Dive Deeper with Unibuddy: The Student is Now the Marketer: The Seven Steps to Creating a Student-to-Student Marketing Strategy that Sticks

I think people are starting to.

Join the webinar here, so let's just jump into it. So welcome again to another dive deeper series with unibody where we're going to be talking about the student is now the market. Are the seven steps to creating a student student marketing strategy that sticks my name is Nick Conti. I'm the general manager of education here at tech delusions and I'm joined with Kyle Campbell of Unibody and just a couple of housekeeping rules. I'm not rules you don't get that here, which is the web and R is.

Being recorded and you'll be able to view this later on our website through the knowledge base. Closed captioning is available up in the I might be pointing to the wrong side here, but in the top right hand corner you'll see the closed captioning option. Feel free to click that on full screen is also available. It's the last button in the top navigation there and you need to re sync your audio or video. Please refresh your share window and that's just a little refresh button over and Google Chrome. Hopefully you have that right right there questions if you have them post them in the chat.

Highland colleagues will be responding to whatever it is you have out there, and if the chat is maybe distracting for you and you just want to pay attention to the presentation, you can also turn that off by clicking on the little chat bubble icon that's in the top right hand side as well. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it off to Kyle.

Hi everyone, how you doing? I'm thanks nick. Appreciate that introduction and thanks for inviting us on to have a conversation with the audience again. Really appreciate it and it's me today and my colleague Nikisha. She's going to be looking after the chat window and she will be answered. It will be posing and creating all your questions towards the end so we can have a quick discussion before we close things out. And so I'm here today to talk about student student marketing and specifically elements within that like community marketing.

And how to form a strategy out of these these approaches and concepts? Because I think we've all probably heard that community is the the word of the marketing day. Isn't it? A lot of people talking about the power of community to attract people to our products and promote loyalty, but want to dive in today into a step by step approach to how come that that can be true. So a bit about me, I'm Kyle and I'm a community marketer. I work for you, nobody, anybody's a platform that allows.

Prospective students to make decisions about higher education and are sort of hook. If you're like in our unique point is that we do that through the power of conversation, so we allow prospective students to chat to current students or any at university and the idea behind that is that they get a much more sort of deeper dive into what the culture and the fit of the universities like alongside general promotional tool that might be produced by university marketing teams. So think of it, it's just the higher education.

Education equivalent of what you do day today. So if you make a decision about product on Amazon or a larger purchase, you often look to reviews. Peer to peer recommendations and that sort of thing and we believe it should be no different to higher education. So I'm not gonna talk about a massive amount about unibody. Today I will touch on some of the stuff that we do as part of the case studies I'll go through, but a lot of the stuff you can do today you don't necessarily need our platform to do it. I'm also going to talk about the wider concepts around community marketing. How you can do those and.

Alright easy straightforward way. So we'll touch on the product, but not necessarily yet that heavily.

So the good thing first I wanna talk about really is, you know, working in education like we do and I imagine how some people on the web and R will do. Two were quite lucky as marketers because, you know, as a marketer, it's it's very rare that you get to work for products that is genuinely making the world a better place and helping young people choose education and find the careers they want. That's that's a good really positive thing, and a lot of that really keys into what community marketing is about because we're helping people who are really infuze astic.

Ahlbrand about university by giving them a platform in order to talk about why that is the case. So by result they attract others to our calls and their cause, and it feels much more authentic and connected then if someone at the brand was saying those same things. And I've been thinking about this root of two marketing for quite a while now and it first came up to me around 10 years ago when I heard about what life and Health Sciences Company G we're doing now.

GE, they're kind of known for crane equipment like electron microscope. So in this this slide here you can see this is a match on microscope. It's like a big hunky, you know, metal objects on the desk. It's it's not exactly the latest iPhone, you know, but it's not that remarkable. But what is remarkable about it? Are these incredible pictures that it produces? I mean, just look at these things are like kind of alien worlds and nothing else can really do that, and even create things like these.

