Hidden Gems: How to Unearth and Repurpose Your Content Assets 

Category: Content

  • Hidden Gems: How to Unearth and Repurpose Your Content Assets 

    Hidden Gems: How to Unearth and Repurpose Your Content Assets 

    If you’ve ever hit “publish” on a blog post, case study, or campus spotlight feature and immediately wanted to move on, you’re not alone. It’s a common trap in higher ed marketing. We pour time and talent into creating amazing content. It makes a splash — and then it gets buried. 

    But here’s the truth: your best work deserves a second (and third) life. 

    Repurposing content isn’t just efficient. It’s one of the smartest ways to extend your reach, stretch your team’s bandwidth, and increase ROI on the content you’ve already invested in. Whether you’re facing tight budgets, a lean team, or the pressure to constantly churn out new material, repurposing can help you do more with what you already have. 

    Let’s talk about how to go treasure hunting in your content archives — and how to turn those hidden gems into strategic assets. 

    First, Shift Your Mindset 

    By the time you’ve edited that article 14 times and battled through five rounds of approvals, you’re probably ready to never look at it again. But that’s exactly when your content investment is just beginning. 

    If a piece of content is worth publishing, it’s worth repeating. It’s worth redistributing. It’s worth reimagining. That blog post could be a social carousel. That video transcript could fuel a series of pull quotes. That student spotlight could become an evergreen story on your admissions site. 

    My colleague Chris Rapozo summed it up succinctly in a recent LinkedIn post: “You might be tired of the message. But your audience is just starting to hear it.” 

    Getting past that “one and done” mentality is key. Great content doesn’t expire. It just needs a fresh frame. 

    COPE—and Then Some 

    You may be familiar with the “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” model, or COPE. A successful content strategy will take that approach even farther. It’s OK to break down those assets into smaller chunks and repurpose them for other campaigns and one-off filler contents. 

    Here’s what that looks like in action: 

    • Dig into your archives: Read past blog posts. Skim your press releases. Scroll your student newspaper. Ask for video transcripts and podcast outlines. Comb through your digital viewbooks. 
    • Pull out your differentiators: Zero in on the quotes, stats, and student voices that tell a deeper story. 
    • Repackage and republish: Turn a quote buried in a press release into a testimonial. Use a student interview as the basis for a social campaign. Turn event video clips into micro-moments that shine. 

    Your content archives reflect how your organization truly lives your brand. A deep dive into existing digital assets and marketing collateral can bring light to unexplored stories and unnoticed snippets. It’s an easy (and budget-friendly) initiative that can revitalize your team’s creativity.  

    Repurposing Ideas You Can Try Today 

    Here are five ways you can breathe new life into the content you already have: 

    Turn your blog posts into short, shareable videos.
    1. Create a LinkedIn carousel. Break down a long-form post into a few slides that highlight the key takeaways. 
    1. Record a quick video. Summarize the biggest insight from a white paper or article in 60 seconds or less. 
    1. Share a quote. Isolate a student or faculty voice that packs a punch and share it on social as a visual quote card. 
    1. Send it in an email. Give your blog content a second run by sending it out with a story or stat that ties it to your readers’ daily challenges. 
    1. Host a short webinar. Use an existing content piece as the springboard for a live Q\&A or mini-session. 

    Remember: the audience you’re trying to reach probably didn’t see the first post. And even if they did, repetition builds recognition—and trust. 

    Press Releases, Podcasts, and Publications 

    The School of Landscape Architecture & Planning at the University of Florida uses an image carousel to showcase the depth and breadth of undergraduate student research projects.

    Need more ideas about where to start digging? Here are some other content assets that often go overlooked: 

    • Press releases: Look beyond the announcement. What’s the story? Who’s the face of the impact? Pull a quote. Highlight a partnership. Create a testimonial. 
    • Video transcripts: These are goldmines for clean, compelling copy. Use them to write blog posts, edit clips, or post visual quotes. 
    • Student newspaper or literary journal: You may already have student storytellers on staff. Partner with faculty advisors amplify student talent and extend their reach. 
    Belhaven University uses interactive image galleries to highlight student and alumni stories from press releases, magazines, local news stories, and more.
    • Student research repositories: Work with undergrad research coordinators or an academic librarian to surface compelling examples of your institution’s research goals. 
    • Podcasts: Link the transcript in your linktree. Pull stats and quotes. Embed short clips in your content. It’s already recorded—use it! 
    • Newsletters and magazines: Repurpose short newsletter highlights and alumni updates into full blog posts. visual storytelling, or even social campaigns. 

    And don’t forget your image and video libraries! Smiling students, active classrooms, and faculty interactions can give repurposed stories a fresh visual spark. Have some fun with cropping and resizing for unusual angles and perspectives. Convert to black-and-white, then add a pop of color from your branding palette.  

    Get ready to repurpose 

    If you’re feeling stretched thin, start small. Choose one strong story from your archives and brainstorm three new ways to share it. Set aside time each quarter to identify evergreen content. Add a repurposing checklist to your editorial workflow. 

    You don’t always need more content. You need to maximize what you’ve already built. So open that dusty folder of past campaigns. Rewatch that five-minute video from last spring’s open house. Re-read the award-winning student profile from last year. 

    Chances are, a treasure trove of assets that will maximize engagement and boost conversions is already sitting on your desktop. 

    Want help unearthing your own hidden gems? Stamats can help you dig deep, think big, and bring your best stories to life — again and again. 

  • How to Spark Niche Content Story Ideas Using AI Personas

    How to Spark Niche Content Story Ideas Using AI Personas

    Marketers who create compelling content in healthcare and higher education deal with complex topics, diverse audiences, and high-stakes messaging. Guiding content strategy with personas is a proven way to understand your audience and break through the noise with content that truly resonates.

    But for too long, marketing personas have felt like dusty documents – broad generalizations based on limited data.  

    We’ve all seen examples of the flat, dated approach to personas: “Sasha, the Busy Mom” or “David, the Aspiring Student” with a stock photo and bullet list of generic attributes. While these 2-D characters offer a starting point for general content and tone, they often lack the nuance and depth to truly connect with our audiences.  

    A good persona can inspire insights that help us derive niche and emotional story topics to meet specific needs. Talking to existing students and alumni will yield answers that are shaped by their experience with your institution. But for prospective students, you want to address the questions and concerns that arise before they choose your brand. 

    Creating AI-powered personas can help you identify niche topics that speak to the questions users might be too timid to ask in person: questions about cost, transportation, childcare, and how your institution partners with them to succeed. 

    With a detailed prompt, you can use AI tools to generate detailed, dynamic personas that reflect real-world audience segments at scale. You can collate vast results that go beyond basic demographics to reveal intricate details about users’ motivations, pain points, and aspirations.  

    Using these emotional insights, you can craft niche content that informs and connects—and that ultimately converts. Let’s discuss how you can make it happen. 

    How to Get from Prompt to Persona 

    Step 1: Gather the information you know 

    Before you jump into writing the AI prompt, list high-level parameters that reflect your specific audience. Consider your enrollment statistics or appointment data: 

    • Who are the people you’re serving? 
    • What kind of information do they need? 
    • What are some of the questions they’ll ask beyond that? 
    • What are some of the things they’ll be worried about? 
    • What might generate some excitement for these users? 

    You’ll use these details to put together a specific prompt. The more precise the prompt, the better your results—AI tools use details to learn your expectations.  

    Step 2: Draft your prompt 

    We wrote this prompt into Google Gemini: 

    Build a persona of a traditional prospective college student, 17-20 years old, male, from Auburn Hills, Michigan. This person has an 8th grade reading level. They are interested in nursing. This person is trying to decide whether to go to community college and does not have a specific college in mind. 

    List their hopes, concerns, emotional triggers, possible barriers, possible benefits, and decision criteria for choosing a potential college. Create a table with this information. Use emojis to improve the look of the table.

    The table Gemini created was not very visual, so we copy/pasted the Gemini output into ChatGPT to create a table. Here’s the prompt we used: 

    Turn these details from a persona model of a prospective college student named Mike into a table. Include all the details in one table. Use emojis to improve the look of the table: [copy/paste the Gemini output data] 

    You can now visualize Mike as he’s scrolling through nearby nursing programs and searching for financial aid. 

    Important Note: We recommend that you do not upload any personally identifying information or protected health information (PHI) into AI tools. Instead, use generalized, anonymized information for idea generation and research.  

    Related reading: The Joe Rogan Effect: Why Niche Content Is Key to SEO Success 

    Generate Topics from Your Persona Results 

    Nuanced, AI-driven persona results are not just for understanding our audience—they are goldmines of content topics. By tapping into the search results of potentially hundreds of similar people, we can identify niche content topics that will answer even the most specific questions. 

    Let’s brainstorm a few ideas to help Mike on his journey to a nursing degree: 

    Concern: Can I afford to go to college? 

    Mike’s concerns mirror nearly every other prospective college student: How much will I need to pay up front? What will this degree really cost by the time I graduate? 

    To overcome that barrier, Mike needs to land on a a solid financial aid page that provides both broad and niche answers – and prominent calls to action. This is where Mike’s conversion happens. 

    Oakland Community College in Michigan provides these answers and actions right up front: 

    • A callout featuring the tuition-free Michigan Reconnect program 
    • A Top 10 listicle 
    • Links to FAQ, net price calculator, and financial aid checklist pages 
    • A customized FASA guide 
    • A short video with an easily accessible transcript 

    Most importantly, OCC places several “Schedule an Appointment” CTA buttons strategically throughout the page. Mike just needs one click to connect with an OCC admissions advisor. 

    So how do we draw Mike’s attention to the financial aid landing page? You could create a finance-focused email campaign emphasizing unexpected financial resources to help him pay his college expenses. Hyper-focus his journey by emphasizing local grants and scholarships available only at your school, and tag community partners for increased brand trust. 

    You could also support this personalized email campaign further with a finance-focused social media campaign leading up to an upcoming application deadline: 

    • Highlight a “scholarship of the week” 
    • Profile a recent graduate who got a nursing scholarship  
    • Ask followers for their tips on writing strong scholarship applications 

    All of these integrated content pieces should circle back to the same goal: Converting Mike’s questions into an application to nursing school. To get there, Mike will need to navigate through his chosen college’s program page – but is it optimized for conversion? 

    Apply what you’ve learned from Mike’s persona to make your program pages do their real job: Emphasize career outcomes, addressing potential pain points, and – most importantly – provide clear calls to action. 

    Hope: I want to get a stable, well-paying job. 

    Before Mike enrolls in classes, he needs to know what the job market is like for new nursing graduates in his region. Mike knows that healthcare workers are in big demand, but he’s looking ahead to stability and living on his ow 

    When the financial aid deadline has passed, Mike’s personalized email campaign can pivot to current career outlooks. His stories can be niche by zeroing in on what Mike can expect to earn in the field in the next five years and what degree will get him there. 

    The University of Texas-Permian Basin used this approach with a blog post on growth industries in West Texas. Their story featured a young working couple who took advantage of UTPB’s convenient master’s degree programs to upskill their degrees tailored to their individual goals and interests. 

    This niche story turned into long-tail earned-media success for UTPB. One year after publication, the story was still #1 on Google for the search term “what degree will get me a better job in west texas.” More than two years later, the story still ranked #2 on Google. 

    That kind of success tells us that niche doesn’t mean a one-off success with a one-time campaign. Niche stories and personalized campaigns get at the heart of universal emotions that power life-changing decisions. 

    The Future of Niche Storytelling 

    Meaningful engagement starts with audience insights. In health care and higher education, where trust and relevance are paramount, leveraging AI-generated personas can be a springboard to revealing niche story ideas. That’s how you live your brand and demonstrate your true differentiators. 

  • Episode 15: Robbie Schneider on Mental Health in Social Marketing 

    Episode 15: Robbie Schneider on Mental Health in Social Marketing 

    Robbie Schneider, Enterprise Social Media Manager of Franciscan Health, chats with Stu and Mariah about leading with empathy in healthcare social media marketing.

    July 25th, 2025

    Season 1, Episode 15

    Robbie Schneider, Enterprise Social Media Manager of Franciscan Health, chats with Stu and Mariah about leading with empathy in healthcare social media marketing.

    Listen to Episode


    Show Notes

    Robbie Schneider is a healthcare social media strategist who advocates for mental health in the digital space. She speaks and writes regularly on mental wellness and burnout in digital media. Robbie is the author of a book on this topic, titled “Social Media, Sanity & You: A Guide to Mental Wellness for the Digital Marketer”.  Explore Robbie’s book on her website. 

    Transcript

    Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.  

      

    Mariah: Hey. Thanks for joining Stu and me. It’s, did I say that out loud our favorite time of the week. We are fortunate to have a wonderful guest with us today, Robbie Schneider. She is the Enterprise Social Media Manager at Franciscan Health, and a fabulous lady, if I do say so myself, and she has a really unique background. So Robbie is an author. She is a mental health and burnout avoidance advocate. Is that an okay way to say that? But maybe Robbie, will you give us just a 10,000-foot view of who you are and what brings you here today?  

     

    Robbie Schneider: Okay, great. I’m excited to join you guys. I’ve been with healthcare marketing since the early days of the public Internet. So I’ve like, kind of, it’s been very exciting for us, because I’ve got to come from the days of where I literally would like mark up printouts and give it to the IT department to building web pages, just managing message boards to watching the evolution of social media, I really got interested in the burnout and the mental health aspect of social media. It really started. We started seeing a change around 2016 as far as the more negativity in the social space, whether it was for politics, people going back and forth, you know, just kind of reading on each other.  

