Douglas Burdett of the Marketing Book Podcast comes out of retirement to interview Brian Piper about Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education.
Content of video:
00:00 Introduction to Epic Content Marketing
06:02 Challenges in Higher Education Marketing
12:13 Defining Content Marketing
17:49 Measuring Content Marketing Success
23:48 Targeting Specific Audiences
30:07 Conclusion and Key Takeaways
37:30 The Importance of Authentic Content
46:53 Breaking Down Silos in Higher Education
52:24 Starting Small in Content Marketing
01:01:15 The Role of Leadership in Content Marketing
01:08:30 Engaging Students in Marketing Strategies
01:17:19 Understanding Owned vs. Rented Land
01:22:33 The Changing Landscape of SEO
01:29:39 Building Community in Higher Education
Learn more about the book:
Transcript of video:
Douglas Burdett (00:00)
Hello and welcome to this conversation with Brian Piper about his book, Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education, How to Connect with Students, Alumni, Faculty, Staff and Others to Build, Trust and Reach Your Institutional Goals. My name is Douglas Burdett and I am the recently retired host of the Marketing Book Podcast. For 502 weeks, which is almost 10 years, I published a weekly interview with the author of a new marketing or sales book that I would read before each interview.
But I wanted to come out of retirement to interview Brian Piper about this great book that he has written and it is such a great book and everyone in higher education should read. And I’ve read hundreds of marketing books and I’ve read every book Brian Piper has written or contributed to. So I guess you could say I’m sort of a Brian Piper fanboy. Okay, there I said it. All right. Now enough about me, let me tell you about Brian W. Piper. He’s the director of content strategy and assessment at the University of Rochester, home of the Fighting Yellow Jackets, an author, obviously, an international keynote speaker, a husband and father of six children, and in his copious free time, a consultant. Brian has been optimizing digital content since 1996.
He’s created online training programs for dozens of companies, including Xerox, IBM, and Volvo, and has spoken at hundreds of conferences and events. He spent the last eight years focusing on data analytics, digital marketing, and content strategy. And since 2021, he’s been diving into AI, Web3, community building, and the metaverse. He’s always on the cutting edge of what all the cool kids are talking about.
Brian wrote, Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education, and he co-authored the second edition of Epic Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi. He is a contributing author and co-editor of The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever with Mark Schaeffer and 34 other contributors, and a contributing author of The Content Entrepreneur with Joe Pulizzi. And I should add that Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of content marketing wrote the forward to Epic Content Marketing for higher education. And of course, he never disappoints if he’s such a nice guy. in fact, when I interviewed Joe about Epic Content Marketing 2, he joked and said, I don’t know, Brian wrote most of those chapters, particularly the newer stuff. But anyway.
So Brian was named one of the top 10 higher education marketers to follow in 2023. And Brian is the host of the AI for You podcast, which focuses on practical AI implementation in higher education institutions. And interesting fact, in his youth, he was a US Army infantryman who served in the third infantry division. Rock of the Marne!
Brian, congratulations on Epic Content Marketing for higher ed, and thanks for the opportunity to talk with you about it.
Brian Piper (03:27)
Well, thank you so much, Douglas. I am honored that you came out of retirement to talk to me about this book. I have listened to your podcast for years and so many of the books that I have read that have contributed to my career have come from your recommendation. So I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for the marketing community.
Douglas Burdett (03:48)
Well, I am happy to help spread the word about this book and I’ll tell you one reason why. Years ago, I was on the Alumni Association Board of Directors for my college. every, almost every chapter I read, they were doing it wrong. I mean, they were doing the best they could, but I’ve just seen it with so many schools, how they just can’t get this right. And it’s funny how at one point,
My school had an alumni association and then they had a foundation which was raising big money for the school and then another one that raised money for the athletics. And they were three different groups and they were all different. They wouldn’t communicate with each other and they would steal employees from one another. After a few years, I finally said, look, I can’t help here. You’ve to get these things organized so that they’re all in the same sheet of music. And ultimately,
they restructured the whole thing, not because I suggested it, because they they started to realize it was a problem. And I’ll tell you specifically what one of them was. They would go in a quiet campaign for the foundation and they might be asking some alumnus to donate like $10 million as they do in a quiet phase. And sure enough, one of those alumni said, I just gave to the school. They just asked me for $15 for the…
athletic thing and they were like, that was just one of the many landmines that you actually talk about and try to get around. I should also add, not to make this about me, but we were both in the third infantry division. And at one point I was in the army in the field artillery, but I’m older. I’m a lot older than Brian. And if you’re watching this interview, you can see, I mean, he’s the picture of youth.
In fact, I’m so old that Brian, when he was in the army, they had fancy camouflage fatigues. Not me. I was in the army with green fatigues. That’s it. Olive drab, baby.