Ikonic images about coronavirus, which you know will come very familiar with, but the point I'm making here really is that you don't hear a lot about the people behind these images, right? And the reason you don't is because they're all scientists.

And you know, scientists are kind of measured on their ability to save lives and and create vaccines not in their ability to take really beautiful photographs. So she wanted to promote this electron microscope, but rather than go down traditional routes to market, like through scientific publications and those normal sort of B to B channels, they decided to run a competition with members of that scientific community. And they did so. They run that competition and the winners of that community.

Winners of that competition they submitted a series of photographs and the winners were taken out to to lunch in Times Square, New York and the the really kind of big difference here, though, was that at the end of this dinner, the hosts of the event took these scientists outsides and they showed them all these screens around the square and to their surprise, their photographs are kind of like littered across them, you know, 10 foot high, which is rarely usually the kindly posted sloth stamps. And Can you imagine though, like if you're a scientist?

And you haven't had like that kind of passion that interested knowledged ever before. Like an interest in photography. And suddenly, like you've won this competition and your show, not your your work being displayed to the wider world and acknowledge you're being heard.

You can imagine that their reaction was quite strong and it was, you know, they. Some of them broke down crying and you know, as a result they actually spoke about the product more in their circles they spoke about in conferences. They spoke about the experience, you know this experience that the brand had given them actually made the news and products travel wiser than it would have fillers B to B channels and as a result the company had a really positive quarter and impact in the sales of that microscope because they went to the roots of the community now.

That's electron microscope, yeah. So imagine if you did something like that with education, which is much more universally understood. It has a much kind of wider appeal. It's a lot more we can work with that education. Now it's a rather. It's a solid fix product, so that's the sort of thing we talk about today, right? So we're going to talk about community marketing, student, student marketing, and that is empowering. Like your student community to attract others to its cause. So not just electron microscopes and things.

The power of education as a much more interesting narrative where we can tap into this idea of student to student and community marketing, and I'm going to break it down across seven steps to make it nice and digestible. Yeah, here they are. Here I'll go through each one in detail. Front presentation. There's an overview. The first step is to relinquish control of your marketing. Number two is to seed your communities. #3 is to build up those communities. #4 is to differentiate your offer. #5 is to make your students.

The heroes of the story rather than brand another six is taken, established POV. Another seven is to do so consistently.

So I'm going to start with this first step here into forming this strategy. One of thinking about and understanding how relinquishing control of our marketing and sets, and we're no longer control over marketing is actually the first step into creating a really powerful strategy. So one stat that really hit me very hard. And when I first read it and it took me a bit of time to unpack it, was this idea that 2/3 of the touch points of our student journeys are no longer in our control, and you know what I mean by that?

Is the 2/3 of things like reviews word of mouth, third party recommendations. This builds up a really big part nowadays of the student journey. It's you know in in the UK we have things we used how things were prospectus is like a big catalog of courses and every year these become less influential and students decision and it's usually about you know the independent reviews people read about it or any kind of word of mouth. Recommendations from peers become much more powerful.

Influencer in that journey, and some universities are big bum to really tap into these trends and understand that their student student strategy is about winning influence back over those two thirds. So for instance, if we look at reviews Nottingham Trent University in the UK, they understand that their views of their institution are very powerful in Swain students to decide to study there. So rather than hide their reviews of different channels, they've actually created them.

Into their own website and you can see from this page here they've got a nice detailed breakdown of what students are saying about them about all these different third party channels. So they pulled out their star ratings across these channels here, and they've even pulled through for the use of an API to your provider or student crowd. The actual reviews themselves for this page is dynamic updates in real time and the universities incepted that you know the actual benefit of having a page out this.

And its ability to convert students outweighs the risk of getting a few bad reviews because generally if you think about it, if you when you ask them about their educational experience, it tends to be positive you know it's actually quite hard to find someone who goes. I actually hated my education, I didn't enjoy it at all, so usually reviews you count on these things. They tend to be positive, so you need to be prepared to get a few odd bad reviews in there. But if anything adds to the layer of making it feel more authentic, like.