     

    It got much, much worse as we got into the 2020, election, and then with the advent of the pandemic. And, you know, working in healthcare system, we saw the entire emotional roller coaster of people having to navigate what this means for the world around them, what it means for working in the healthcare system. Their lives upended. Their kids were shut out of schools, and then they’re trying to juggle home-based learning as well as their day jobs, as well as you know what’s going to be happening next, as well as the world going through a real time science experiment and learning about a new disease. So it was a very stressful time. You know, we were working 1516, hour days. I think I finally took a day off on day 60. It was incredible, and I felt like I was kind of swimming alone, because social media was the place where people came and working in a small team. 

     

    At the peak during the pandemic, I had it was myself and one other person. That other person ended up going outside the field because, probably because of some of the stressors that we deal with, and I had to deal with personally, I contended with a lot of burnout and frustration and anxiety going through that emotional roller coaster of everything of you know, not only navigating the early days and parades in the parking lots to all of a sudden, you know, within six months, people are like, you know, accusing you of having, you know, jabs that are going to kill you and and Some really negative language, and that’s hard to absorb. Um, you know, I got some feedback from people. They’re like, Well, maybe it’s because of the stuff you’re putting out there. And I’m like, No, I’m putting out best practice health information based on what we know. So it’s not a me thing. As I’m starting to talk with other people who work in my job across the country, they’re experiencing the same things, and we’re all dealing with this high level of burnout and stress loads. And I’m realizing it’s not a me thing. It’s a healthcare social media thing.  

     

    And then as I kept digging into it more, I’m realizing it’s truly a worldwide phenomenon. I mean, there are studies in Australia and England and across the United States that are talking about the mental health effects of working in marketing communications, digital communications, we’re starting to look more and more on the social media space. There’s not a whole lot out there, but we’re finally getting attention to it that it is so difficult in this always online culture to separate that and remember that there is a human behind the screen, and that human deserves a break from the screen too.  

     

    Mariah: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Stu you and I have talked about this at length, about how in healthcare, especially, marketers, tend to take things very personally. You know, we’re very invested in our work, whether it’s content creation or digital ads and all of that. So do you see kind of that similar phenomenon amongst clients that Robbie’s talking about?  

     

    Stu Eddins: I do. In fact, I think Robbie, you hit it on a very good point. You may be the spokesperson for an organization out online, but it becomes personal when you put it out there and the response back is personal. And I think that’s a large difference about how that that that person takes it, their their reaction to it. It’s hard to say no, like you said no, I’m telling you what it is. I didn’t just say this myself. We see the same thing coming up in a lot of different ways. 

      

    And I think that may be a good point, looking at some of the titles that you have and out there, I especially love social media and sanity right there. First off, an oxymoron to some people that you can’t have one and the other together, but i don’t know i In reviewing the information that about you, in digging into some synopses, of the of the of the articles and such, I really believe that, first off, you’re on to something, but I also think that it dovetails with the experiences of so many people I’ve talked to. 

      

    Robbie: Not a study of any kind, but they reported like, man, it’s a slog. I go out there and I’m supposed to take care of social media. It’s supposed to be an informative and sharing environment. And it feels like I put it out there and all I get back is, you know, sledgehammers thrown at me, or the other part of it is just the sheer burnout from volume. Yes, and I’d love to hear your point of view on that. To me, it feels like if there’s two things that are, 24/7 is social media and my health, my health is always present with me. So if I run across something relevant to it, I’m more apt to react to it at 2am as I am at 2pm. 

      

    Stu: Do you find that that 24/7 immediacy plays into it as well? 

      

    Robbie: It is so challenging, and when you’re dealing with an evolving situation, and that’s one of the things that I talk about in social media. Sanity in you is dealing with, how do you fix the baseline levels of stress, so that when you are thrust into a crisis or a long term issues management situation, that you’re better equipped to handle the stressors of those environments. So maybe it is putting in boundaries in place within your work team. Or, you know, we have work rules, like, I remind my team members, you know, being in the United States is not for the week right now on social media. And you know, I remind them, it’s like you need to check yourself, and if you need to say, I need to take a day off of monitoring, I will step in.  

     

    You know, they let me know what their trigger topics are. And if it’s that’s the topic that’s in the news and it’s really getting to them, I will step in and, and I’ve offered to, and I’ve done so before, and take over that monitoring and and say, hey, you know, there are other things you can do to be productive, beyond just being in the weeds and being able to step aside. And, you know, allow yourself to not only have that plan for when things hit the fan, which they like to hit the fan a lot. And you know, how do you navigate that and thinking about that ahead of time, proactively, just like we do with any other element of crisis communications? But I think that’s a very important thing you mentioned, obviously, you know, getting hit with a sledgehammer.  

     

    And there were a couple of studies that are kind of interesting. One of us is from West Virginia University that came out during the early days of the pandemic, and it was focusing on the mental health of higher ed social media managers, and it talked about how during crisis communications and during COVID, which I consider a long term crisis slash issues management concern that their mental health on a scale of one to 10 took a hit of like one to two points just because of that influence. I find that interesting. The other thing I find interesting is that there, there have been research studies that are out there about just being in the sphere of negative comments can set the tone of your workday, your productivity, your mental health during the workday. It could be something as simple as, you know, I’m in line at the gas station to get a copy, and the guy in front of me starts railing on the person working at the station. That incident, even though it’s not directed at you, is actually going to set the stage on your stress levels and your mental health for that day. So you know, being exposed to comments like that, whether it’s in person or digitally, it takes that toll. And so, you know, we are very much responsible for the energy that we put out into the world and the effects that we have on other people too. And I think that’s something that maybe we’re not as cognizant of, that we can certainly take a turn on.  

     

    Mariah: Yeah, so Robbie’s talking about her book that she wrote, “Social Media, Sanity & You: A Guide to Mental Wellness for the Digital Marketer”. We’ll put the link to order that book if you’re interested in the show notes. And I assume that after hearing you today, Robbie, a lot of people will be interested in reading that you kind of talked about, you know, high level, some of the the reasons that drove you to write this book? You’ve talked about, some examples in the day today, I don’t want to give any spoilers for people, but are there maybe three to five big takeaways for healthcare marketers that they can expect to glean from your book? Like, give us your elevator pitch for the book?  

     

    Robbie: Oh, goodness. I feel like we talk about a lot of things. You know? I think it really just starts out with the fact that we are all going through something, and I am so glad that we talk about mental health more than we did even five years ago, and knowing that everybody that we interact with, whether it’s ourselves, our coworkers, our loved ones, the people we talk to online, they are carrying some kind of burden that we may not know about. And so you need to work within your abilities to be empathetic with others. So you know, realizing that we’re bringing that to the table and doing what you can to step back and mitigate that.  

     

    Secondly, I am a big proponent of systems, and it’s not because I want everything to be super organized or buttoned up. I’m big fan of planning for all of the possibilities, and then we roll with it like we thought about everything we can and we can feel confident going on. And so whatever you can do to help develop systems on your team to think about proactively what happens in certain events. You know, when do we go dark? When? How do we escalate things to risk management or security, or, you know, what types of things can’t be handled within the bounds of our team, and we need to get other players involved, as well as from a workforce standpoint, making sure that we are not the people drowning at the base of the hill as everybody’s throwing and and as you guys know, on the client side, sometimes we get a lot of ideas, and we’re moving campaigns around and where, and this would be a great idea, and we keep throwing more and more things that and social media will just make it happen, whether it’s, you know, putting up a flyer, just throwing vertical video.  

     

    Right now, I’m getting the, could you do a video? Okay, let’s think strategically, you know, that kind of thing. So I’m a big proponent, and this is probably my second takeaway, is, you know, not only having that structure, but being able to advocate for yourself. Practice that if then statement, so if we are going to move up this campaign, or if we need to allocate resources to do this video series, what takes a step back? If you’re marketing cancer and you want to market prostate and breast and you know this new pancreatic treatment, and by the way, we’re announcing this, what hits that priority level that this right now needs to go out to the general public on the social media channels or what have you. You know is everything a level one emergency that needs to be published today, and having those conversations with your team members and other members of your marketing team strategically. You know, how do we get the most of our message? Because the hard work is getting it all together, and you don’t want to waste that just by slingshotting it out into the internet. You want to make sure that you’re you’re putting your content out there thoughtfully, and also giving your team members that opportunity to do the best work that they can when they come to the table.  

     

    I think another message that I want to bring to everybody is that you know you are responsible for your relationships, and whether that’s in person or the people you’re working with or the people that you live with, you also have a relationship with technology, and it does not have to own you. I mean, there are exceptions. You know, my phone runs my diabetes app, and I have to have that within my my area. But do I need to be on my phone all the time? No, I don’t. You know, you can set work rules. You can set phone rules. I think my breakthrough during the pandemic, when I mentioned, you know, the 60 plus days of working was when my teenagers, like, you know, you can just put it on sleep mode at 10 o’clock at night. I’m like, You’re kidding me. And because I it never even would have thought, you know, it never came across me because, you know, I’m sitting here as a sandwich person, you know, with aging in laws never would have occurred to me. But yes, you can set those rules. You don’t have to respond to a non emergent work related text at nine o’clock at night. You can wait to respond to your business hours when you are most efficient. I am very guilty that it’s like, if I send something, I will put it in draft and text it in the morning. Or, if I’m like, I have to get this out now, because I know I’m going to have to send them something later. It’ll start with, you know, take care of this tomorrow, you know, yeah, and giving people those that reason to not necessarily have to be online.  

     

    Mariah: Yeah, we’re huge fans of scheduled emails. Yes, between Stu Sandra and myself, we’ve all worked together for a really long time, and so we are, we are guilty of that late night, hey, you up kind of text, but for the most part, like we try to set those boundaries with our teams and with each other. But yesterday, this is a little bit of a dovetail, you were concerned about, you going off the rails, like Stu is, like, here it comes, already! Listening to me, but so I want to zoom out from the book. The most recent kind of cool thing that you’ve done was you, you were a panelist at social media.org health 2025 which is a really cool conference that they, they really niche down, and they get industry specific, and they bring experts like you all over the country, you know, people that are in these in these different teams, different aspects of social media marketing, so I want to talk about that.  

     

    But first, since we were talking about, you know, rolling with change and leading with empathy and things like that, yesterday, Stu and I were chatting about Instagram’s big reveal about how professional pages are now going to have their content indexed by Google. So that’s, that’s a big organic trend that we’re that we’re seeing in social media. I want to ask the two of you, Stu and Robbie, like, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in organic social right now and then, what are some of the trends that you’re seeing in paid social that healthcare marketers should pay attention to? So free for all, whoever wants to answer that.  

     

    Robbie: I think the Instagram and Threads indexing is a big thing. And actually, they were starting to roll it out about a week or two ago because I happened to just, you know, search for something. It was like I was looking for a reference to a newly joined provider, and I started seeing those posts in there, and I’m like, so that’s important for us as social media marketers, because we have always been kind of tuned, you know, we’re more conversational, we’re more, you know, let’s jump on trends, but really, we need to be about findability too. So it’s really about marrying that language of, you know, conversational, with keywords, and especially the long title keywords. I think the impact of AI, what that is, is going to be big. It is just fascinating to me. You know, just in the last couple of weeks, you know, as I’m researching, because my team does video content, social and blog, so we do, we do the spectrum, and you know, what did we do about concussions or what have you? And Google spits out everything, including videos and Instagram and and what have you. And then it actually starts summarizing and saying, you know, this is what our organization says about it, so we have to be so, so intentional with the content that we’re producing. I think that is, that is such a huge thing. And Stu, I’d love to hear your thoughts about that too.  

     

    Stu: Yeah, I agree with you 100% on that. I also went to a little more of an application part. Google also announced about a month ago now that they’re going to be having a separate tab and results for short video, which means Instagram, which means these other social platforms. And up until now, they’ve had Instagram non commercial videos cited in there. Now that they’re going to take on commercial, what I’m seeing is that social media is going to be able to take a front and center seat in getting a narrative out in sections. 

     

    Now, now my brain goes to strange places. So first off, let’s, let’s assume something. And you can ask young people that you may know, but below a particular age, you’re going to find most people, when they have a question, don’t turn to Google, they turn to Tiktok or Instagram to ask the question. So when I think healthcare and that, I kind of go to the lowest common denominator. And I think the first question is, what the heck is this rash? And if I go out there and look at it and I get something from an organization that answers how to identify different rashes, my next question is going to be, okay, can I treat it at home? The next question is, if I can’t how to that’s the narrative. Put it together 15 and 30 seconds at a time, and I see that depending on where the person intersects with a search question. A lot of our healthcare organizations are going to be able to get a lot of information out to younger people in a format that they identify with, but we’ve gotta be very intentional with it.  

     

    Robbie: I mean, you know, it’s, it’s not the way we used to do even five years ago. And trying to break our Department of, hey, we need to have, you know, the commercial videographer come in and put together a five minute educational piece. Those days are gone, right? And, you know, we are, you know, completely have flipped the script in the last year. And I’ve gotten to the point from, like, I’m very nervous, and starting into vertical video, because, okay, being a print journalism background, you know that that’s, that’s the last area for me to now, I’m thinking that verticals first with everything. It’s like, how can we shoot vertical video, get the experts in the room, and then back it into other forms of content, whether it’s, you know, infographics, whether it’s blog posts, what have you you know, how do you string that together to usable content and really putting yourself in the patient seat, like you said, you know, what’s keeping them up at night? And Mariah knows this, but you know, I come from the background of being a caregiver, and I’ve done a couple of books associated with our family’s experiences as well, and the things that keep you up at night. Right, are not the things that that healthcare systems are writing about, and when you know you’re worrying about things like, Hey, why am I so itchy and I’m going nuts and I’m whatever after surgery, we’re not writing about that. And I realize that’s not exactly marketable, but it’s about building that trust for wherever you are in that in your healthcare journey, whether it is, hey, I’m feeling, you know, off post-surgery, or I’m considering future care. So it’s just, you know, we have to be where the patient is.  