We can edit that out. I’m just kidding. When Brian was in, they had Kevlar helmets, very nice helmets. Not me. We had these steel pots and we liked it. Just want to let you know. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. anyway, now I should also mention to all the University of Rochester folks, many of whom are no doubt members of the Bill’s Mafia, if I had to guess, my wife,
Brian Piper (06:13)
Nice.
Because they told you, had to like it.
Douglas Burdett (06:31)
was born at the University of Rochester because her dad was a med student there at the time. And then later on, she graduated from the medical school there. you know, I hope that I’ve established my street cred with the the Yellow Jacket community there, even though I’ve never been to I’ve never been to Rochester. So anyway, now, before we start talking about the book, I just wanted the audience to know that I did not share these questions with
Brian Piper beforehand. if he seems a little surprised or more likely irritated or annoyed, that’s why don’t don’t beat up on him for that. Also, when I was producing the marketing podcast, it was an audio only show and everyone said, you should put it on video. I never did. but I never had to worry about looking at the camera and performing. for those people that are watching this interview,
You’re going to see me looking at my notes like I am right now and not the camera all the time. And for that, I apologize if we’re a better interviewer, if I are more of a television personality, I’m sure I could do that. But one thing I want to mention though, is that in lieu of a midlife crisis, I started performing standup comedy and I’m all better now. Thank you. But while I’m interviewing Brian,
you know, he’s going to produce this and he’s going to be responsible for the final product. But there may likely be some really stupid jokes. There probably will be. He may edit some of those out. So you may see a few jump cuts. I mean, he’s only doing that to spare you the audience. And I can respect that. on to the book. I just have to say one thing. And this is to the reader who’s thinking, do I need to listen to this interview? Do I need to read the book? Well, maybe not.
But I’ve got to say chapter five on the challenges to higher education. I’m not a higher ed marketer, but that grabbed me by the lapels and shook me vigorously. I did not know about that. And so it should be a wake up call for any reader. I think a lot of folks in higher ed will probably know about this. And if you don’t, it’s definitely what the head of your institution is thinking about, probably even while they’re asleep.
But it reminded me of every story I’ve ever heard about the Titanic, where they’re blissfully hurtling towards an iceberg, not knowing that it’s there. So we’ll talk about chapter five in just a couple of minutes. I should also mention chapter eight is all case studies. It’s like one successful case study after another. And that’s important not just for higher education folks, but anybody who’s saying, how else did another school do it? You’ve got some other folks that have done that, and you can start to borrow from that.
Now, on to the book. I want to read from a quote from the introduction.
You’re right. There are many unique ways to read this book as there are different types of people. Well, maybe not that many. It’s just a book, but there are takeaways for everyone. If you have not done much or any content marketing, by all means, read the entire thing. If you want to deep dive into all the particulars of content marketing in general, read the second edition of Epic Content Marketing, which I’m holding up again for the camera. I hope Joe Pulizzi appreciates all this.
If you want a deep dive in all the particulars of content marketing in general, read the second edition of Epic Content Marketing that I co-authored with Joe Pulizzi. The first few chapters of this book start broad and focus on content marketing fundamentals relevant to higher education. But I dive deeper into the specifics as the book progresses. You can also pick and choose the sections that are most applicable to you.
I would recommend that everyone who picks up this book read the case studies, chapters on content optimization and discovery and the chapter on the future of content marketing in higher education. So in the acknowledgement section of your book, Brian, you mentioned six authors who have written multiple content marketing books and whom I’ve had the honor of interviewing every one of them. There are a lot of great content marketing books out there. Not all of them are great. All the ones that were on my show were.
Brian Piper (10:41)
you
Of course.
Douglas Burdett (10:50)
but that’s
because I got to pick the guests. So you begin the introduction with the following. Why do we need another book on content marketing? Aren’t there already two editions of Epic Content Marketing and scores of other books focused on it? Do we really need a book specifically for higher education content marketing? What does Brian W. Piper say?
Brian Piper (11:16)
I say we absolutely do. And especially as I was working with Joe on the second edition of Epic, as we were going through the book, I kept thinking, why aren’t more schools doing this? We have all these stories. We’re trying to share information and knowledge with our users. And we’re just putting out the same old three students in a tree touting all of our programs.
not really talking about how we can help our students help our population and add value, answer their questions, solve their problems. So yes, I decided that we definitely need a higher ed specific book. And then when I started doing the interviews with people and I was asking them for examples of good content marketing in higher ed, that was one of the most difficult questions for anyone to answer. So it kind of proved its own case there.
Douglas Burdett (12:13)
You seem to have interviewed a lot of people for the book.
Brian Piper (12:18)
I did, yeah, I got about, it was over 50, I think it was 53 people, including higher ed marketers, leaders, and also content marketing experts.