If it was all good reviews or five stars, people look at it and think it's probably something wrong here. It's actually showing your reviews on other sites and from other sources that people trust, so will positive thing. If your student to student marketing.

The second is word of mouth as a way of facilitating stories and happenings that people are willing to talk about further down the line about their experience. So trying to manufacture that idea of spreading the word, I'm going to step out of HE for a moment and talk about the sample that struck me. So this is a department store called Nordstrom in the UK. After explain what this is, because if you don't have them over here, but essentially this whole store is built on providing, I think there's that phrase is.

A fanatical viewer service, so they go the extra mile to make people feel satisfied and and welcome in the store. But the whole strategy around that is to give people talking points through word of mouth. So for instance, they've been known in the past to take back products that weren't actually there in the first place. I provide refunds or products that weren't bought in store, so people go on to talk about that to their friends and spread the good word of service. And they've also been known to carry items at least a couple of blocks to someones house so you know it.

Buy it providing these experiences that are worth talking about further down the line, and it's that offensive sort of word of mouth transmission information that can only be shared through providing like something to talk about the first place. So again, it's something to think about when you're thinking of open house events. How can you provide experiences in those contexts that people will want to talk about once they leave campus?

And finally third party, so we know the value of community, but often it isn't always about having people come to your community and experienced on campus. It's about bringing your community to places where there are look alike communities and haven't seen as some synergy between those. So, for instance, full sail studios. There are specialist university that deals with used like high end gaming degrees, technology degrees but in the creative.

Arts or space? So because gaming is a big part of their portfolio, it's not unusual to find that big gaming Expos or E sports events with a presence, so when they're seen at these events, they actually have members of their student community there so they can interact in those spaces and as a result they managed to actually attract students from those very similar communities into their own. So it's about porting your community to other areas as much as about bringing students into yours on the campus.

We seem to be stuck in this like I guess move now. It's really good. OK, so the second step is to seed and nurture your communities advocates. So this is quite important step that we found the Union by these some universities. They don't skip it but they don't fail as much emphasis on this then the technology side. And the technology is important but actually getting the infrastructure of the people who are going to be the advocate for your community at your college or university is.

It's probably equally as important. OK, so your community is nothing without those. Those top advocates who are part of it and spreading the good word about you and a way that you can do this quite easy when you're building your team, and it's often a misstep. It's thinking about how you're attracting people to ambassador programs now. Often universities put out with a single job description for these things, so they put out something outside student ambassador and have a lot of different skills and complexities, including that one job.

Description and end up finding really hard to recruit the right people because they're essentially looking for one person can do everything and we found a good way to build that Ambassador team is to create multiple job descriptions that attract different types of candidates so those systems want to fill. So if you're looking for a Blogger, you hire for a good writer or a good Blogger in general. Someone who's great video you gotta live video skill. Somebody wants to wrap someone social media for social media skills and we found that when people do that.

To get the right people in and they don't have to worry about sort of crafting things later. They go along, but the other thing that was really important for these students to speak more about the community and actually attract others and their ability to attract others with understanding what the cause of those ambassador communities were. So a really good way you can do this is to kind of hammer down what that sort of mission statement is for your digital ambassadors as part of your student Ambassador project. So I've got example here.

A good way to think about it is to break it down over who the how and the why. So you start with The Who who's the target audience. In this case its respective students the how, what kind information device providing them and then the why and the reason you're doing the program is because you want students to choose the right university. So if you have this sort of mission statement hardware and you do the students that you work with understand why they're doing it and they also have the skills to do it as well. So you need to focus on not just the kind of text that you've got.