     

    Stu: And I think this also shifts some of the balance of responsibility in those who work in social media and maybe responsibility. Let’s use the word opportunity. It shifts the balance of opportunity and makes reactive a little less important than proactive. I recently had a minor surgery, and the doctor gave me all sorts of information, none of which I was able to remember because I had surgery, so my brain was on what just happened to me, but yet I had all these questions, and I kept going to my computer to ask questions. Is this normal? You know, should my left forefinger be numb? Whatever the heck it was, I kept going into it. There are things where social media can intersect with the proactive response that’s normally been marketing, and now bring it in as a social experience. Post operative care. How do I tend to a wound? Whatever the heck it is, but things that people wouldn’t really want to have in their news feed, maybe, but they’re going to search for it, and we have it available. 

     

    Robbie: Exactly. And I think that’s about educating your internal audiences about it, because, you know, I’ll throw out the example. It’s like, no one is going to share in necessarily, like a post on hernias. They just don’t want to go there, but they sure, and heck is are going to search for it quietly. It’s, you know, if they’re going to have to deal with it when they get home. And so, you know, thinking, you know, what makes the most sense to reach our audiences is a big deal. So, you know, in those cases, you know, maybe it is on YouTube, maybe it is on Tiktok, for somebody who’s, you know, working in a more active position, you know, you’ve gotta think about where your customer is. And it’s not the one size fit us all. It’s not just, Hey, we’re gonna stick it on internet and it people will find us. We we’ve got to work a lot harder and a lot more intentional with what we’re doing in in healthcare.  

     

    Mariah: Yeah, I saw a little quip yesterday that said, you know, it was about AI, but I took it as you know, outside of that, that your brand is is no longer this narrative that you control. It’s a story, and it takes me back, like to college when, when you know college behavior, silliness, and you’re like, What is this thing that I should, probably should be worried about? And you would go to Web MD, and then you’re like, I immediately have cancer, because every symptom is, you know, listed out there. I think this is the new generation, the next generations, iteration of WebMD, except for they have 25 sources that they can go to with 25 per you know, math is not my thing. Exponential influencers that can give misinformation on top of the good information that brands are trying to give.  

     

    Robbie: And so, yes, I feel like the influencers, in many ways, they’re doing a better job at Outreach because they are thinking more again, throwing out the long tails, but they’re thinking more in that problem solving. What are people looking for? As opposed to, traditionally healthcare, where, like, Hey, we’ve got a new doctor, we’ve got a new treatment, we’ve got a new whatever. And we’re not about necessarily putting ourselves in the position of you’ve got a problem. We’re here to help you navigate. And it’s, it’s shifting that narrative, and we’re getting there. I think there’s some systems that do a really good job with it, and but it’s, it’s a resource thing for a lot of our organizations too. So we’ve just, you know, all got to do our best, and hopefully, you know, collectively, we’ll be able to educate the public.  

     

    Stu: Yeah, along those lines, you know, we’ve just talked about short video of a particular type. I mean, other platforms have been in Google for a while. A key one Instagram, meta. Instagram is coming into it. How do you see paid social interacting with what you’re doing is regular social. And to me, video gets a little intertwined with that, which is kind of my bridge into the into that part of the conversation. But Facebook is unique in that you can put an ad out, or you can take something organic and boost it. We’ve used it sometimes for crisis management. We’ve had hospitals that have had something bizarre or some sort of a red flag incident happened, and the first thing it turned to was social media. But there’s social media is not always a crash course in what’s wrong. Very often it’s also about the good news and such. How do you tend to blend in, paid with your organic and is it a tool that you. Use to determine how engaged the person might be with the product they’re putting out, the product being that post or that ad. Is there any correlation between what you observe happening to the marketer when it is organic versus paid? 

      

    Robbie: That’s great question. And I’ll start by prefacing with our agency does all the paid element. So our team is focused solely on organic. What the big question right now, overall, with everything in healthcare communications, I think, is, what’s the ROI? And it’s really challenging, because organic, a lot of times it’s about relationship building. It’s about building trust that, you know, hey, our staff is capable and compassionate. It’s Hey, we have the best practices. Hey, we want to educate you. We are here as your partner to help, you know, keep you aware of what’s going on in our community, whether it’s measles outbreak or back to school, tips or what have you. You know, it’s about imparting that trust, so when people are ready to make that decision, they can pull the trigger at the same time, you know, paid is more about a lot of times, unless you’re doing, you know, a brand campaign, which I’m just going to leave that aside. You know, you’re looking at taking action. You are scheduling an appointment, you are joining event, you’re taking a health screening that brings that totally different animal of attribution, which in healthcare is messy at best, and so thankfully, I’m not having to deal with that side of the conversation as much as reminding people that we are here about positioning ourselves from a consumer standpoint, we’re here about education, and we’re here to help build trust within the community.  

     

    Mariah: I want to swing back around to your panel, Robbie, tell us a little bit about what your panel discussed at social media.org health 2025. Tell us why, why you were so excited to be in that group and maybe some of the ideas that came out of it.  

     

    Robbie: So social media.org is actually a small niche community that deals with health care communicators within the hospital space social media specific. And I was part of a wonderful panel about, you know, protecting your mental health in the digital space, along with Bailey Cargill and Jonathan King. And it was just a great group of, first of all, wonderful social media professionals who have been in with their organizations for a long time. They’ve seen a lot. They understand the very realities of whether it’s managing a an external crisis or an internal crisis, what it means to have to worry about, I need to do a posting, but at the same time, I’m worried about world events, because there’s writing in LA and it’s not fair from where grandma lives, you know, being very, very transparent, and understanding that not only are there humans working behind the screen, but the humans are contending with real life things on a daily basis. And so we talked about things, everything from, you know, tips for us to, you know, get through our day to succeed, you know, how do you step back? How do you make decisions, you know, like, you know, going dark, you know, when do you when you throttle things back? And really about how you how, actually, as us, as individuals, you know, take care of ourselves, both in the workday and outside.  

     

    Mariah: Yeah, yeah. I’m thinking of thinking of your advice and how that will impact the rest of my day, as I’m sitting here thinking, I wonder if my kids texted me back, like it’s only been a half hour. I don’t need to look at my phone, jeez.  

     

    Robbie: So, yeah, that’s why I don’t have it on my I don’t have a watch. And I also, you know, the funny thing is, I don’t keep outlook on my phone, and everybody is surprised by that, but I don’t want that trigger every single time of the day, because every time that we get those alerts, it actually triggers something in our brain, and having to do those mental shifts back and forth, it’s very mentally exhausting. So why not do that? Why not be in your moment, focus on your tasks at hand, and then move on to the next and you end up being a little less stressed by the end of the day. So yeah, it definitely working, working on all of these things.  

     

    Mariah: We did two of our biggest website projects as an agency through the pandemic. So like all of those, all of those stressors, you know, 24 hours a day, and it really gave me a new not to say I didn’t appreciate before, but a new appreciation for the time, and the dedication that the providers put into all of their round the clock, having to think about this all the time. You know, nurses, doctors, social workers, everybody, and so it, I think it in a lot of ways, those stressors. Of course, it was hard working in marketing, working in social through that time, but definitely the people that were able to find a way through that. I think if we’re still in the industry, coming out on the other side, have a new appreciation for all of the different parts of the team, you know, inside the clinics, outside the clinic. So it’s really interesting. But maybe to close this out here, Robbie, if you had…we were talking before we turned the recording on, that Stu and I have worked together since I was a wee baby marketer a long, long time ago, and he taught me a lot of things over the years, as many people as Stamats and our previous institutions have. But if there, I always think like, what are some things that I know now that I wish I could have told myself 10 years ago, when I started in in the agency world in marketing, what are some maybe three to five takeaways that you would give a younger you know, first first time marketer coming in for healthcare to help them ease into the job and and, like you said, make those breaks but still uphold all of their responsibilities.  

     

    Robbie: I think the first thing I would tell my younger self or a younger teammate, is to stay curious and not be afraid to flop. And there’s been times in my career where I, you know, wanted to dive into something, but I was worried about not able to fully invest in it. And so the absence of being perfection, I didn’t do anything at all, and that was probably missed up on my part. And you know, even if it’s messy, messy is still growth, and you learn from it. So, you know, I was thrilled. I finally, you know, I mentioned about the video, I finally dived in. I’m like, we’re going to just do it, and it’s going to be messy and it’s going to be imperfect. And we started a year ago, and now we’re to the point that our team is like, okay, we’re flipping our strategy.  

     

    So it’s vertical first, we saw 600% growth between second quarter this year and from last year, as far as vertical video views. I mean, it’s, you know, we’re investing. It’s not perfect. We may never get to be perfect, but we keep trying, and that’s okay. So, so being flexible, staying curious, our world changes so fast, and not only from the digital space, but healthcare in five years, is going to look radically differently than healthcare today. And that’s not even a political thing. It’s just everything that we are seeing with evolutions and technologies and and science and the like. So, you know, being able to just making sure that we are always interested in learning and trying new things, I think is important. 

      

    I also think it’s important to be able to say no, no is a complete sentence, and that is very difficult for a lot of us to do. We don’t want to let people do but it’s okay to say, you know, I would like to do this, but it’s not going to be done well if, and, you know, explaining your rationale, and you know, maybe not having to do all the things, but doing fewer things better, I think, is important.  

     

    And then lastly, I, you know, I want to remind people to pace themselves. We are not going to solve everything overnight. As healthcare marketers, we are not curing cancer, as much as you know, we can be happy to share when that happens. You know, it’s, it’s bit by bit, and it’s, it’s building that story, but it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and let’s get there to the end, being in one piece with it. 

      

    Mariah: This has been a really awesome conversation. Stu Do you have any last questions comments for Robbie? I have about a million questions. We can keep going on here. Robbie, thank you again. 

      

    Stu: Sometime, I want to tap into your real, honest thoughts about AI and social media. And let’s talk about privacy. It just keeps going on. Anyway. Robbie, thank you very much. I really appreciated your take. And again, really kind of kind of dug in on the the mental health aspect of being a marketer in this particular vertical. Very helpful information. Thank you again. 

     

    Mariah: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com. 

  • S1, E14: Screaming Monkeys, Impressive Height, & Other Onsite Revelations

    S1, E14: Screaming Monkeys, Impressive Height, & Other Onsite Revelations

    Remote work is amazing. But you know what’s better? Bringing all our Stamatians to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a team onsite. Stu and Mariah talk about screaming monkey boomerangs, our impressively tall colleagues, and the enthusiastic creativity that will bubble up to our clients.

    June 1st, 2025

    Season 1, Episode 14

    Remote work is amazing. But you know what’s better? Bringing all our Stamatians to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a team onsite. Stu and Mariah talk about screaming monkey boomerangs, our impressively tall colleagues, and the enthusiastic creativity that will bubble up to our clients.

    Listen to Episode


    Show Notes
    Transcript

    Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO. 

    Stu Eddins: One thing we thought to talk about today, departure from marketing and departure from all the digital stuff that tends to inundate our lives. We thought we’d talk about what just happened at Stamats this last week, we had an in person retreat for everybody who works at our company, we all showed up at world headquarters here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

    Mariah: Eventually. 

    Stu: Eventually, that’s true. That’s true. Well, that isn’t, that isn’t to say that there, there hadn’t been trouble and strife in getting here. Certainly was one of our teammates, Lisa, in fact, was prompt. She got up, got to the airport at 3am and time to figure out her flight had been canceled or some such thing. But any rate, it took some effort. We all got here, and it was interesting. A lot of the folks who were under this roof had worked together for years, and it was a time to kind of rekindle some friendships and acquaintanceships. But we also had a number of new people, people who had never really been person to person, even with the person who interviewed them before they got the job. That was the first What do you think I count at least five people for who that was? 

    Mariah: Yeah, at least five. Yes, five. And one of our senior writers, Chris, had actually, we’ve worked together for about five years, and I’d only met him in person one time, so that was kind of fun. Yeah, for the second meeting. And I’m always impressed with how tall people are in person. Yeah, you see people from the the rib cage up all the time. Yeah, people are impressively tall here. Got that going for us? 

    Stu: Yeah, we win by height. The other thing that kind of occurred to me is the people did fall into talking to each other, talking to each other fairly, in a fairly natural way. The ice didn’t need to be broken that much. And that includes our administrative team and our accounting team and our HR folks, and just everybody. It was, it was really cool to see everybody kind of gel together, from sales to support to execution, virtually everybody was here. The thing that I found interesting was that it appeared that most of the new people, if you will, quickly settled into the group. It’s not because there was the warm opening arms, welcoming everybody in. There was there was that, but it was because there had been relationships established before they showed up. Yeah, even if it had only been a couple of weeks that there were, there are people to touch base with, and actually shake a hand and so on. But what I’d like to kind of get to is some of the benefits that I saw happen beyond the agenda. Now let’s talk about that agenda for just a moment. 

    Though we tried to have a jam-packed meeting, because, let’s face it, we essentially shut down business for three days, which has cost. We flew everybody in, we put them up at a hotel room, and by the way, we fed them along the way too. There was cost involved with this. So we did have an agenda. There were things we wanted to accomplish. We wanted to make sure that we use the brain power we have in a unique way, and we’ll talk about that a little bit. We wanted to make sure that that we got a bullet list of tasks done, some of which were immediate payoffs, such as discussing how we’re going to talk to clients about performance or future, how are we going to get together as groups and solve some problems. So we did have an agenda stretch out. 