Douglas Burdett (12:18)
Any idea how many, what the number?
Yeah, yeah. And it was interesting to see a couple, several of the authors, you know, weren’t necessarily an acknowledgement, but who were mentioned in the book, like Jenny Lee Fowler, who wrote Organic Social Media. She’s head of all the social at MIT. Just amazing. So in the books forward written by Joe Pulizzi that I mentioned earlier, he wrote, believe it or not, of all the business to business and business to consumer brands out there, higher education institutions
have the most stories to tell. So explain what Joe means and why stories are so important yet overlooked.
Brian Piper (13:12)
Well, mean, because we have all the stories of all of our students, all of our faculty, all of our staff, and those are the audiences that we’re trying to reach. We’re trying to reach new prospective students or current students who might want to transfer in. We have a employee retention problem, so we’re always looking for new staff. We’re always trying to bring in the best faculty. So who better to…
share their experiences and to share their understanding of our institution and its culture than the people who are actually in those audiences living within our institution. So, you know, that’s why we have so many stories to tell. I mean, you can convince people of things in several different ways. You can show them data. You can, you know, explain the rationale behind something to somebody, but there’s no better way to
convince someone to make a decision than to create an emotional connection with them and to get them to trust you and to get them to form a relationship with you. And the way you do that is through storytelling and through content and through providing value and making sure that you are adding relevant.
Douglas Burdett (14:12)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (14:30)
information for them so that they can picture themselves at your university or using your products or using your services. mean, that’s the heart of content marketing is valuable and compelling content.
Douglas Burdett (14:43)
Yes. And when we say stories, we’re not talking about making stuff up. There’s no secrets to all this marketing stuff, but stories are pretty close to a secret sauce. Humans use stories long before they could write. The brain processes stories much more effectively than facts. There’s great books that explain why stories are so important.
When you’re dealing with your leadership, you may not want to use the story word right off the bat because it may misunderstand and I think a lot of marketers hurt themselves by using a lot of marketing terms instead of things that your leadership might be thinking about. We’re going to talk about leadership. Joe also wrote that higher education institutions are, to be frank, terrible at finding, telling, and promoting their stories. But the book goes into quite a bit about how to…
how to do that. So let’s get some definitions out of the way. Content marketing is a term that a lot of people have heard, probably everyone who’s listening to or watching this. And the problem with that is that everyone probably has a slightly different definition or understanding or misunderstanding of what it is. So explain what content marketing is.
Brian Piper (16:02)
Yeah. So, mean, basically at its core content marketing, what takes content that you put out in the world, right? And we’re all content creators. We’re all posting and creating, writing emails and creating content. But what takes your content and turns it into content marketing is it has to be valuable and compelling, right? It has to have value for whoever you’re trying to target with it. has to. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Something that they would miss if it went away.
Douglas Burdett (16:26)
Something they would say thank you for.
Brian Piper (16:33)
You know, they want more of it. It has to be targeted at a specific audience. When I first started at the university, content creators would come into the editors and say, we’ve got this great story about this fantastic research that’s going on. We’d look at it and be like, yes, this is absolutely a story. Who’s the audience? And they would say, everybody. Everybody needs to read this. Like, everybody is not an audience.
Douglas Burdett (16:57)
Yes.
Yes.
Brian Piper (17:00)
So
you have to pick the one audience that might take some action after consuming your content that would be the most beneficial to your brand, to your institution. And that is your target audience. Because the other, the third element that content marketing needs is it has to be strategic. It has to be tied to your goals, your institutional goals, your brand goals. Because if you’re just throwing content out there, right, and doing random acts of content, you’re not
Douglas Burdett (17:13)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (17:30)
reaching your goals and you’re just wasting your time. mean, we could all just create content every day and throw it out in the world, but it’s not effective content marketing and it’s not effective use of your paid employees time if they’re creating content that’s not specific to your goals.
Douglas Burdett (17:45)
Mm-hmm.
Right. Now, another definition in every book I’ve read by you or Joe Pulizzi or Robert Rose or Mark Schaefer or any number of these just fantastic books on content marketing. They all argue that the number one reason why content marketing fails is because of a lack of a content strategy.
a lack of a, so what is meant by that? And there’s difference between content marketing and content marketing strategy. Explain this content marketing strategy because if there’s, let’s say there’s a president of a university or somebody who’s maybe interviewing for that job, I think this is one of the most important things for them to understand. If they only had to ask one question, like if somebody comes to them and says, we’re going to start doing this, one of the best things they could say was, okay, well, what’s the content marketing strategy? So explain what that means.