But the people you've got involved in that part of the project and some universities look to for examples of this and how they look after their digital ambassador. Communities are University of Glasgow on the left here and Lakehead University in Canada on the right. So University of Glasgow, in addition to their district Master scheme, they have a separate sort of stream of work that is dedicated to building the skills of each district *******. Part of the program. So any project that's faster takes on. It's usually connected with some sort of personal development.

They can later put into part of a portfolio to help them improve their career prospects after university. For Lakehead, they've got a really nice program. They call their campus family and they essentially make these ambassadors feel part of very, very strong team. So take them out on socials. They facilitate their career development, is similar to Glasgow and they just make sure they're generally taken care of and has that sort of status on campus so they have decent equipment they have like.

Uniforms and stuff like that, so you know it's it's making them feel that's part of their for their as part of a community. Ambassadors as much as the student to student marked him work that they do. So when you go into these strategies, you know, don't just think about the sort of longer term pains necessarily. Think about that kind of early early stuff you need to do that. I tracked in the right ambassadors to the program itself.

First step is about building and giving your students a platform. In order to do the work that we want them to do. Now the the role of the marketer, in my opinion is is shifting. So whereas before the role of marketing was about the promotional placement and you know kind of getting that kind of brand messaging out there, we now seem to be moving through a time when we're in the business of building platforms that our customers can stand on and take good things about.

Or brand in our communities, right? So the way I like to think about it is that the market's role is shifting to this idea of being more of a director and a behind the scenes sort of person. We still got the expertise, but it's not us on the stage, right? So if you're a director of a play, for instance, you control the light in the venue, the choreography in the stage, but you're not on the stage. You know you are. The markets are, but you've got to bear in mind the people on this stage. They're the ones who are doing all the peer to peer recommendations. They're the ones doing the student, student chats and convincing, ultimately.

People to come and study institutions, so trying to hammer this into your head that the student is now the markets are and our role. While we do, we still have to do our promotions, but campaigns we also need to be making sure that we're giving them the knowledge and expertise that we have in order to help them do that job better. So what I'm not saying here today is that you will go home. It's like your students do jobs for you, right? That would be a disaster. But we need to do is get more or better advocates out in front of people.

And then equip them with the knowledge and the skills in need to represent the brand in a really positive way. So there's a great example here from University of Limerick, and what limit do therefore mastered this tick? Tock format so the videos are really, really funny, they're consistent and they're completely ran by students. The creative energy. This platform in general tips amazing, but this this actual use of a channel for university.

You know it's something I actually watched. It's actually entertaining. Which is, you know, saying quite a lot. Some of them aren't so good, but this is great. So you've got students talking about their pressure, the different points in the cycle you've gotten, like doing lot of skits around places on campus that are familiar to their community, the actual use of this feels really connected with what's important to Limerick and what tracks students to study at UNI. But my point here is that you better believe there's a strong marketing team behind that as well, right?

They haven't just handed over the channel to the students and said go at it and they have probably sat down with them. Free editorial meetings and made sure that pop content is published regularly. It follows a certain theme. It taps into different things that imports into student body at different types in the cycle. You know. So think about this when you see it with a shiny product like this, don't just think it's about handed over into students. Be aware that marketers are still playing are a key role in this, so we need to think about ourselves more as.

Directed play rather than people on the stage.

Differentiation this is a really important part of any marketing strategy, but it's it's freaky. It's part of your community efforts as well, and the emphasis here is about being differentiated and creating something fresh and interesting and unique. But the really interesting thing about differentiation, right? So as marketers we put so much emphasis and love into the building of our brands and often like the top tier of marketing.

Rose, they usually associated with Brandon. They're the best gigs to get right. That's the interesting stuff and where it also, it happens. But the great thing is, is that a lot of companies? It's not the brands that's made them really special. It's often having a really differentiated idea in the market. So if you think about Ralph L'wren, for instance, they didn't get famous for a logo, right? It's around for any got famous for like making neckties that were slightly wider, more colorful than those in the market.