    We also wanted to take the opportunity to have some opportunity for self improvement along the way. Chris Rapozo gave a great keynote on personal brand. And again, we’ll talk about that too. But in between all those moments is really kind of the interesting part. I spent some time watching and observing, and what I saw that interested me the most. It’s as though we crammed a year’s worth of important hallway conversations into three days. 

    Mariah: Yeah, you just don’t get that same water cooler effect when you’re all remote. It’s easy to just, well, you. When I in the office all the time, so you can pop into my office, I pop into yours and harass you every day, and you just, it’s different. You can’t just ping someone and be like, Hey, dude, what’s up, and then you wait five minutes for them to see it. It’s a little different. Yeah, yeah. 

    Stu: But at the same time, having had those distant, electronic connections, I think is part of what made it easier person to person. Yeah, yeah, totally. 

    Mariah: I think there’s always something lost in translation. Like me, I’m a very scatterbrained person, as you know, after working together for 10 years or so, I jump from thing to thing, and it’s a way different to type from thing to thing, because you sound kind of cranky. But in person, it’s like, Hey, man, yeah, you’re bouncing all over the room, and people are like, Oh, is this what you meant when you typed that thing two weeks ago? Yes, yes, it is. 

    Stu: By the way, we don’t consider it scatterbrained. We consider it enthusiastically creative. But yes, I get that, and I think the fuel behind some of this was curiosity, the electronic communication we have it after a while, as much as you may feel you know the person, you still at some point, think of them as an as an avatar, or this little two inch video insert in your life, and having had the experience of working back and forth, even remotely through electronics, that was kind of the icebreaker, in most cases, getting to face someone and talk to them one on one introduced something else. And it wasn’t personality, it was communication style, and that’s really important. Here’s something I found interesting, and I was thinking that this morning, as I was getting ready to talk this through with you, several years ago, I was in a different office, different industry altogether, and I watched two people who sat back to back with 15 feet of empty space between them have a five minute exchange over text messaging. 

    Now my kids, but you know, I watched one person, type, type, type, type, type, and then I heard ding on the other computer when it came in. Look at it respond, think about it for a moment. Type, type, type, okay. The setup is silly. I mean, if they just turn their chairs 180 degrees and talk to each other five minutes, could have taken place in 90 in 90 seconds. But one thing it did bring up, and this is where electronic communication, I think, dilutes our relationships. We contemplate, we self edit. We have an opportunity to say, oh, Backspace, erase, erase, erase, erase. That’s not what I meant. I meant to say this. And sometimes I think what happens is we neuter our conversation, we subtract emphasis, or we exchange emphasis that we feel for one that seems more appropriate. 

    Mariah: Yeah. It’s sometimes the opposite, if they need to unto something and like, if I was in person, maybe I would have sat with that for a minute, yeah, not to let my face look so grumpy. I’m really not that grumpy everyone. I swear. 

    Stu: No, she’s not. Maybe.  

    Mariah: Oh, careful, because we’re in person! 

    Stu: That’s right. Oh, our self-image gets in the way. But the the other part about it is, is we’ve always known that communication is largely visual as well being able to read the body language of somebody. Yes, you have a video call, you’re seeing the rib cage and up two inches taller full screen, if you’re one on one, doesn’t matter what you’re not seeing is what you’re not seeing is what they’re doing with their hands. You’re not seeing how they shift their feet as they get impatient. You’re not seeing all the things that cue people to say, let’s get to the point and get it done, or the encouraging ones leaning in. We even have that as a phrase, leaning into something, and that’s kind of lost on video, because we’re shifting around in our seat all the time, but we first, if we’re face to face, having conversation, and it becomes more connected, more enthusiastic, we do literally lean in, which encourages the other person to keep going. It is subtle. It’s been body language has been studied to death, and will continue to be for ages to come. 

    But getting everybody together in one place, suddenly, we renegotiate those relationships a little bit. It’s not with each other, it’s within ourselves. For example, I was talking to somebody that I really don’t have a lot of connection with, Chris, you were speaking of, and we actually had some aside, conversations not work related at all, but we I caught myself leaning in a little more to talk to him, which encouraged him to talk back to me. Not a major thing, not a big thing. Maybe it would make him feel more comfortable talking to me digitally. Yeah. So that’s some of. Benefit. Now we can talk about personal and soft benefits and so on and but the real outcome of was, in many cases, the conversation topics may have been more work related, but we were able to communicate quickly where we stand on a topic. And I think that that was that, that was what I was talking when I said a year’s worth of Hallway Conversations inside of three days, yeah, and I saw people slightly eager to have those conversations. It’s like, I need to talk to this person. I’m going to make sure I have one on one time with them, at least for, you know, half a heartbeat.  

    Mariah: Yeah, it was kind of interesting. Like a few years ago, we did the same thing with just one of the teams. We had the project managers only come in. And I feel like that was more intensive. There was much stricter agenda. We really had a lot of, okay, these people need to talk with these people. And kind of shifted people around. This was a lot more organic. And I think we as a leadership team, maybe expected to have to, like, herd people together a little more, like everybody come to the front, you know, fill in these seats, or you guys sit over here with these, these folks over here. But they really mix themselves together organically very well. 

    We had people clamoring to get up front so they could see their coworkers present and things like that. So it was, it was really inspiring. It’s easy to kind of feel like, especially, I think in a leadership position, kind of feel like, what are we going to do next? Everybody’s so maxed out, you know, who’s going to work on this coming project? It’s everybody really is confident as they’re saying they are about that. Then you see it in action, and it’s really validating. 

    Stu: It is, there’s, there’s also a potential for something else to happen when you get to meet somebody face to face, when you’re having that, the moment you have during these, these in services, retreats, whatever you want to call them, it can also renew that commitment to not let that person down. Yeah, it’s a personal accountability issue. It’s not like Mariah, you and I met at the conference after not seeing each other for a year, and I got it’s like, you know, I gotta remember from these conversations that Mariah isn’t just a taskmaster sending me stuff to do, but I realized it’s the person that I’ve got to protect that relationship that’s there to make it more effective, to make her successful. 

    Mariah: I think that translates to our clients too. Yes. You know, in in the olden days, we used to go to client visits all the time when we would have blog interviews and things I’d slap on down to wherever the client was, bring all my recording equipment, sit with the doctors, sit with the faculty, whomever we were visiting with, and really have those face to face conversations. And then the pandemic hit, and all of that changed, and it just never changed back. 

    So, we’ve really made a concentrated effort over the last couple of years to get on site with, you know, clients, to have that face time, not just at conferences, but to really make time to do that for those same reasons. You know, like I’ve met some of the editors that I’ve worked with for years, and when you meet them in person, and you get to see all the other things they do besides just your little project, you really get a different perspective of all of the things, of all of the ways that they make time to make you feel like part of the team, and it really drives you to like, I’ve got to I’ve got to do this for Rick, I’ve got to do this for Valerie. I’ve got to do this for Amy, whatever. 

    Stu: Yeah, and we did have hard target things we wanted to get done, and that’s the agenda parts. But I think having the community time before each one of those things happened made people feel more comfortable in the exchange during those agenda items.  

    Mariah: Yeah, raising their opinions, giving their ideas, they weren’t going to be like, Wow, that’s stupid. 

    Stu: We had two needful breakout sessions. Pardon me, the first one was how to use Excel. Well, I I’m minimizing by saying it that way, but you know, it’s something of a let’s get reacquainted with Excel. It’s more than just a collection of columns, rows and numbers. Here’s how we use this thing. 

    Mariah: You mean it’s not just an editorial calendar? Yeah, that’s one of many uses. 

    Stu: Then we had another session on how we have our internal accountability to tasks. We use a card deck system for being accountable to the task we have to do. So there was a session on that, because that was like more of a sharpening the saw moment. If everybody knows what it was, in the beginning, we’ve drifted. Let’s get back together. Make sure we’re all on track. But the third one had absolutely nothing to do with business whatsoever. The third one was Eric out there teaching people how to take better pictures on their phone.

    Mariah: The fourth one was Kris teaching people some ins and outs of Canva. 

    Stu: I think part of what made it successful was we were developing the company and the person at the same time. Yeah, then Chris Rapozo with a keynote on his on brand building. 

    Mariah: And yours on AI prompts and and how to create different things, different outcomes, using the same steps. That was really helpful for people. 

    Stu: Well, yeah, and honestly, I I tried to make sure it wasn’t work focused, because we used AI to plan a trip to Arizona, as you know, individual workshop type stuff. Some people decided to make it to the Black Hills. I think somebody decided to make it a trip to Hawaii and and then Google spat out what the airfare was, any rate. The thing that I was trying to observe, because I mentioned I did hold back, in some cases, stand in the corner, look at what’s going on. I’ve already noted the ease with which people assembled when they started coming together as a group, talking, exchanging, moving from one person to the next to talk and so on the comfort level, I’ve mentioned the interaction that happened during the the set piece breakout sessions. 

    One thing I’ll say this, I walked into the Excel event, one of them, because everybody rotated in just one of those meetings. So meetings, I noticed somebody asked a question that alone that normally I would have expected them to say, I’m embarrassed to ask this. But how about they weren’t embarrassed. They just asked the question they felt comfortable enough in front of their peer group to simply say, You know what? This should be basic. But I don’t know, help me. Yeah, and I think that that may have been a better learning moment for that person than being referred to a tutorial, or maybe even a one on one interaction with an instructor, because young people were there kind of support them as they were, as they were asking that, that, if you will, vulnerable question in front of their peers, yeah and no criticism.  

    So again, benefits that tend to be more relational than just the just rote. It wasn’t so much that it was just about learning how to how to work with Excel. We got that that was that was great, but it was also the the learning that you can ask the question just ask. 

    Mariah: It’s less intimidating to blurt something out, than to unmute your microphone, wait for your turn, say it in front of God knows who is on that meeting, and then just kind of wait for the tickets, yeah, to answer right, right. 

    Stu: Well, you know what? That’s the other part about it. When you’re live, it’s kind of hard to avoid answering, yeah, even in a group chat, even if you have a teams meeting going on, you got five people in there, and the person at the moment who has the mic steps up and asks the question. It’s easy for everybody else to say somebody else is going to go first. It’s more difficult to do that when everybody’s in the same room and everybody’s looking around saying, okay, who’s going to take this one? Because somebody’s got to step up and respond. So there’s a little bit of prompting that comes along from that, as well benefit again, overall, when I look at what we did, there was a, let’s face it, it was, it was a expensive thing to do. 

    But I also think the people that attended this walked away perhaps with the idea that it was, it was an investment more than an expense. Yeah, I’ve been part of some of these at other organizations that fell absolutely flat. They spent a lot of money. They got nothing for it. It was an expense. Yeah, I can remember one memorable one where we all went to Orlando, and that was where we had our meeting, because it was truly a nationwide company with several thousand employees, and they pulled in all the management people to Orlando, and it was regimented. And you had 15 minutes between sessions, and you moved from one to the and it did feel. It felt in no way organic. There was, there was, there was no moment other than the lunch break. They even planned dinners for us and after dinner entertainment, which means everybody’s focused on the entertainer. Instead of talking to each other, they blew it. They spent the money to fly in about 150 people to Orlando from across the country, choreographed every single moment, and everybody left knowing that they had an agenda, and that’s about it. 

    What we did, we’ll find fault with it. We’re going to have a postmortem on this and go through and say we should have done this better or that better, that that’s true. But what we did, and frankly, because most of us have matured from those points of the highly structured. We anticipated having the quiet moments in there for people to gather on their own. 

    Mariah: Plus, we have so many creatives that are introverts; ya gotta give those folks a break. 

    Stu: Yeah, yeah, no, nobody showed up wearing black, yeah, this wasn’t that type of a thing. But the other nature, yeah, by nature, a lot of people who are involved in marketing do tend to be introverts. I mean, I can stand up here and expound about anything you put in front of me. I can talk to groups of people, other stuff. It’s the one on one that gets a little rough. Yeah, that’s where the where the introverted part of me has a bit of a problem. But the other, the other benefit about this is we have stories that unite us now a little more. 

    We went to a ball game, and I don’t think anybody watched any batter that was up for more than, like, maybe a couple minutes, and that was it. It was a great way to have hot dogs and hamburgers pushed at us a beer, maybe a soft drink, and mill around on a very warm night while there’s a loudspeaker announcing something nobody paid attention to. Okay, there were people who paid attention to the game. Yeah, I was not one of them. 

    Mariah: Like, everybody brought their grandkids and teenagers running around and like, is this your kid? And oh, they look just like you. And it was, it was fun to see the other side of people when we’re not just running around trying to get work. 

    Stu: Yeah, yeah. We forgot that it was June in Iowa, and we tried having a picnic arranged. And this year there was no tornadoes, but there was a threat of thunderstorms. And, yeah, 90% humidity, degrees, yeah, with a feels like temperature at 6pm of 105, yeah. It was a plan that didn’t that didn’t work out. 

    Mariah: Everybody was so flexible, yeah, everybody was so pleasant. And we got to have a very aggressive Bunko tournament instead, which was right, right? You know, you know, you get to see a different side of people when you put dice in their hands, well, in flying, screaming monkeys flying through the air. 

    Stu: Yeah, that’s a whole other podcast. But the adaptability and the idea about going to the park was also that we would have a pickleball tournament and so on. It people were not happy that we couldn’t do that, that we didn’t do that. It was, it was a big draw. Bunco did not take its place, but it may have, it may have eased the pain a little bit, but we still found ways to have fun together, to communicate and to extend within the group. And then the next night was the night where we extended within the group and brought in family and I think having the two distinct different events, separated by internal and family focused as well, I think that that was a another key nuance to this, to this meeting. We’ve done it that way in the past once or twice, but I think that was also something that that we got comfortable with each other before we introduced the families that go along with each of us. Where was possible. I mean, the people from New York didn’t hustle their family five states across to come to a ball game, but mixing in the more family aspect was a good thing. I do think next time we all need to go someplace where nobody lives. 