Brian Piper (18:42)
Yeah. And, and Robert Rose wrote an entire book about content marketing strategies, which is fantastic and happened to come out right as I was in the midst of writing this book. So it was incredibly helpful as I was going through this. I mean, there are marketing strategies, right? That you need to have in place. So, you know, what you’re trying to accomplish with your marketing and then there are content strategies so that as you’re creating content for your website or your social or your newsletter that
everything is consistent and that it has the same voice and tone across it and then is being put in the right place for the right purpose. But then when you talk about content marketing strategy, you’re really looking for a way to kind of codify, Andy Crestadena calls it the XYZ principle, where you’re looking for what are you trying to accomplish, right? What are your goals? Who are you trying to communicate to and
how are you adding value for them? So it goes back to those three principles of content marketing and by putting those into a strategy that you can very simply and easily share with your marketing team, with your writers, with your social teams, that will get them all on board so that they all understand what are we trying to accomplish every time we’re sitting down to create a new piece of content.
Douglas Burdett (20:05)
So then why do most higher education institutions not have content marketing strategies? Why does content typically become an order, as you say, an order taking soup of mixed messages, canned stories and packaged media?
Brian Piper (20:24)
Well, and so much of that is because marketing in general has not been up until about 10 years ago. Most higher ed institutions didn’t do much marketing. They either, you know, had a big enough brand name or there was just enough demand. There were enough students. There were enough people applying. We’re just opening new institutions for each different niche, for each different target audience, or in a lot of times, just cause there’s a location, there was an area that didn’t have a college nearby. Let’s open a new college here and people would come.
And then people didn’t start coming. And then there was more competition about where you were going to go. So then they decided, now it’s time to start doing some marketing. It was almost Teresa Flannery in her book, How to Market a University, talks about the fact that marketing really wasn’t a thing in higher ed. So now you tell, now we’ve got every institution’s doing some marketing. They’ve got a marketing team. Sometimes it’s just one person.
you know, putting on all the different marketing hats and trying to do everything and balance it all. Usually there’s a lack of resources and a lack of funding because marketing still doesn’t get the, you know, the strategic kind of support that it needs from leadership. But more and more of the schools are starting to do like really good marketing and really think about it. But content marketing is still a fairly new idea to a lot of institutions.
Douglas Burdett (21:48)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (21:50)
When you go talk to leadership and you say, we wanna try this new kind of marketing where we’re storytelling, we’re building relationships, we’re growing a community. By the way, it’s gonna take probably 12 to 18 months before we start seeing results from this. But the results that we’re gonna get are gonna be dramatic and we’re gonna build this trust and we’re gonna become known as the experts in our industry. But that’s a tough sell to a lot of leadership who want
enrollment for the next semester who want the, know, advancement donations coming in like now before the next big campaign rolls out. and they get very caught up in this marketing campaign mentality where you run one campaign and then you push it to the side and you go onto the next one. Whereas content marketing, you know, content marketing is about
Douglas Burdett (22:32)
Yeah.
Yeah.
As if they had a captive
audience, which they don’t. Like back in my day as an ad man years ago, we had a captive audience. I call those the good old days. People had to watch our commercials, buy network television and the client would start making more money. But you started to touch on this. You write that one of the complaints you often hear is that you cannot measure the impact of content marketing.
Brian Piper (22:42)
Exactly, exactly.
Douglas Burdett (23:06)
There’s no direct line to see if a piece of content or several resulted in a campus tour request, an application, or a donation. But you argue that is not entirely true. Explain.
Brian Piper (23:19)
Yeah, absolutely. there are a lot, mean, Christopher Penn says this all the time, you can measure anything. It’s just how much effort and money you want to put into measuring that. But there are a lot of, exactly, absolutely, you have to figure out if this is really, right. Right, but if you’re collecting data and you’re not connecting that data to a strategy, it’s just numbers, right? So you need to know,
Douglas Burdett (23:29)
And not everything is worth measuring.
Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s meaningful, right? Sometimes.
Brian Piper (23:48)
strategically what you’re trying to accomplish and what goals you’re setting. And even in content marketing, you need to have that. You need to know what your goals are. You need to look at a variety of factors besides just like page views. And there are a lot of ways that you can track performance of your content and you can look at specific areas where you’re getting traction around, know, growing your audiences, creating engaging opportunities.
You know, and a lot of this is qualitative data and less quantitative. So the feedback that you’re getting about the content that you’re putting out there, the support from your audiences, and that will all eventually turn into, you know, more traffic, more engagement, more admissions, more donations, but without being able to connect all the parts and pieces to see how many people came in from social, who came in from your newsletters.
what pieces of content were working or what weren’t. It’s a very fragmented kind of landscape to be able to create this big picture. But there are ways to do it. Arizona State University has an incredible system set up where they’re dumping all of their content data into one big data lake that then they can go and they can track down. Once you fill in a form, they can look back at your complete user journey to see what content you consumed, what
resonated with you, what caused you to make a decision. But we know that user journeys, especially on websites, are not a straight line. They come in, they poke around, they come back, they look at different pieces of content, they see something out on social, they consume it, maybe they don’t come to your website. So there are a lot of difficult things to track. But
By tracking and measuring, it gives you the opportunity to optimize, to identify the gaps in your funnel and to figure out where you need more content. What are you missing in your content? AI is helping us a lot with that also by helping us analyze our data and helping simulate users so that it can figure out where we’re missing content or what areas are not complete for that user story.