But I'm saying something like Salesforce right? So Salesforce doesn't get popular because of their brands, but it gets popular because it starts talking about off premise hosting. By taking your you know your CRM and hosting it off premise as a technology that didn't exist until they started talking about it. So it's not necessarily about branding, it's about taking concepts and combining them in new ways. So take one concept from over here. Take another and hopefully you get something new that is going to be a success. Or maybe not.

Who knows, but you always got to be iterating, so looking at some great examples of what's going on and then perhaps building on them in a slightly new and unique way to make them stick. So this is DT PEN, right? So Digipen is, again, it's a very specialist technology institution, but I like going with these because they're small, grey, agile and they tend to understand really kind. Nice niche in the market and that's really creative ideas off the back of that. And so did you pen. They use Unibodies student student platform. It's a chat.

Platform, so essentially, like an instant messenger system that allows students to talk to each other but what's depended isn't the only to build on that platform opportunity. So when students have a really positive experience on the unity platform, like a one to one chat, another student and students usually get a follow up email afterwards inviting them to join a video call upgrade. So if you've had a really good experience, you can actually then arrange a time.

To speak to the ambassador, you just spoke to on a video call for a set amount of time on a certain topic, and this is all monitored by the university, so it's quite safe, but it's another sticky traction point that student can actually connect with the university, so it's taking existing technology and thinking, OK, how come you upgrade this? Do it slightly differently and this is how did you pen approach that particular situation?

Again, I want to look a little bit outside the sector as well, and there's a danger when we look at higher education marketing that we stick in that sort of bubble when really there's some really like powerful uses of new technology being used in in E commerce and other sectors around that we can take note from. And one thing that really struck me during the pandemic was what Amazon was doing with its Amazon Explore network. So as you know, when the pandemic struck and we had to change everything to go go digital. But Amazon.

It here to help people out who would like city Tour guides and they actually created a platform that allows someone to host a one small group personal city tour with a guide who lives in that city. But the wonderful thing is when you're running these things through the laptop and there's like five or so people behind the laptop and one person did the guide and the guy would then take the group into a shop and the group would pick out an item each. But then like a week later that item that you bought in the video would then turn up at.

The house with a personal message from the guide saying thank you and it's that wonderful sort of loop you've got there and and that's the great thing about hybrid event, right? So we often look at hybrid about having online and sort of in person as two separate streams, but this should be athletics circle. So you want the in person the digital to feel very connected and having that experience like gift, enough of your door is a really great way of doing that and I'd love to see a university doing this and you don't even need to use an Amazon explore, right?

So if you do like a tour of campus or the matter to a small group, or maybe a larger one and then take them into like a certain part of the that or where they can pick a hoodie from the university or some sort of bit of memorabilia and it turns up at their door like a few days later with a handwritten note for the ambassador, that's a talking point. That's a really powerful experience, so you know, exploring ideas like this, then combining things in new ways, and we really should be looking down this route and try and things like this more often. So have a Google events.

We'll see how it works and then see where you can reuse their ideas and good stuff going on there.

So next step is heroics, and it's about positioning your students as the hero of the story rather than the university. And we all know as marketers how powerful storytelling is. You know it's drummed into us and you know, it's nothing beats in a good story to understand a concept to an idea, but it was certainly a concept that was kind of beaten to death during the kovid period. And so you know, there's a lot of brands that they put out.

Informercials adverts about their history and how they're always still with us, how they're still a lovely good sponge Bob mean to and how they're always with us and how they always stick with us throughout this pandemic, when really they never did. They didn't care, you know, and they're talking about their story and how they're still around, and there's a wonderful video on YouTube that I recommend. Everyone watches at some point and even Google it now in the background, but there's a video called every COVID-19 commercial is exactly the same, and.

It's a combination of probably around 70 different adverts or spliced together, and if you watch it, it looks like the same ad. It's crazy, because the same messaging is used over and over again and it's all about the brand talking about themselves and how they're the hero, how they're always with you. They don't talk about the customer, it's infuriating, right? And look at these brands and how they perform during the pandemic and they will take this massive tank in terms of like profit revenue and things because they didn't reposition themselves to be.