    Mariah: Yes, and where there’s perhaps not the threat of tornadoes.  

    Stu: Yeah, yeah. We don’t need to watch the tornado races during our ball game or something like that. But again, I really think that while we got everything accomplished on our agenda, we also had the time to do that rekindling of relationship among people, but more importantly, I think we reestablished a level of communication within the team that gets kind of stretched 10, 11 months down the road after the last face to face engagement, and I think we’ll see that play out without effort easily for the next 6090, days or so. After that, we’re going to have to come up with ways as a group, not just, you know, you, me, Sandra, whoever, we’re going to come with ways as a group to keep that feeling going. 

    Mariah: I think the last activity of the event is one way to do that. So we’re, we’re not 1,000-person company. We’re small. Where you have 35 people, and when you’re that small, everybody has to take ownership, everybody has to take accountability. And I steal some of his words from before my time at Stamats, I worked at a ESOP company, so you were an employee owner, and that was really the mindset, and that’s something that we’ve always tried to establish here as well, even though we’re not ESOP, but it’s that, it’s that agency mindset where everything is always changing. You have a responsibility to be part of that change, and the outcome is the ownership of everyone. And so we had a group. 

    We started out with four corners, and it turned into five, and there were many jokes associated with that pentagram aspect of of our leadership, but we ended up with five groups, and each of those groups was tasked with coming up with a big problem that we see in the industries and a big solution, or a set of solutions that we could come up with. And so from there, we took those ideas back, we came back to their group, and then we shuffled the group so it. Weren’t necessarily in the same group that you came up with that problem. So we had everybody work together to create these ideas. We chose the top ideas that we felt were the most pressing, and then we reshuffled the groups to come up with solutions. So it was a good way to mix everybody together two or three times, shuffle the deck, if you, if you think about it that way, and then our, our goal for these groups is, over the next year, they’re going to report monthly, we’re all going to work together on these different initiatives that really matter to the company, but also to our clients, right?

    Stu: And I was, I was a little surprised when we asked, okay at the end, Okay, folks, what went well here today, or for this, for this event, and somebody actually said they cited that we mixed people up off their off their normal native teams. When we set up the groups, it was intentional, simply sometimes, because we needed to have an assortment of skills in each group. And, you know, I can’t have all the writers in one group and another group without any so it was to some extent intentional. But I also think that when I went around and walked around between those five groups on the 4.4 points plus one that we set up, I walked around and listened in. I heard a lot of of equal weight collaboration going on. There were, there were strong voices in every team. There always will be. But I didn’t hear them overwhelming people that were not shy but and not necessarily reserved, but they take more time to contemplate before they say those people were not being overwhelmed.

    From what I saw, I can’t speak for how they felt, but an observation, there was nobody who was just dominating and saying, do it this way. Don’t, you know, don’t, don’t think for yourself. I also noticed that on their own, they came up with fun ways to describe their group, and that’s kind of a natural thing to give your group a name of some sort. And, yeah, so it was, it was still serious business, but, but there, there was a degree of casualness to it that was fostered, I believe, by having groups of people who knew each other well enough be a little silly to be a little silly. Yeah, so I guess to in a way, did you see? Did you have any other observations that were different? Was there anything that struck you as being particularly noteworthy?

    Mariah: No, There’s two teams of writers at Stamats, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two teams. I was really excited to see all of them break out of their own introverted shells and jump out there and put themselves out there. Everybody was pretty tired at the end of every day, but I think with kind of the opposite of your personality to be super people, and you just get very excited to be with your coworkers, and that comes out. It’s pretty cool. 

    Stu: There’s one thing I did forget to mention, corporate culture. Peter Stamats gave a presentation about the history of the company, and a lot of it. We had our 100 Year Anniversary 18 months ago or so, and a lot of us heard it at that time, but there’s been a lot of new people since then, and I think it gave some grounding What Stamats have been about. A lot of people, yeah, yeah, a lot of people. In the world of higher education, there’s a thing called a view book, and a lot of the people that we work with have been in higher education one way or another for a while, even before they came to work for stay mates, they knew what a view book was. They didn’t realize Stamats created it. They were the first company to put out a view book, and they sold that as a service to universities and colleges across the country. And they were the first. 

    They were also surprised to learn that in the very beginning, when it was Stamats and French, that what they were doing was menswear advertising; had nothing to do with higher education, nothing to do with healthcare, you know, darn little do with printing. They were creating catalogs, basically catalog type advertising. So interesting to learn those things. Here’s something, since this was a publishing company at heart, since the whole thing was printing and ink and paper and everything else during the war years, in World War Two, there was rationing, and people wondered, why would Stamats Buy a company like buildings and interiors. Why would they? Well, if they bought a company, they got that company’s ration of paper. So there were reasons behind acquisitions of what seemed to be slightly different direction businesses along the way, but even that one, you can say, Okay, well, here’s a reason. We could produce everything. They had, we could produce everything we had, and we had access to the share of ration of paper we had between the two companies.

    Mariah: And they kept that magazine running for 40 or 50 years.  

    Stu: So, you know, publishing is in the blood. We publish websites now, too, by the way, I thought I worked that in. Yeah, thanks. It’s actually kind of lame, but we’ll go with it. But the sharing of that company history also helps foster the company culture. We have a logo that says 100 years, putting some imagery behind that, putting some message behind what that means and the growth that’s been important. One thing I found interesting was how many disasters, or natural disasters has Stamats survived? And there were five of them, several floods, a derecho, just, just all sorts of things that COVID and Stamats has gone through. All of them. Flooding was important.

    Our original building before we moved into this one a year and a half ago, was an art gallery. I mean, there was, there was art on every wall. It was an art collection, a purposeful collection. And when the floods were coming in 2001 it was evident the building was going to get inundated. So teams of people volunteered to go into the into the building in, I believe, as I understood it, calf deep or knee deep water, and pull the artwork off the walls, one piece at a time, carry it out and load it up into a safe place for transport away. That’s putting some visual behind a disaster. Yeah. 

    Mariah: Years later, they did the same thing with all of the computer equipment. 

    Stu: Yeah. It was interesting to see I wandered around that building a lot, because when I came to work for Stamats, IT was still just, you know, half, half a heartbeat past COVID, I often found myself in a, I guess was darn near 10,000 square foot building by myself to city book, yeah, and I’m wandering around the hallways just to stretch my legs, and there’s a brass plaque with a line on it that said 2001 that was the water height in 2001 and was eye level for me. And I’m six foot two. And then hearing Peter, I’ve seen the plaque. I knew the artwork had to be removed, but hearing Peter relate the story of it was different and provided a better a better touch point. I don’t feel like I was part of the effort, but I understand the people who I currently work with who were part of that effort are contributing today to the culture that Stamats, right? That was an important outcome as well. Okay, so we had an agenda. We had cultural touch points. We had an opportunity to get together, share a brain about some problem solving, and set up a path to solution for it. But again, a lot of the benefit is going to come from the stuff that happened in between. And I don’t think we can put a price tag on that. We can put a cost on it from all the airline ticket then everything else, but the price, the value, is yet to play out. 

    Mariah: The ROI.  

    Stu: Oh, thank you. Yeah, but I think that the part of the problem is it’s up to the participants to make sure that the ROI gets realized. You know, we can’t sit here with a with a stick, in a in a carrot, and say, Come on, let’s keep going. Everybody has to be somewhat self motivated to keep it going. And some of that’s going to come in accountability. We talked about this, and I don’t want to fail you on it, personal accountability, not to each other. But I have, I have pretty high hope that if we, if we can keep this going for the next three months or four months, that there’ll be a sustained benefit that goes past that time. Yeah, I’m hopeful that if we were able to do this again, that we will learn from what we did with the take the successful parts and magnify them, and the parts where we kind of went, Oh, we could have done better. And we smooth those out and the OH MY GOD moments, and we get rid of those and come up with something else to try.  

    Mariah: But I really hope we get to keep the screaming monkey.  

    Stu: The Screaming monkey, I think is going to be good, by the way, I can get him as a six pack on Amazon for 30 bucks. I think I’m putting one in every office going forward. So yeah, flying screaming monkeys for everybody. All right, Ryan, thank you. I think that if you work for a an organization that has the opportunity to do such a thing as an retreat or an in service, it’s good to participate. It’s good to be there. Think of it as benefiting you almost more than benefiting the company. The company can get stuff done remotely. They don’t need to put you all together to get stuff done. So the objective is always more than that. It’s about it’s about building a team, and you will always take out of any team building what you put in.  

    Mariah: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com. 

  • Niche Content Rules Right Now: 3 Lessons from Mariah’s Appearance on The Education Marketing Leader Podcast 

    Niche Content Rules Right Now: 3 Lessons from Mariah’s Appearance on The Education Marketing Leader Podcast 

    Following a well-received webinar titled “The Joe Rogan Effect,” Mariah appeared on The Education Marketing Leader, a popular podcast hosted by Chris Rapozo, Stamats’ new AVP of Marketing Strategy.

    “We’re living in a time when anybody with a microphone and an opinion can spread it around,” she said. “Higher education institutions and academic centers have an opportunity, maybe even a responsibility, to counter misinformation with real, evidence-based facts that give people a chance to make good decisions.”

    At its core, niche content marketing means creating content that speaks to your expertise in a targeted way to appeal to a smaller segment of your total audience. By demonstrating your brand’s deep knowledge of a particular subject matter, you can engage audiences by answering their specific questions, sometimes even before they’ve thought about asking.

    For example, a community college with a well-regarded program in automotive repair could consider creating content that speaks the language of students seeking education in the field.

    Articles, videos, and other content that demonstrates the value of the program and how it fits into students’ busy lives could drive up applications for this strong program, expanding revenue for the college.

    Consider the just a few benefits of building your content marketing strategy around your brand’s specific expertise:

    • Focusing on a niche audience allows you to create content that is more relevant to their interests, driving up engagement.
    • Niche marketing can help you stand out among larger competitors. You might not be the biggest, but niche content helps your best-qualified audience learn you know your stuff.
    • Leveraging social medial communities where consumer groups interact is a snap with niche content. These pieces are easily shared by engaged consumers, expanding the reach of your expertise.

    In a wide-ranging interview, Mariah and Chris discussed how institutions like colleges, universities, and academic medical centers can harness the power of niche content to deepen brand engagement and nail their marketing goals. Here are a few actionable highlights from their conversation.

    Listen to the full episode: Mariah Tang on The Education Marketing Leader

    1. Go Longer.

    As clickless search takes hold across platforms like Google, Bing, and AI-based GPTs, the brands that rise to the top will be those that can leverage long-form content to speak to a niche audience.

    “We’re going to see fewer broad searches and a lot more specific questions and specific conversation-based searched,” Mariah said. “I strongly believe this is why long form content—whether that’s video, blogs, or transcripts—will continue to have a place.”

    Rather than trying to answer every question an audience member might have, brands can build knowledge centers that include several pieces of content to answer the most burning questions. In higher education, that might mean a range of queries, from “do you have my major?” to “how does your institution help me get the next step after my degree?”

    “That really increases the chance your brand will surface in AI and Google searches, and whatever the next iteration is, too,” Mariah said. “It shows you’re in touch with your audience, you know what they’re looking for, and you have solutions at every stage.”

    Related reading: The Joe Rogan Effect: Why Niche Content is Key to SEO Success

    2. Go Deeper.

    So how do institutions get all the expertise of their faculty into a niche content format that can engage audiences?

    “It really starts with those experts,” Mariah explained. “Take their excitement, their enthusiasm, and their comfort level as your starting point.”

    For academic institutions, the faculty are at the core of the student experience, and students want to know they’re learning from teachers who have experience and compassion. Lean into the personalities of these champions and build flexible content based on other sources like student testimonials. These first-person insights deliver trustworthy content that gets results.

    As an example, Mariah cited Stamats’ work with the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, an academic medical center an Albuquerque, NM. They approached Stamats seeking to attract high-quality trainees to their neuroscience intensive care unit.

    While interviewing UNM HSC’s in-house expert, Stamats’ team discovered an opportunity to target a niche with specific content rather than broad strokes. We asked the expert, what are trainees most worried about in a program like this? When they answered “work-life balance,” we knew we’d found a story to speak to the niche.

    Stamats created a “day in the life” concept that included the program basics, as well as images, and details like “this is when you’ll sneak in a snack break.” It made the challenging program more digestible, and ensured prospective students understood the university is in their corner.

    “They ended up winning a Digital Health Award for the story, and it continues to rank highly in search. That’s because it touches on both the facts and the emotional pull,” Mariah explained. “They continue to outrank institutions [in search results] that generally pull top candidates because they tapped into that emotional brand voice.”

    Related reading: Search Is Changing: Shift Your Strategy & Tactics to Adapt

    3. Go AI.

    When you’re building a niche content empire, it’s important to think outside of your comfort zone. Many marketers are comfortable rolling out stats like student-to-faculty ratio and average class size. It can be difficult to remember those numbers don’t mean much to high school students choosing a college—or another path.

    “There are a lot of alternatives to college,” Mariah said. “There’s a lot of different pathways to approach education. So, if you’re just going with hard facts or what people 10 years ago told you was important, you’re going to miss a lot of that.”

    Answering the questions today’s students are asking is the key to building effective niche content. So how do you know what they need to know when even young alumni and current students can be out of date?