Douglas Burdett (26:04)
Mm-hmm. And any leadership, again, not to keep repeating this, leadership, just read chapter five as a reminder so that you’ll have a restless night of sleep. And then read chapter eight about some of the really great things that some organizations are doing. jumping ahead to one other thing from that chapter, in my experience in the agency world, whenever we would get a new client,
you know, at the marketing agency, they would, you always hear somebody say, well, how we got to create a bunch of content. We don’t have any content. think approximately 100 % of the time they had a lot of content. They just didn’t realize it. So I had to laugh when you wrote what applies. So you had it on page 35. You’re right. There’s not a piece of content that we create as higher education institutions that could not be leveraged for marketing every piece of content you create.
can include an opportunity to better connect with one of your audiences. It’s like years ago, I was on the vestry of my church. after being on the vestry, I learned how to say no finally, but I am going to heaven for that. But it was kind of frustrating. years later, they’d say they were looking for guidance on social media. I said, OK, I’ll come in and do a presentation.
Brian Piper (27:21)
You
Douglas Burdett (27:33)
but I’m not going to do it. You know how those volunteer organizations, say, Douglas, that’s a great idea. Can you do that? Well, now I know. So, but I was showing them an outline of some things that they could be doing, which basically came down to these days, people don’t have to go to the church to kind of learn more about you. First, they can kind of check you out online. And like, and I showed them examples of other churches that were doing this. I talked about some of the examples from David Merriman Scott’s book, the new rules of marketing and PR.
And they said, well, but who’s going to create all this content? And I said, look, you’re a church. You’re a content machine. You’ve got a lectionary all year. You’ve got sermons each. You’ve got beautiful music, beautiful pictures. You’ve got the content. Same thing with higher education. Although I would argue there’s probably even more content there. So maybe you could say a little bit more about that. mean, do you run into
different organizations within your organization who think they’ve got to create everything from whole cloth.
Brian Piper (28:40)
Yeah, absolutely. there’s so much, when I first started this job, I went into the interview and I said, you have so much content, you create so much new content. But the problem is, no, they knew, they were very well aware. But I said the problem with the content is that it’s not all serving a purpose. And you don’t recognize the value of all this content that you have. Your content is an asset.
Douglas Burdett (28:52)
Were they surprised when you would say that?
but there is a lot of raw materials.
Brian Piper (29:11)
There’s so much raw material and all this raw material that you have has all this data around it that you can go look at and see what people are interested in. And then you can re-leverage that. You can repurpose that, retarget it, redistribute it. I mean, just because you put out a news article three years ago, doesn’t mean that there’s not still value, that it’s not still answering questions that people have or solving problems that they have. And your data will show you that.
Douglas Burdett (29:36)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (29:40)
Use your data, look at that, figure out what was working, and then create more of that, but figure out predictively what will work the best. And we’ve actually started tracking about three years ago, we started tracking, we call them reactive stories versus proactive stories. So reactive stories are stories that a researcher or a dean or faculty bring to us and say, this is a story, you need to write this.
Sometimes those are actually really good stories. And a lot of times those are just like, need to get this grant publicized that we got or something. And then the proactive stories are the ones that our editors and our content creators think about what’s going on in the world and what’s trending and what do we have expertise around. Those perform five times better in organic than the reactive.
Douglas Burdett (30:32)
That’s very important you make that point
in the book about how some of these things that are tied more into current events Are much more effective Yeah
Brian Piper (30:42)
For sure, yeah, absolutely.
And once you have that data, then it’s much easier to tell somebody, you’re right, this is a great story, but not for our news site. This is going into our newsletter or into social, but we’re not gonna spend three or four hours crafting this into a story and then putting it up there for 10 people to see.
Douglas Burdett (31:03)
Yeah. And as I joked earlier about saying no at the church, there, being able to say no as a content marketing, was very important. And we’re going to talk about a couple of ways that you can do that. you talked about audiences earlier. want to ask you, you write on page 42, it’s, it’s tempting to want to cast the widest net possible with your message. Like you just said earlier, but everybody needs to know about this to reach everyone, answer all the questions and solve all the problems. This is a fool’s errand. Please put a.
Brian Piper (31:32)
You
Douglas Burdett (31:33)
finer point on
that. You know, even the government doesn’t try to reach everybody and they have all the money, it seems.