As port to the customer and if you look at the branded well palette and amazing and yes, it's because it's an exercise brands and because it was home usage things like that, but it is actually the highest performing category of home use exercise brands right it during that period. And the reason that that is the case it because they had a really strong community surrounding that product. There's a streaming product you can subscribe to as part of owning a pellet on bike.

And it allows you to join other people during exercise to track how you're performing against them. Feel part essentially to help you feel part of something bigger, right? And this is a great example of how a brand understands that it's it's community members, its customers, who are the heroes and not the brand itself. And it's a really good way twisting that narrative on its head, and it's very suitable for a times.

And it's the same case. For universities, there's some really good examples of this. Now come into the four and this is a video again from Minerva University. So Mary University wanted to promote their global programs and their ability to get students out into the world of work internationally. So what they did was, rather than do a general promotional video about all those kind of global connections and the normal stuff we hear about, they decided to film several students in one geographical location. In this case it was.

London and hear about their personal experiences of doing different careers in that region of the world. So you've got students working in huge corporates. You've got students working in Nice sort of startups, and you've got all kinds of different stories and narratives and personal insights from those students. Sperian sing that that internship, that overseas career for the first time. It's incredibly powerful, and it's very effective. It probably cost them quite a bit to do, but if you compare it to that kind of general stuff.

Out there, it really does make a mark and it stands out as a really really powerful piece of promotional video about international working abroad. So I recommend having look at global Immersion London and it's Barb and Urban University. Want to Google that one? Very good stuff.

OK and yeah, so last but one is so about POV and and we all know again as a red common snap for us marketers to understand that we know that user generated content does really well, but you know the general problem with the Internet is that there's some user generated content out there and a lot of it is about creating it down. But you know, in general we can say that when you post user generated content on your social feeds in manage multiple studies it.

It tends to do pretty well and much, much better than color regular branded content that comes from an organization, so it's like 600 times more likely to be shared or engaged with if it actually comes from someone experiencing the products rather than an organization, just telling you how good it is so we all know this. The problem with curation remains right? So how do you pull it all together into something tangible and meaningful? And it might come as a surprise to some people, but you know, print is a pretty good way to do this.

Especially around community marketing. So I think during the pandemic, so many brands axed their their print publications and I understand why. On the surface it's like you know, no ones in these venues or you know people don't want print anymore because of transmission of COVID and things like that. But now a lot of these things have been shuttered, especially at universities. There's a real opportunity for people to create these powerful, really high value gloss publications, again because there's no competition.

So think about it, if you're doing a direct mail campaign, your competitive person postcard through the letterbox. UM, whereas if you produce a really standout magazine for students aimed at a certain part of the journey, and you can have a real impact with that, and that's what Aston University does, and they produce with their, there's unibodies, their student ambassador team, a magazine produced by students about things that matter to students during the cycle. So this magazine goes out to applicants and it's all about how.

Study mental health. It's about the region that the university is based in. It's about all the themes that matter to potential students applying to that university, and it's a nice, high quality gloss magazine. And the reason is quite effective, especially when talking about Community marketing and peer to peer and student student. Is that a lot of the themes and the mental state that people in when they're consuming that sort of marketing, it's in a lean back experience. So if you think about when you say website, you very lean forward, you're trying to get.

Something done or straps immediate value when you're eating print. It's more about fit. Feel is it somewhere. I think that I've I belong if you like and print is very good at having that more reflective approach. So you're talking about community marketing. I think it's a good idea to have some sort of print experience. That key point in the cycle and fast and universities have done very well for them. They find that students who receive this magazine and they tend to be higher chance of converting to.

Turn up the university so you know you can't really argue with that. There's there's something definitely working here for that institution, so definitely something worth exploring for people looking down this route.