    “Using tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can really help you collate what a lot of people are searching for in the moment, or at least in recent history,” Mariah advised.

    Prompting an AI assistant to help you build prospective student personas can help dial in the specific questions your niche is asking.

    “You can ask [AI] about their dreams, their concerns, their hopes—things that maybe people wouldn’t think to ask about or respond with if you were talking face to face,” Mariah explained.

    The answers to those questions can lead to topics. These carefully crafted long-form content pieces on your website can inform the audience at any point in their decision-making process, helping them engage with your brand and understand how what you offer can help them achieve their goals.

    These insightful tips are just the beginning of the wide-ranging conversation between Mariah and Chris on The Education Marketing Leader. For more, check out the full episode, and consider subscribing to the podcast for even more actionable advice.

    If you’re ready to start building your institution’s niche content empire, Stamats can help.

  • S1, E13: Search Everywhere Optimization

    SEO? AIO? We don’t need a new acronym – we need a new mindset. Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang discuss why SEO is now Search Everywhere Optimization, and why successful brand stories are created for people, not platforms.

    June 3rd, 2025

    Season 1, Episode 13

    SEO? AIO? We don’t need a new acronym – we need a new mindset. Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang discuss why SEO is now Search Everywhere Optimization, and why successful brand stories are created for people, not platforms. 

    Listen to Episode


    Transcript

    Stu Eddins: If you’re optimizing for everywhere, at some point somebody’s going to ask the last question for which they need an answer. And that comes back to, “our content has to close the deal.”

    Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

    Stu: There’s been a lot of talk going on, of course, about AI. It’s everywhere around us. It seems to be invading everything from my shopping list to my Google ads and everything else. There’s been some recent conversation and a lot of back and forth about how you go about influencing AI? How do you get found in this stuff? And there have been a lot of suggestions for what to do, but there’s been a lot of conversation about what to call it. There have been suggestions all over the place, and some more recent ones even resulted in a posting on LinkedIn by Rand Fishkin, who, interestingly, suggests we already have a name for this stuff, and it’s Seo. Now here’s something. And Mariah, you’ve been dealing with content forever, so SEO is really deep into the language you’re probably using a lot with clients. Have you heard any clients ask what this next step is going to be called?

    Mariah: Not really. I mean, they just want to know, how do I get found? How do I break through the noise? You know, the same things that we’ve always been hearing forever.

    Stu: Yeah, and I think that’s really the big deal. Nobody cares what you call it; the objective is still the same. How do I get found? How does my voice get heard? And how do I make sure that I’m reaching out to people who actually need to connect with me, or I need to connect with them, either way, however you care to look at it. So Rand Fishkin suggested that it’s still called SEO, but then he said somebody coined the term search everywhere optimization, which is why the acronym stays the same as it was. There’s a lot of pushback. And a lot of that pushback, I think, comes from the fact that for ages, in the very early days of internet, SEO was pretty much considered to be snake oil. There were a lot of people out there who said they were SEO practitioners who were more interested in selling you a service than helping you get anything done. And you know, I at the time, when I was working on different websites, or, you know, in house, on the brands website itself, we were concerned about these things, and we actually bit on some of those offers that today would be considered Black Hat link farming or spinning out articles to put everywhere else so that we had more links coming into us. Yeah, that was SEO back when there were very few rules and there were white hats and black hats. But today, SEO evolved into a different space. There’s still people who try to game the system more than they should, but this next step has people concerned. You write a lot of content, particularly in healthcare. Let’s talk about that for just a second. I don’t feel your objective has changed one bit. Do you?

    Mariah: Not really, if anything, it’s gotten a little bit more niche. It’s gotten a little bit more specific. So from everything that we’re seeing, groups are still being asked the same questions. From this, many of the same platforms, patients or prospective students are just using a different tool with maybe longer form questions to ask or just search for information. And that’s a that’s a problem that we’re seeing too out there in the whole SEO AIO, you know, Farm Animal Song, alphabet soup situation that we were looking at right now. It’s like, well, people aren’t searching, they’re asking. But at the end of the day, when you’re searching for something, you’re looking for an answer. When you’re asking a question, you’re looking for an answer. It’s just, you know, pedantic, to try to break it down further. So whether it’s a simple near me request, whether it’s a long form request, it’s still people looking for answers, and they’re still looking at you as the institution to give them the answer they they’re looking for.

    Stu: You know? And I think that what this, what this moment, may be doing, is pulling something into focus that’s always been there. It’s just that for many of us, the focus has been easier. It’s been easier to keep focused on a narrow spectrum of services to get a job done. They seem to be the biggest levers to pull advertising SEO, other forms of content marketing, but I think that what we’re leaning into now may be what’s been an underlying truth of all of that. And that underlying truth is kind of explained by the fact that your audience is everywhere. We’ve always been everywhere. We’ve just been able to get our biggest bang by saying, Okay, we’re going to make Google send more traffic to be paid or organic. We’ve been able to have backlinks from blogs, which helps SEO, but also sends traffic from referrals all to our website. But I think this moment actually does bring into focus something else. If our audience is everywhere and search everywhere, optimization, I think we’ve got some high correlation between these two thoughts. I would suspect that as we back out from our narrow view into a broader view, we realize we’ve always had an opportunity to answer those questions outside of search. On Reddit, we’ve had the opportunity to answer it on Snapchat. We’ve had ways to connect with people where they are in a meaningful way. And maybe that’s, that’s the argument for search everywhere optimization. Does that make sense?

    Mariah: Yeah. I mean, we used to just say, create once, publish everywhere. And I think that’s still an appropriate methodology for distribution. But it’s, it’s basically saying the same thing. It’s get your, get your arms around the problem that people have create the content or the, you know, whatever it is, the video, the blog, the ad, the landing page that brings those answers together. Put it out where people are, and they will find that information. I mean, with, with AI tools, with, you know, the “everybody’s a writer” kind of thing that we’re seeing right now and probably going forward, it’s going to be harder to break through the noise as as people say or as people request. But I think at the end of the day, it’s the brands that really take the time to understand the audience, that really take the time to understand the way that people are asking and where they’re asking, and tailor their responses to those queries or to those individual moments of intent that are going to continue to break through the noise, just like every single other iteration of this that we’ve ever seen.

    Stu: Yeah, and I think there’s a couple of things at work here. We’ve always had these other channels we could use to reach people to do, as I said, meet them where they’re at. But it’s less satisfying from measurement point of view. We’re not able to say that well, you know, we went out here and said this thing, and look what it did for our benefit on the website, either through engagement or conversions or something else. It’s not been, I don’t want to call it a gray area, but an easy area, measuring that follow on benefit from some activity you do outside of your domain, outside of your website. And I think that there’s a resistance to that lack of satisfaction, the scorecard mentality, if you will, is gonna take a hit.

    Mariah: Yeah, it’s like the dark ages of content marketing, when we were all out there just with our boots on the ground, like, trust us, it’ll work. And then it did, and then the ways to measure it followed. I mean, I imagine something similar will happen. I can’t I can’t fathom that by this time next year, there won’t be some way to track your AI footprint, or, you know how chat GPT or perplexity is sending people to your whatever, whether it’s your social or your website, or some, some way to connect the dots.

    Stu: Yeah, and I also think that we have to work toward getting away from that single channel mentality of measurement. I don’t think it benefits us to switch from we’ve been tracking how well search works for us to tracking how well AI works for us. I think that that we have an opportunity to not be so narrow. And this may be it. Search everywhere. Optimization, your audience is everywhere, confining ourselves to what Perplexity does, or what ChatGPT does, though it is one of the bigger levers out there we can pull. It’s just part of the whole story. I was watching some videos over the weekend, and one of them was a conversation more about. Branding and video and so on. But there’s some correlation here, and I think I can substitute what we’re going to get into what these people were saying. A lot of this stuff is not going to generate a conversion directly. If you go out and answer questions on Reddit, it’s not going to generate a conversion directly. Let’s look at the higher education side of our house. If I go out there and answer questions about how our housing takes care of your need while you’re on campus, somebody who reads that, it’s not gonna go, Oh, great. Click, let’s go to that website. Click, I’m applying today. It doesn’t happen that way. And as a result, I think, and SEO has been regular. SEO has been this way. To a large extent, we have to have a broader view measurement going on. You notice I keep bringing it back to measurement? Then there’s a reason for this, but we have to look at it from a rising tide floats all boats. And in this case, the rising tide is going to be our presence online, and the boats are gonna be the different things that we want to have happen on our website. So we may be looking at is, did branded searches increase? We’re getting back to search as a measuring tool, but it’s talking about the or trying or attempting to measure the impact of everything we’re doing, and using several discrete points to say, okay, when we do this, we see these three things increase. When we stop doing this, they eventually come down, and that takes time to develop that correlation. So yeah, really it’s gonna be about things like seeing a lift in brand search totals, or conversions from those branded searches going up. To be more specific, perhaps it’s gonna be incrementality testing, which kind of what that is. So in we do all these things and we say, Okay, we’ve got, we’ve got eight platforms. We’re constantly responding to stuff. What if we stop doing it in two Do we still get the same amount of lift, or does it take all eight and start asking those questions about our presence, rather than getting down to the very last nth degree of precision on click detail? And I think post purchase or posting gift surveys are going to become more important, too.

    Mariah: Oh, yeah. Like the How did, how did you hear about us? What made you make your decision? You know, do you remember seeing us, here, there and everywhere? I mean, this is this whole like, our conversions is more, I think on your side of the table, Stu then mine, because, like, content marketing, storytelling, all of that stuff, whatever you want to call it, has never, has never, in theory, been a conversion, driving channel. It’s never really been like a our sole goal here is to make conversions like on a landing page or an ad. It’s the brand awareness. It’s like what you were saying. It’s the lift. It’s the tying all the pieces together to move the needle, and then at the end of the day, that last point is the conversion point. Sometimes it is a blog, sometimes it is a podcast that you hear just at that right time and say, Now I’m going to make the move. But most of the time, it’s the buildup of those things that lead to seeing a really great ad or a really great landing page and saying, Ah, now I’m going to do it. Stu: And to build on what you’re saying, the way I usually look at this is the ad click is the final moment in a conversation that’s been going on for a long time before an engagement that’s been that’s been going on for a while, it’s the decision moment, and the ad only intersects with the decision moment, and we’re only part of that decision moment if we’ve earned our place in that I can put out ads all day long about a counseling associate’s degree, and people may click those ads, but the number of people who are going to act on what they what they see on landing page is quite low. If they’ve never had any contact with our brand beforehand, if they if they are not familiar with us as being a viable alternative to what they may have already had in mind. And I got to tell you, I also kind of look forward to this search everywhere optimization concept, really, because it does tend to describe the full engagement, the full journey somebody takes. And we don’t, we don’t invest every single bit of effort, every single dollar we have in being interruptive at the last moment. You know a lot of advertising is you’re talking to a group of people who know the brands that they know, have the experiences that they’ve had, and that colors their thought. And we’re here to interrupt that train chain of thought and interject our. Themselves as an option. It’s just interruptive type advertising. Advertising does that well, it is a tool for that purpose, but I also think it can be the part where it is the culmination of that developed brand presence and knowledge that goes out there. The content marketing that you do, no, it doesn’t drive directly toward a conversion, but the website exists largely for brand awareness and where it can to develop those conversions. And I think if we don’t look at them as joined at the hip, we’re never going to get to a satisfying explanation of our effort versus outcome.

    Mariah: Yeah, yeah. 100%

    Stu: Yeah. Okay. And the outcome is not the same for everybody. You know, yeah. Some people just want to, just want to be known as, hey, we’re just as present as brand XYZ two counties over. That’s good enough that right now, that’s our objective. We’ll come up with another objective after that. So, yeah, I think that search everywhere optimization may be a clue about what we have to think about next.

    Mariah: Yeah, it comes back to what we talked about right at the start is, that’s why with the content part or the brand story part, you might have a big, general piece about a topic, and then each specific step in that user progression towards the conversion would have a different, more specific story or piece or video or whatever. And it gets more and more granular down the pike. So that way you have a piece of content that covers every, every common angle, or every possible step that somebody might stumble upon your brand, and whatever journey point they’re at, you can get them that little incremental cobble towards that that final conversion. That’s the ultimate goal.

    Stu: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I wonder if it changes our paradigm, if it changes how we think about what we’re doing, because a lot of what we’re doing now and again, more on the advertising side of things is we’re trying to define our activity by actions. And if we’re thinking about, if we’re thinking about the full journey, we’re not trying to influence actions. We’re trying to influence people. And if you’re, if you’re doing that, I think you may be more successful. You know, think about the Cold Wars. There are people who drink Pepsi, who would never touch a coke if you gave them $1 to do it. There are people who think that McDonald’s fries are the best in the world. Burger King, they would just hand it off to their friend and let them eat them because they wouldn’t touch it. Okay, we’re not going to get that level of loyalty, probably the community colleges. But think about what the influence you could have if you set yourself up to be the preferred brand, the preferred delivery of service, class, product, whatever it is early on. And you don’t quite have that McDonald’s cache to the to the brand, okay, you don’t, but right now you’re, or you’re strongly in consideration it. And here’s the thing, if you’re optimizing for everywhere, at some point somebody’s going to ask the last question for which they need an answer. And that comes back to, “our content has to close the deal.” So I don’t see anything as having changed with all that, except now our focus may be not on the action, the experience of the action, but the experience of the person. And I think that can be a useful change of point of view. I can talk to people and influence them. I have a hard time walking up to them on the street, pushing on the shoulder, and say, Hey, do this. Some people will do it because maybe they’re intimidated by me. Others may do it just to humor me. Some were thinking about doing it anyway, but if I’ve been walking along beside them and talking to them about this stuff in a helpful way all along, well, guess what? We’ve just come up with another definition for SEO in the first place, we’re actually content marketing more likely. So maybe things don’t change so much. We just expand our scope. We do it in more places. When it comes to content marketing, how sensitive are have your clients been toward measuring the outcome of it? Do you think they look at that conversion, or do you think that they’re looking at something different? Something different?