Brian Piper (31:39)
Yeah, yeah,
mean, if you try to please everyone, if you try to write for everyone, you’re writing for no one. Your message is gonna become so muddied and gray that it’s not gonna have value for anyone. So you have to think about who’s the most important audience for this? Who are we really trying to get to take some action that will have the biggest impact on our institution? That’s your target audience and that’s who you write to first. Now.
Douglas Burdett (31:46)
Yeah.
Brian Piper (32:07)
If you have to write the story and then at the end, now you have a secondary audience that you need to put some content in there for, that’s fine. But when you start off, you have to figure out how you can make this the most valuable and the most helpful for your target audience. And then go create another piece of content for a different audience if you need to do that. And we’ll do that a lot. Sometimes we’ll say, you know, our news site might not be the best place to reach prospective undergraduate students. So.
We’ll write an article for potential faculty or for other potential researchers. We’ll put that up on our news page. And then on social, we’ll create content that targets our prospective undergraduate students. So you have to think about what channel is the right fit for which audience and how you’re gonna deliver the most valuable content around a particular topic area on that channel. But so many times marketers get caught in the trap of we need a YouTube video.
You know, they do channel first, we need social posts. But you really have to think about what you’re trying to communicate and what the value of your content is. And then who’s going to find that most valuable and then start figuring out where to deliver that.
Douglas Burdett (33:06)
Yes.
Yeah, one of the tells, when I was working at talking to a prospective client, if they would ever use the word blast as it related to email, I knew I had a problem. And similarly, whenever somebody would say, you know, we just need to get the word out. It was like, man, I’m going to have some work to do. To whom? I got a few more levels, a little bit more of the onion to peel back. Yeah. You say that,
Brian Piper (33:28)
You
Right, right, why?
Douglas Burdett (33:45)
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating content is not having a specific audience in mind. And let’s say just for the sake of this conversation, the different audiences could be prospective students, parents of students, alumni, prospective faculty members, talent, very important, to prospective employees, research partner. I mean, there could be any number of them. You don’t have to have a whole lot to get started. We’re going to talk about that in a minute.
But you talk, you also talk about, this is just true of any in the business world, just, this is always going to be a problem. The most difficult thing to do with content marketing is to maintain focus on your audience. It is so easy to start slipping back into the trap of talking about ourselves to ourselves. And it’s, difficult for organizations to stay focused on their customers or their specific audiences. But you know, if you just do a little bit better than the others.
Brian Piper (34:38)
for sure.
Douglas Burdett (34:44)
You don’t have to be perfect at this. But if you can speak, let’s say, to prospective students a little bit better, and we’re going to talk about one of the ways you can do that, you’ll really stand out. You’ll get a second consideration. You won’t get turned off right away. Now, the other thing that we touched on it before, but I mean, these are really simple things to say, really difficult for organizations to do and very important. The key to Epic Content Marketing is to stay focused on adding value.
for the audience, not for your institution. Focusing on your audience first will benefit your institution long term. Adding value sort of along the lines of producing something that the audience would say, wow, that’s really helpful.
Brian Piper (35:27)
Yeah, absolutely. And so much of the content that you see out there from Higher Ed and with six kids and three in college and two having finished college, we have gone through the college tour, college research, brochures, all the content that comes from institutions. And so much of it.
Douglas Burdett (35:47)
Excuse me, let me interject.
Was all of that what prompted you to become a skydiver as well?
Brian Piper (35:52)
No, that was actually long before I even had kids or thought of kids so But it certainly did encourage me to keep skydiving and you know Try the crazier things. I was like, well I I can do this and maybe this will you know be the end of it for me. So Yeah, there you go if you want to get really dangerous for sure No, but you know, it’s it’s just that so much of the content you see is the university talking about how great they are
Douglas Burdett (36:08)
Right, right. Well, there’s always motorcycles.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (36:22)
and
the students don’t care, they just wanna know how it’s gonna help them, how it’s gonna make their lives easier, how it’s gonna, you know, the decisions that they have to make. They’re leaving home, they’re making probably the biggest decision they’ve ever made in their life. you know, the research has shown that most of those decisions are based on how they feel about an institution. So it doesn’t matter, yeah.
Douglas Burdett (36:44)
vibes.
Brian Piper (36:47)
It’s, and all of my kids have said that, you know, once they choose a school and of course they’re like my focus group. I’m always asking them questions about stuff. They’re like, stop with the questions already. but I ask them, what was it?
Douglas Burdett (36:57)
Yeah, but you know, a lot of people in your
position probably don’t talk to these people in their target audience.
Brian Piper (37:01)
True, true.
So, you know, and most of them say it just feels like the right fit. It seems like where I wanna be. They’re my people there. And they get that from the stories they hear. And we were, was at a conference earlier this year and they had a panel of seven high school students who had selected their college. And when they were asked what kind of content they wanted more of, they all said, I want more.