Can the final point I want? I want to touch on this consistency, right? So the key here really, and it's an opportunity that I think a lot of people just kinda miss out on is turning up when expected with your marketing and you might have had the recent stat that there's been over times 2 million podcasts being created now, right? There's a lot of media out there and it's a reason some of you need to shine away from starting their own now 'cause the markets a little bit saturated and you.

Going to kind of do a trade off there is there. Is there an opportunity for you to grow your audience in that space when there's so much content out there already? But the amazing thing is that you don't hear about is that only 20% of those podcasts actually kept going after 10 episodes. So there's something as a lesson in there for all of us, right? So if something looks saturated, maybe kind of look closer because you know, in this sort of market here, this is saying that you can kind of get into that top tier.

Just by showing up and being consistent. So think about this and this is the case for Wabash, here. This is a great podcast for universities, and they've been, they, they they do a podcast around their campus communities. They talk about alumni, sports teams, administrators, current students, they they use this as a platform to share the happenings in their community and what makes it super effective in a place that you want to to join and be part of.

And they've been publishing this since I. I believe it's 2013, so there are hundreds episodes in and there's no sign of them slowing down and they've managed to build that audience over years and put in years and years and time come into this platform because they know it works right and they've invested so much time and effort into this piece and it's loved by their community is loved by the potential applicants to the university. It's very popular, but they're they've actually managed to create that.

So a space for them, that kind of unique hook if you like in that that asset for themselves because they stuck at it. And if they've given up after 10 episodes, you wouldn't have if you listen to it now, you'll see how pie production value is so, but if they give up after 10 episodes, they wouldn't have had that asset, so a lot of these things, like content marketing, cleans marketing student student marked him. Are we honest? These aren't quick turn around, right? So you need to be willing to give these programs between 6 and 18 months. I'd say before you start seeing.

Some real benefits, so you know, turn up in surveys and decent feedback and then start to see results like OK. These people receive these community community marketing initiatives and we're seeing an increase in conversion rate as a result of this activity. So you need to give it a bit of time for that audience and their relationship to develop. But once they do, they become very, very powerful assets that RC two serve you for a long time rather than a quick kind of turn around campaigns that were used to.

That's seven steps. So the first one I go it again. It's not relinquish control, and understand that 2/3 of our marketing is is no longer in our control, and it's all about winning back the influence over those 2/3 through peer to peer recommendations and word of mouth. And come get me DP chats and the second is seed in your community. So actually having the advocates and the right level of skill through the right job descriptions.

Making sure that you're creating the best people to talk about your brand and putting them on a platform, making them feel loved today are more likely to share a good message at university. Building out your community experience. I looking at how you give your audience that stage to talk about your various initiatives to think about yourself as the director of the production, rather than someone who's actually on the stage differentiation. So having those unique ideas.

And combine them in different ways to think about how busy Penn had ambassador video chats. Think about how Amazon explore is allowing people to have a truly hybrid event experience. Heroics, positioning your students are the heroes and story rather than brands having a solid pee POV. So using user generated content which is more effective to attract people into your brand and then finally consistency, making sure whatever you're doing is consistent and you're turning up at the same time every week and become part of peoples.

Habits so people come to depend on you and expect that same level of quality from you. Time and time again.

A list together and you know the most important thing here is that you just remember that it's you just need to give your students the platform to do this stuff. And like I say, it's it's. It's often the case that people only have positive things to say about their education, but it's a challenge to kind of get those messages out. So we need to be thinking as marketers. How we can open up those channels and those avenues to help students celebrate their institution.

Rather than just trying to do the talking for them, and definitely safer working to anybody, there's been some amazing conversations that happen in these these chats. You wouldn't believe how deep some of them go and and it's often the stuff that's in these chats that it's questions that can't be answered by Google search alone. And that's a nice way I like to think about it. Is that when you know you can get find content online, pretty much anything. But when you get really complicated questions, outfit belonging, can I do this? Can I do that? How can someone like me or my background?