    Mariah: I think we see kind of a split camp. We have a few clients that really care about “this story performed this well because this doctor or this faculty member really cares about their brand,” and they want to know these numbers. And a lot of the groups that we work with still are more on the “this feels good. We’ve gotten good responses to this on social media,” and they kind of stop there. So I think, I think we’re fortunate in that a lot of our clients really understand that hard conversion numbers don’t necessarily come out of content marketing, but they’re a part of a bigger campaign, and I think they understand that the sentiment that comes in through those pieces, either individually or at the campaign level, is really what counts. It’s the shareability, it’s the relatability, it’s the Well, I have a similar story. Here’s what happened to me, or this doctor, you know, took care of my child when they were sick, and I can’t recommend them more, you know, or I had a great experience in this program, and, you know, Professor so and so really changed my life. And just those little anecdotes that don’t necessarily result in a in an enrollment or in an appointment, but definitely lift the brand.

    Stu: Yeah, oh brand, we had a recent experience with that. We helped, we helped a client launch a new website. There was a lot of change that happened. A lot of a lot of work they did to make sure that their visitor journey was smoother, fewer speed bumps in the way that there was more complete information on pages. So it wasn’t just replatforming, where we took content from A and put it on site B, and here we go. They did a lot of work on it, so they had a lot to talk about, and they were out there talking on multiple platforms, our new website, our new experience, our new everything else. And the thing we found, because it was more of an informational website, there was not an application moment, necessarily, there was not a registration moment. But what we found, and we were quite happy to share with them, is branded searches surged 30% on the same search terms, branded search terms after launch, about two, three months later, compared to any moment before that relaunch, and it’s been sustained. So using that type of a metric, again, back to measurement, we could say that we launched a new website that didn’t do it. Somebody had to talk about it. Somebody had to put the word out there, the invitation to come experience that the content they had to visit, all of this stuff, caused, particularly the outreach, an increase in branded searches specific to the website. And it wasn’t just the brand name. It was they do, they do talk about a certification, though it’s not one of their main goals. And it was the brand name certification was, was the search terms, those really kind of went up. They saw increases in downloads of some key PDFs that they offered. And again, there was no advertising behind this. This was all achieved through, word of not word of mouth, but content marketing tactics, either by guest blogging, their own blogging, PR, everything else that was out there, getting the community talking about it and they saw a lift. Yeah, we’re using one source to prove it, to prove a point, which is search. But the effort was across everything. And I think that’s the search everywhere optimization effect right there.

    Mariah: I agree. I mean, it’s the it’s the old dog, new tricks, but not really kind of thing like teaching it, just to do it a little bit differently, right?

    Stu: Yeah, and we’re not going to answer the question anytime soon about, how do I get myself into an AI result on Perplexity or anything else? I mean, these, these answer engines are changing every week. So anything, anything I would tell a client, do this, so you turn up in a in a Gemini response. It may have some legs and work for a while, but we’re not looking at final Gemini here. It’s going to be something different in a year. And I think that that’s why we have to continue with our original, traditional SEO tactics, but then take that idea and expand it across other platforms, beyond Google, Bing, Yahoo-type search.

    Mariah: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting how many groups and how many agencies are jumping on the this is how you optimize for this, that and the other thing, because at the end of the day, we don’t, we don’t get to see behind the curtain. We don’t know what those algorithms look like. We don’t know what those formulas look like, how they’re scraping things. We have a general idea of how it works, but we don’t. We have more information about Google, the the king of hiding how they do things, than we do about these new platforms. And you know, many of them, most of them, operate by yanking information off of Google and other sites. And, you know, using their data so like we can extrapolate how they work, but at the end of the day, just like every single other thing, and it comes back to tell, tell good stories, give the information your audience wants at every step of the journey and put it someplace where they can find it. Stu: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a very succinct way to put it. Other things that kind of play into this for me, an article, and I can’t remember the citation, I believe I mentioned it in another, another one of our episodes here, there was an article that said, in their research of AI results, a significant percentage of the content came from pages that didn’t even rank in the top 100 for organic search. So I think we’re looking at two different things that we’re doing here with you know what happens in organic search, what happens in AI answers? They’re two different things altogether, so I think that’s part of that search everywhere optimization. And another person I was listening to this last week had an interesting idea a little more toward the transactional side of things. AI engines AI engines like ChatGPT, that’s where you go to find out what you need. Here’s the quote, here’s my problem. What do I need to solve this problem? But those answer engines, at this point in time, really suck at telling you who can fix your problem. They’re really great at going out and finding a wealth of information to present to you and say, you know, Stu, you got more problems we can solve. But here’s an answer for the one you asked about. And they’re really good at doing that. But the these people that I was listening to, it was, it was a panel discussion. They said, chat GPT helps you find the things you need, but search engines are still where you turn to to find out who has those things for you, and it, to me, is similar to that. Reddit example of content. Reddit is where the answers were given. Was the where the engagement happened. It was based on what we know, which is our content offering, if you will. And that person is not going to click on that and make an appointment, register, apply anything else, but they’re going to come back later on through search, perhaps, you know, Mariah answered my question in the best possible way. Look up where she works, and I want to go explore that, and that’s the transactional side. And I think that this is going to force us not just to look at different places, to engage with people, but to start breaking up these engagements into informational, transactional exploration, you know, evaluation. We’re going to have to broaden our scope in that way too, in how we think of it, absolutely, yeah, and I think content is going to be key to this. Any search ad I write absolutely does nothing for your ranking, findability or anything else, unless somebody searches for the exact thing I’m looking for and clicks on the app. It is a limited discovery tool. A broad discovery tool is everything else you say, all the content you have out there, and again, even the answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini double down on that very thought. You have something to say. Say it in a unique way and be helpful.

    Mariah: I think that about some sums it up.

    Stu: Yeah. Do you remember 10-15, years 10-12, years ago, we were working with healthcare websites, and most of them were using the same health library? Mariah: Yea, ADAM, or whatever it was called. Yeah.

    Stu: That was a contracted service. And if somebody said, you know, “what is a knee replacement?”, you clicked on it. It went to the health library. It had the content and the pictures and everything.

    Mariah: But you can put your own logo on it, right? That’s how they marketed it.

    Stu: Every hospital had the exact same content, even if they had it on their domain, it was the exact same content. Then they figured out they have to describe it in a unique way. That was not easy. I think going forward, we have to be even more unique, if that’s a possibility. But our uniqueness has to be in our serviceability of the content we’re offering. That it has to be maybe, that we have a greater array of answers on a content page, and we have to think logically about the progression of what’s the next question somebody may ask.

    Mariah: Yeah, the rise of the FAQ page. They always come back. Everybody hated FAQs for the last five years for some reason, and now they’re back. They’re back, baby!

    Stu: Mariah, there’s a group of people out there who suggest that we are going to have websites for search engines for all the people out there in the world to come visit us and see what we have. And we’re going to have something else altogether, which has that same information, but strictly categorized for the AI answer engines that are out there. And I’m thinking, Okay, we worked really hard to get rid of the m-dot-mobile domains we used to have to have and have a responsive website. Same thing’s going to happen here.

    Mariah: Yeah, yeah. The smart groups will just continue to put it all together.

    Stu: So again, just another indication that we already have most of the tools we need. There will be some new stuff. But I think the search everywhere optimization, the your audience is everywhere. Thought, I think that that content continues to be the reason to have a web page or a website in the first place, and paying attention to that is perhaps more important than how you promote the fact you have it. The reason for that is paying attention to the content you have earns attention from search engines and answering engines.

    Mariah: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.

  • How to Build Trust in Content Marketing with Your Leadership Team 

    How to Build Trust in Content Marketing with Your Leadership Team 

    We know this struggle and salute your efforts.

    Brand storytelling—blog articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, social content, and more—is essential for modern marketing. Consider these statistics about the importance of content:

    • 97% of marketers say content marketing is an essential part of their strategy
    • 76% of marketers surveyed said content marketing helped them generate both demand and leads in the last 12 months
    • 70% of marketers would rate leads generated through content marketing as “high quality”

    It is easier than ever to demonstrate real return on investment (ROI) for content marketing, with tools such as Moz, HubSpot, and LookerStudio organic search query dashboards. You can use these tools to deliver real data to help C-suite executives embrace the short- and long-term value of content marketing.

    But before you can build strategies that align audience needs with your business objectives, you need to get your leadership and marketing teams on the same page. Here are some tips that have helped our clients launch successful content marketing partnerships with their institutional leaders.

    Speak Their Language

    You wouldn’t launch any campaign without a deep understanding of your audience, and the C-suite has personas and goals like any other.

    When you’re making the case for content, connect it to your organization’s broader goals:

    • Enrollment/customer acquisition: Organizations that use content marketing see lead growth 165% above and conversion rates nearly six times higher than those that don’t.
    • Brand management: 62% of marketers surveyed said content helps nurture audiences, and 52% find it helps grow loyalty with existing customers.
    • Advancement and philanthropy: Deepen brand loyalty and add engaging CTAs to drive donations. Alumni emails that include engaging video content, for example, can see 65% higher click-through rates than those that don’t.

    Identify the KPIs that resonate with your leaders. Some are focused on increasing website visits, while others are driven by lead generation or conversion rates.

    Related reading: 3 Ways Stamats Specialists Leverage Personal Higher Ed Marketing Experience for Clients

    Leverage Data and Case Studies

    Telling stories of success can move mountains, especially when they’re backed up by the data leadership needs. There are plenty of concrete, data-backed examples out there of how content marketing can advance organizational objectives.

    Consider how Stamats client University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center Department of Neurology leveraged content marketing to drive trainee enrollment:

    • Stamats crafted career storytelling articles such as “6 Learnings on My Journey from Medical Student to Epilepsy Attending” and “A Day in the Life of a Neuro ICU Resident”
    • The articles shot to the top of organic Google search results, outranking competitors and national organizations
    • These stories appear in AI Overview search content, driving student enrollment and media placements

    We recommend creating trackable events in your analytics product when you build these stories in your website. That way you can present real data that communicates a blend of quick wins that are driving action and long-term value alongside other marketing tactics.

    Related reading: ‘Do You Do SEO?’ We Do, and You Should Too

    Propose a Phased Approach

    Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your leadership will likely be leery of going “all-in” on content marketing no matter how convincing your pitch. At first, it may be more effective to focus on a single department or service to pilot your content marketing program.

    Frame your storytelling as an ongoing strategic initiative and start small while building on successes. Prepare a plan that includes:

    • Realistic timelines for deliverables
    • Appropriate resource allocations
    • Regular reporting and analytics to demonstrate ROI

    For example, you could start with a series of articles on alumni outcomes to boost adult student enrollment or a hub of short videos featuring cardiologists to drive appointments. Aim for discrete targets with outcomes that can be measured and reported.

    Related reading: Storytelling & Connections Lift the Patient Experience

    Set Up Stakeholders as Thought Leaders

    Savvy brands are collaborating with organizational leaders to produce original content that positions their executives and stakeholders as industry thought leaders. This way, leaders get a hands-on role in content marketing and can see the first-hand benefits of how storytelling advances the brand.

    If you need a hand making the pitch or launching your brand storytelling initiatives, Stamats’ experts can help. We have decades of experience in content marketing strategies. We help clients navigate important conversations and implement successful campaigns that drive results.

  • De-clutter Your Digital Junk Drawer: How to Prep Your Content for Redesign

    De-clutter Your Digital Junk Drawer: How to Prep Your Content for Redesign

    Before diving into the design phase, there’s one crucial step you can’t afford to skip: content preparation. A structured approach to content inventory, review, and rehoming can save you time, money, and headaches down the road.

    In a recent webinar, I shared some of the lessons I’ve learned working on dozens of web projects of all sizes. Analyzing and prepping your content is your chance to wrap your brain around all the content you own — and the data you might not even know is out there. Once you have that knowledge, you’ll be confident, prepared, and motivated to get your redesign off to a great start.

    Start with a Content Inventory

    What kind of clutter is lurking in your CMS? Every established website needs a thorough ROT analysis: Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial. Running a site crawl with a third-party tool will uncover all the hidden pages, outdated content, and duplicate files that have accumulated over the years. This inventory gives you a clear understanding of what content you have and what needs attention.

    Once you have a complete list, break it down by content owners or subject matter experts. Distribute their reports with three essential questions:

    • Is this content current and accurate?
    • Is it outdated and ready for removal?
    • Should it be moved to an internal platform?

    Firm deadlines for content owners will help keep the process manageable and ensure the redesign stays on track.

    Give your subject matter experts a week to review their content (and maybe another week grace period). Don’t give them time to overthink. That’s when it starts to feel like a burden, and you risk losing their interest. Offer them easy choices so they can work quickly.

    Related reading: How to Maximize Website Traffic with a Content Audit—and What to Do Next

    Redirect, Rehome, or Remove?

    Content management isn’t just about deciding what stays—it’s also about handling what goes. Before deleting pages, put redirects in place to prevent broken links and preserve SEO value.

    If there’s content that shouldn’t be on your public-facing website but still holds value, consider rehoming it. A digital librarian or archivist can be an invaluable ally in this process. Archiving historical or academic content in platforms like the Wayback Machine or Archive-It ensures it remains accessible without bogging down your website.