Douglas Burdett (37:05)
yeah.
Brian Piper (37:30)
day in the life content from current students because that’s what it’s gonna be like when I go there. That’s gonna be my day in, day out experience. I don’t wanna hear about how many people you graduated that ended up getting jobs. I mean, that’s great, but I wanna see what life is gonna be like and how you’re going to help me have a better experience.
Douglas Burdett (37:53)
Yeah, and you know, any kind of content marketing, if it’s done right, it starts to give you a preview, like in the business world of what it’s going to be like to be a customer. The other thing that we should remind folks of, and there’s a lot of scientists who work at universities, humans make decisions at the emotional level, at the subconscious level. And then they use the conscious part of their brain, which may be one to 5 % to rationalize what they’ve already decided. Basically, you’re
Brian Piper (38:02)
Exactly.
Douglas Burdett (38:22)
your conscious mind is your PR department, which justifies what you want to do. And that’s what you’ve described. It’s the vibe, know, the gut, which is often a very good thing. Just one other thing I want to ask you about. said
We need to go from transactional content to valuable content. What do you mean by transactional content? Just so people can maybe hear this and think, ooh, we’ve got a lot of that.
Brian Piper (38:54)
Yeah. So when all of your content is all about the call to action, everything that you read, every email you get, every website page you go to is like apply now, apply now, apply now. Like that, that’s not what we want these users to do. We want them to get value. We don’t necessarily need them to apply right now. We don’t necessarily need them to be students at our institution if we’re not the right fit for them.
Douglas Burdett (39:06)
Yeah.
Brian Piper (39:22)
but we can help them along the way. We can help educate them about the process. We can help inspire them about the value of higher ed, which is another thing that’s been brought into question a lot in the last few years.
Douglas Burdett (39:35)
Yes. I want to talk about
that next. Yeah. Well, actually, you the other thing that if you wanted to be snarky or maybe you’ve had a few drinks, which I don’t recommend when you’re talking to them, people who are decision makers, but it’s like, so when you got married, tell me about your first date. then you say, is that when you asked her to marry you on the first date? It’s like, yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Okay. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Brian Piper (39:56)
Right, yeah. Build that relationship, establish that trust before you try to sell them something. Yeah.
Douglas Burdett (40:05)
So, before we jump to chapter five, which is my favorite chapter, don’t tell the other chapters I said that because they’re all very good. I love them all each in their own special way. explain, this is one question from that next chapter was, explain why authenticity trumps perfection. And this almost gives you permission not to be perfect, which actually is a good thing.
Brian Piper (40:17)
course.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, even when you look at, like you were mentioning earlier about looking down at your script, right? There is AI now that will force your eye contact with the camera. So it looks like you are always looking at the camera. And there’s AI that will remove all the filler words from your speak while you’re talking from your presentation.
Douglas Burdett (40:50)
And we won’t have any
of that on this conversation.
Brian Piper (40:53)
Of course, absolutely not. But now what they’ve started doing is reintroducing. Now there’s a feature where you can add filler words because it makes the people more authentic. yes, so we are human because we make mistakes and that’s how we learn. That’s how we grow is by, mean, most of my growth, I mean, I’ve got some great stories of winning and success, but most of my good stories are about where I failed and how I grew from that.
Douglas Burdett (41:03)
That’s great, I did not know that.
Uh-huh.
Brian Piper (41:22)
And that’s the value of authenticity is showing your full self and showing that I’m just like you. I make mistakes. I screw things up all the time. And that’s how you learn from that. And that’s how you pick yourself up and move on.
Douglas Burdett (41:34)
Yeah.
slick is not helpful. You know, there was one of the many authors I interviewed was Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing. And he wrote in a book and at later Mark Schaeffer and Marketing Rebellion talked about this is how in this modern age where so much of it is digital, you actually have to start showing maybe a little more vulnerability than you used to. Because otherwise people are so suspicious and it’s just, it’s so hard to fool the human mind.
Brian Piper (41:41)
You
Douglas Burdett (42:07)
People can just tell. So now let’s get on to chapter five, which really got my attention. I want to start with the following quote from page 68. I seriously could not believe this. You write, in a Chronicle of Higher Education report from 2012, 60 % of Americans believed that a college education was worth the cost. Only 12 % disagreed with that statement. In 2023, the same study was done
and 56 % of those surveyed believed that higher education was not worth the cost. The change in mindset was most evident among millennials in Gen Z with more than 60 % of those populations expressing skepticism about higher education. And then also in here, I believe a couple of pages later, you say, you mentioned that
IBM reported that 50 % of its US job openings do not require a four-year degree. I’ll just talk about some of the challenges, the threats, the obstacles there are to higher education right now and in the future. I realize some people may have heard of this, but even if they have, it might be helpful to repeat this.