Fit into this this environment, you know that's the sort of stuff that Google can't answer. Where the power of community marketing and student student marketing really comes into its own. And so before I hand over to the quiche is kind of pull together anything and then kind of go through some questions that came in before hand as well. And I just wanted to say if you want to learn more about these topics and understands, like the thinking behind community marketing and see some sort of step by step processes, get some templates for how to approach this.

We talk about it every couple of weeks in the chat, which is like Unibodies newsletter and it's all about showing people how to create belonging and that sounds a bit weird, but it gives you all these kind of tools and techniques and you know also how other universities are doing it so you get like the data from the chat platform we show you kind of what students are talking about, but we show you what universities are doing to kind of fit in with these things and we also give you her two articles so you kind of get the whole gambit in that newsletter. So I do recommend.

Skype to if you want to level, so I'm going to go to my colleague Keicher. If any questions come through. I know there's one submitted before the web and R. If you could share that one with me that be great.

Hi.

Uhm, thanks Kyle. We did have a question from Middlebury College which is what is the best way to harness current student enthusiasm for your institution in order to make connections with prospects?

It's a good one.

I mean it's, they're also infuse astic, aren't they? I mean, I think, like I say, given the chance to do it, and you nobody is like a solution that can do that, but I guess you want to hear some kind of other alternatives as well and really kind of cost effective way I see of doing it or quick way of doing. It's probably a better way to talk about it. It's kind of curating content already exists and kind of the name of the university that did it, but they created like a channel.

On their YouTube and completely dedicated to videos that have been produced about them by students. And so when I looked at it actually looked like the brand the university actually created that content of a program, but actually all they've done is curated. So if you feel like you want to kind of go into entry level of this, that's a really good way to go about it. Just look at what your current audience are actually saying about you already and put that in a space where people can see it, whether that's in your coms or just only.

YouTube channel in general the higher ends and really kind of embedding this door. All you do I think it's really important to have.

A channel where decent text out to make those conversations happen. It is possible to set up ways for students to talk to each other for you university properties as they are now, but I will say having a chat platform and party website. What you do Buddy offers it. It just speeds up that connection. It makes it seamless. It makes it easy. It kind of brings up to standard of what students are used to when they're sort of having instant messenger conversations. So that's the kind of experience that we offer to do that.

And there's loads of stuff in between. But yeah, I mean, you can get started quite easily. Or you can go full hog with a proper solution, but whatever you're doing, you just need to make sure the experience is seamless for current students to talk to those coming in whatever platform you use doesn't matter, but think of the UX, think the experience, think through that journey where it fits in. That's probably the best way I'd go about it.

Come up to time, but is there any more questions from people?

See if anyone has any more questions. Now is your last chance to ask Kyle something?

Or if you want to leave us with any parting thoughts, I guess Kyle.

OK, so if you want to contact us that they they can suffer the chat 'cause you can just reply to that email when it comes through but she wants to talk to me about anything this discuss here today it's just Kyle Campbell at unibuddy.com and if you are.

Like kind of dipping their toe into this sort stuff. The best way to kind of do it is for experimentation. So first start off a few little tests you know, see what actually happens when you've chest. Now the ways for students are taught to each other, but be prepared if you're going to go into this sort of thing. Make sure you do eventually commit to it for like a time period between 1/6 and 18 months, because it takes time to build human relationships you know, and we can't just suspected direct result from one campaign element. It's like how.

All of it fits together into one thing, so that's that's all for me, really. I'll hand back over to Nick.

Thank you for the wonderful presentation. Thank you Kyle. Thinking takisha. Thank you unibody for sending you and stay tuned for another dive. Deeper series next Tuesday. But until then this is recorded if you want to share the wonderful stuff that was shared here through the link, it'll be available in knowledge base as well as as well as the website. So thank you again so much and we'll see you again soon.

No problem, thanks.