    Related reading: Blog Governance: When to Archive or Update Old Content

    To estimate the hours needed for a full content review, multiply the total number of pages by 0.33. This calculation often reveals the extent of content sprawl and underscores the need for a streamlined approach.

    I used this simple equation when I was faced with tens of thousands of pages. I was able to make the case that it’s time we stop using our websites as digital junk drawers.

    Get Leadership Buy-In Early

    A successful website redesign is more than just a marketing project—it needs to be a priority across the organization. Securing early buy-in from leadership gives you the stakeholder champions you need for the necessary resources and support. When you present content project plans, focus on how a strategic redesign improves efficiency, enhances the user experience, and aligns with business goals.

    Connect the project to leadership priorities. If the goal is to improve staff morale, discuss what features of your new website will reduce frustration and streamline internal processes. By clearly demonstrating value, you’ll gain stronger support from leadership. That leads to change management success down the line.

    Related reading: Accreditation Content: Requirements, Expectations, Anxiety

    All the work you do up front gives you a better understanding of the scope for your website redesign. When you know how much writing or content migration to account for, you’ll be able to write a more accurate RFP—and that means you’ll get back better proposals that are focused on the work you need done.

     

  • Accreditation Content: Requirements, Expectations, Anxiety

    Accreditation Content: Requirements, Expectations, Anxiety

    We’ve learned from schools at every level that the answer is yes. You need a strategy and a plan for adaptation. Accreditation requirements for web content matter—yet they are often vague, open to interpretation, and carry a load of faculty and administrator anxiety that can confound all your UX content strategy. 

    You Need an Accreditation Content Strategy

    Without an accreditation content strategy, your prospective students may be greeted by a stiff, intimidating disclosure statement as they arrive at your website. (Worse, it might show up on the search engine results page as the metadescription.) 

    We know students care about accreditation, yet it needs to surface at the appropriate point in their journey. As you clarify your institution’s strategy for this content, keep the user front and center.

    Accreditation 101

    If you’re new to working in higher education, the whole accreditation process can be mystifying. Annual reports, learning outcome tables, student demographic data, words like “pedagogy”—it’s a lot of work for a very important reason. Prospective and current students need to know that the school they choose is legitimate and isn’t turning their hard-earned tuition money into useless credentials.  

    Accreditation also ensures that administrators, faculty, and staff willingly open their doors for a thorough background check. The oversight agencies look for more than just graduation rates—they’re digging deep into curriculum standards, faculty credentials, financial records, student demographics, and more. In fact, post-secondary schools must earn accredited status to participate in federal student aid. 

    The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) has some great information about the who, what, when, and why. They also monitor the accrediting agencies themselves and maintain a public database of over 8,200 institutions and over 44,000 programs in the U.S. 

    The Top Accreditors Are Regional—Usually

    At the institutional level, most colleges and universities in the U.S. undergo review by 1 of 6 regional organizations:  

    Regional accreditation is considered the gold standard for institution-wide accreditation. Generally, national accreditation is considered a lower standard for the college or university as a whole. However, CHEA also recognizes certain faith-related governing bodies to accredit religiously affiliated schools nationally. There’s also a CHEA-recognized organization for schools whose students learn primarily by distance education—a modality at odds with the notion of “region.” 

    First, Verify the Requirements 

    As an accreditation deadline looms or a website overhaul ramps up, administrators and content managers are already harried. The requirements might be buried inside a 100-page policy PDF or guarded behind a portal with a login no one remembers. There’s rarely time to investigate the rules. That’s when we hear such directives as: 

    • “Just get it up there on the homepage somewhere.” 
    • “Put it at the top so the accreditors see it.” 
    • “Keep it the way we’ve always done it.” 

    That’s not really helpful—to the accreditors or to your future students. 

    Do the legwork; discover the requirements. 

    Start with the Required Words 

    Accrediting bodies provide the specific wording they require every school or program to use when claiming their accreditation status. These statements typically include the full name of the accrediting body, their full contact information, and a link to their site, for example

    In an ideal world, this verbiage would be conveniently accessible on the agency’s website. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to locate—we were unable to find the official guidance on the websites for NECHE and WSCUC despite extensive searching.  

    If you need to hunt for it, try searching with the current wording or keywords like website, compliance, disclosure, public, status, advertising, or marketing. 

    Accrediting bodies care about your students, but not necessarily your students’ experience on your website. 

    It’s a given that we can’t change the words. What we can control is where it’s positioned on the page. An administrator may tell you to “put it at the top so the accreditation agency sees it.” In fact, this is rarely required and has a strong likelihood of stopping the user’s journey in its tracks. Analytics and usability testing clearly show that students are drawn to practical details (location, tuition, etc.) and emotional appeals to their career aspirations. Presenting them with a dry official statement is never a good first impression. 

    Unless the official agency says otherwise, it’s OK to place a regional accreditation statement on a child page, in an accordion, or towards the middle or even near the bottom of the page

    Most schools choose to publish their institutional accreditation statement within their “About Us” section:

    Other schools publish their accreditation status as part of a fact sheet or in website sections devoted to compliance, policies, academic affairs, institutional effectiveness, or consumer information: 

    Some schools create a page that lists not only the primary accreditation statement, but links to accredited programs as well. This can make it easier for the marketing team to monitor and maintain: 

    Assuaging the internal anxiety

    The accreditation process is always stressful, so a documented web content strategy can help alleviate worries and avoid last-minute decisions. Be sure to have the URL(s) for the specific requirements and a simple visual mockup ready to share, along with links to accreditation pages at other schools governed by the same organization. 

    ALERT: We did the legwork for you! See the links in the Quick Reference section. 

    Your content team should also anticipate potential obstacles and have focused talking points handy. Always acknowledge the concerns and reinforce that your recommendations are based on thorough research and long-term strategy. Some examples might include: 

    • “We understand it may seem risky to make this change. We’ve done our homework, and we’re confident that this strategy will meet the requirements and streamline future updates.” 
    • “We know it’s sometimes difficult to visualize what we’re suggesting. Here’s a quick example of what the new page will look like.” 
    • “Our web analytics and industry research have shown us that prospective students and other key stakeholders expect to find accreditation information in the ‘About Us’ section.” 

    If an anxious administrator holds out for a particularly awkward implementation, recruit support from a trusted department director or project champion. They can give you pointers on finding the most persuasive words to achieve consensus. 

    If all else fails, ask, “When is your next accreditation review?” Offer to hold the changes for their program until after their next review cycle.  

    It comes down to this: Research, plan, communicate

    You, your department chairs, and the accrediting bodies all want to help prospective students make smart choices. Keep the focus on what’s best for your user, and you all win.

    Your regional accreditation quick reference

    NEED DROP-DOWN MENUS FOR 6 REGIONAL ACCREDITATION ORGS

    Remember: Web pages belong to the users

    Accreditors and administrators are not your target audience. Don’t be afraid to flex your content strategy muscles to reinforce your professional expertise. Developing trust with leadership teams is crucial for a vibrant and engaging website that truly works. 

    It’s time to create a student-centered content strategy for your accreditation info. Email me today. 

  • Marketing for Continuing Education

    Marketing for Continuing Education

    Because of its breadth of programming—everything from certified nursing assistant (CNA courses) to basket weaving—CE courses are managed by multiple teams from several departments. That means disparate stakeholders with varied levels of time, budget, and enthusiasm, and lots of opinions about how to market and who should be the decision-makers.

    Because of this diversity, some adult learners are looking for a class to start a hobby while others are giving up something important—family time, overtime at work, the comfort of the status quo—to plan for their careers.

    The CE audience is special, and institutions can’t rely on one-size-fits-all or generic messaging to reach them.

    Each campaign must be unique in tone and angles, with shared design elements. To successfully market for CE, institutions need a thorough understanding of who their niche audience members are outside of school, the challenges they face, and strategies to help them make the trade-off of time/comfort to choose your institution.

    At Content Marketing World and NCMPR District 6 2024, I joined Jennifer Perez, Director of Campus Communications at North Orange Continuing Education (NOCE), to discuss how to create on-point, engaging messaging that connects with underserved adult learners. We focused on three specific tactics to promote upskilling and enrichment programs—and deliver the help and information this unique audience needs.

    Ads Should Match a Specific Emotion & Career Pathway

    Someone interested in CNA is probably not interested in a class about chair yoga for seniors (at least not at this moment). So, it makes sense that you wouldn’t try to lump both programs into one ad.

    But we see this misstep time and again. Limited budgets and low understanding of audience needs can lead institutions to generic messaging that spreads itself too thin.

    A better strategy, Perez said, is to tap into the emotional journey of the prospective adult learner:

    • What do they need? To get a better job making more money to better provide for their family.
    • What is the obstacle to starting now? Meeting their basic needs. They can’t take time off work for school, their car is on its last legs, and they can’t afford groceries, let alone tuition, training materials, or better WiFi.
    • How does your institution support students to fill the need? NOCE helps on all fronts to help learners meet basic needs, such as a food pantry, online/flexible classes, and financial aid or grants for transportation, internet access, childcare, and event technology loans such as laptops.
    • What will they get if they choose your institution? You can complete job training in X months and be ready to get that job—and we’re here to support you in that journey.
    • What one step does the learner have to take to start? Click, call, register, download, or watch. Choose one specific call-to-action that matches the next natural step.

    Here is an example of a good ad from NOCE:

    Campaign landing pages: Clear beats clever

    Just like an ad shouldn’t be generalized, nor should the page to which you are sending that paid traffic. Even the best ads won’t convert to expectations if the campaign landing page (CLP) experience is vague or confusing.

    With limited budgets or time comes the temptation to include *all the details* in the CLP. But doing so will overwhelm a busy adult learner. On-page busyness and unclear calls-to-action will make the conversion steps unclear, resulting in page abandonment.

    Instead, Perez recommends choosing one call-to-action per ad and landing page. Think of the call-to-action as the visitor’s “to-do” or next natural step. Give them one thing to do—repeated as necessary on the page—and the chances it will get done will increase.

    NOCE worked with Stamats to revise a series of CE campaign landing pages for a more streamlined user experience. The result? A 1,000% increase in conversions and more than 3,000 student leads in six months.

    After the visitor provides their information or completes the conversion step, make sure the follow-up is validating, quick, and sincere. Provide a thank-you page with next steps, along with a follow-up email or text to explain next steps.

    For even better results, take time to mystery shop your campaign experience. Many clients believe their system is working as expected, only to find that emails weren’t being sent or calls weren’t being made. Stamats mystery shopping answers questions such as:

    • How long did it take to get the follow-up communication?
    • Did the messaging of that communication make sense?
    • Is it clear what I’m supposed to do (or get) to move forward?
    • What could have improved the experience?

    Related reading: Reimagining the Marketing Funnel: Time for a New Model

    Answer adult learners’ questions through content marketing

    Adult learners want to understand the value of their investment before diving in. And throughout the academic experience, they’ll need answers to specific questions about their training, future career, and how to manage the work-life-school balance.

    NOCE relies on real-time insights from students, staff, and faculty to understand the questions learners are asking. They send surveys and host an in-person forum each fall to get feedback on everything from their curriculum to their social services, such as the food pantry and tuition assistance.

    Stamats and NOCE complement that invaluable feedback with digital tools that surface search queries real people are typing into social media and search engines. Some of these tools include social listening platforms, Looker Studio organic search query dashboards, and query patterning sites such as Google Trends.

    Using these insights, create pointed articles, videos, postcards, and infographics that go deep to answer specific questions. Insert details about how your institution helps throughout this process.

    Here’s an example outline of what to include in a story about “how to become a CNA”:

    • Introduction that describes the joys of being a CNA, why it’s in high demand, and how quick/easy/affordable it is to get started in that career at your institution.
    • Section 1: Class format and duration
      • Online, hybrid, accelerated options
      • X months to complete (don’t speak in credit hours)
      • Experiences (hands-on, classroom lectures, job shadows—you don’t need to list all the classes in the catalog)
      • Facilities (cool labs, new buildings that make it easy to choose you)
    • Section 2: How much it costs
      • Tuition and materials
      • Financial aid, grants
      • Loaner items you provide (laptops, protective gear)
      • Other services (childcare, transportation, food pantry)
    • Section 3: What to expect after training
      • Salary/wages
      • Where to find a job (great opportunity to tag local employer partners)
      • Ongoing support from your institution (certificates to help with your next promotion)

    Take this strategy a step further to create a knowledge hub of content that focuses on niche aspects of the main topic. Your stories could answer FAQs about welding, and you could profile alumni who completed the program and now excel in their career.

    Throughout the story, sprinkle in links to supplemental information. This is where we can bend on our CTA rule—while there should be one primary call-to-action, content marketing is the art and science of balancing the next steps of visitors at multiple journey points. Often, users are coming in from search or social media, whereas ads drive users from focused micromoments of interest. So, the story should include supplemental calls-to-action for a strategic range of next steps.

    And don’t forget the platform—think about where your adult learner audience spends the most time. Most use a smartphone for digital communication, so text messaging, email, and social media are important channels for CE marketing. Stamats and NOCE have also seen success with radio spots, native ads (placing blog content on relevant websites your audience uses), and good old-fashioned mailers.

    Listen: ‘Do You Do SEO?’ We Do, and You Should Too

    Ready to launch your CE marketing campaign?

    We love Continuing Ed marketing because it is true to the soul and spirit of the goals of education—tapping into your talents to make the world a better place and providing a better life for yourself and your family.

    When you are ready to launch your CE, email me or message me on LinkedIn. Stamats will help you craft the right messaging and marketing plan to reach adult learners with the training and enrichment programs they need to thrive.