want schools to feel empowered that they can do it, they can do the research, they can start to really understand what this is and then start to also chip away at their marketing issues, their enrollment issues as well.

So I struggle with, schools that say to me like, Oh when I get a marketing budget or when our enrollment grow grows, we’ll start doing digital marketing. It hurts my heart because I just feel like there’s opportunities and there’s ways that schools can really start tackling these things, but it does take a budget and it does take some education and it does take some awareness beyond yourself, which I understand is hard.

So be brave. Start learning some stuff, read some things and start talking to your colleagues and your coworkers and your bosses and the board about what the school needs. Wow. That’s 

Aubrey: some great advice, 

Liz: Liz. Thank you. My pleasure. 

Tara: Yeah. We’re so glad you joined us today. This is going to be a really popular episode.

Where can people find you online? 

Liz: I hang out on LinkedIn quite a bit these days. So Liz Weigel, my name is so complicated, but it’s Z W E I G L E. But I’ll be on LinkedIn. I’m also on Truth Trees LinkedIn as well. So we’d love to have you over there. We have a newsletter every other week that you can sign up for.

It’s called One Minute Wednesday. And it literally is a one minute read, chock full of really good, quick takeaways, quick research, quick trends. We’ve got a whole new section on AI right now. So the newest and greatest AI stuff. So that’s a great way to find us and connect and start to dabble in some digital stuff too.

Fantastic. 

Tara: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day, Liz. My 

Liz: pleasure. Thank you. Bye. Bye.