Brian Piper (43:27)
Yeah. And there’s a, there’s an excellent book called the abundant university, which really dives into this. But I mean, it’s the fact that historically higher ed has been like the next step. It’s like the progression that you go through. This is the standard. You go to high school, you go to college, you get a good job and then, you know, you’re a success. That just doesn’t work that way anymore. There are too many other options. There are too many certificate programs out there that you can get. And a lot of companies just want experience.
more than they want a degree. mean, knowledge transfer is not enough anymore. At higher ed institutions, we have to look at ways to get our students real world experience, to really provide them an opportunity for personal growth and to figure out, know, especially at the prices that we’re seeing in a lot of higher ed institutions, it just makes you really question whether or not this is a good investment. I know a lot of people who have gotten out of college
who are still working minimum wage jobs and they can’t find jobs in their career fields. And with the changing world of AI and the ability to have knowledge at our fingertips, at the drop of a hat, we have to start changing the way that we think about what higher ed is here for, what we’re trying to accomplish and what we really offer as value besides just growing your knowledge base.
Douglas Burdett (44:55)
Yeah. And we may talk about this later, but it’s, the idea of competition. You’re not necessarily competing with other schools. You’re competing with other options. Like, where I live in Virginia, there’s a ship building company. There’s these fantastic apprenticeship programs and they’re, they’re, they’re running TV commercials on NFL games to get people to want to come here to help build submarines. So it’s
Brian Piper (45:05)
for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, because
they know that work is out there. mean, institutions need to start working more with businesses to say, what need are you going to have in four years that we can provide you the resources for, that we can give our students jobs, we can connect, we can have you sponsor their education. There’s so many different ways that we can change the way that we run higher ed, the way that we run the system in our country.
so that we can really figure out the best way to add value and to create these wins for our students.
Douglas Burdett (45:56)
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about just one other thing. And when I was reading about this, I was reminded of something David Ogilvie had in his book, Ogilvie on Advertising, where he, I can’t remember exactly what it was, but he said there was somebody who was so tired, another executive who was so tired of the politics and ad agency. He went to work at a college as a professor and he didn’t realize that he’d actually gone to the most political of work environments, which reminded me about
The silos, so you’re right, we cannot talk about challenges to higher education institutions without talking about silos. And I would think that any university president who might be listening to this is really dialed into what you’re talking about. if you you’re right, understanding the importance of consistent communication across silos is often an issue that is overlooked by leadership. why is that and what can be done?
to help leadership understand the downsides of these rather vicious silos.
Brian Piper (47:00)
Yeah. And silos are such a huge problem in higher ed. And it’s really been like decades of building these barriers between different groups. So every, you know, every different school, every different department has their own leadership. have their own goals. They’re doing things their own way.
Douglas Burdett (47:17)
It’s probably like a one or 200 year
old problem, really. Always been that way.
Brian Piper (47:21)
absolutely, absolutely. And it all started
with funding, right? It all started with who had the money and who can try and you get this much money and you get this much money. And then every different group or organization, different school would have their own budgets that they would need. And they’re just, you know, we just lost the ability to look at the whole picture and to really start thinking about how can we be one university? And, know, it’s really a
a branded house instead of a house of brands. You really need to figure out how you’re gonna deliver your messaging. And from a marketing perspective, there’s a huge number of issues just about what your messaging is, how you’re collecting your data and storing that so you can’t analyze things across your entire landscape. When you start thinking about what could happen if all of these groups came together.
Douglas Burdett (47:49)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (48:10)
and they all united under the one institutional strategies that we’re all trying to align with. I the opportunities are endless. And we’ve seen this, you know, during COVID, we really had a lot of coming together of different groups and really talking about, you know, we don’t need a different COVID statement on every different website that we have out there. We need to come up with one that will work for the entire institution. So we started like working more towards this
one university and now we’re finding like pockets of different programs that we can look at, you know, using those as tools to reach out across the institution. So accessibility, it’s a huge issue. Everybody needs to get on board with that. So we need some central governance over that. So we’re all doing things the same way. We’re all protecting ourselves from lawsuits and providing our content to all of our audiences without, you know, depending on
independent of how they consume it. You know, we’re seeing that with AI now. This is going to touch everyone. It’s going to touch every team. So we need to figure out how we can manage this at an institutional level. things like that get us start thinking about different ways to connect and collaborate across an institution. But silos are still a huge issue. And so much of it just comes down to communication, just understanding what everybody else is doing.
Douglas Burdett (49:37)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (49:38)
and asking them, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish in your school? How can we help? So, yeah.
Douglas Burdett (49:45)
Yeah, it’s funny,
back to Jenny Lee Fowler’s book, Organic Social Media. I remember when I interviewed her, if I’m not mistaken, she’s at MIT and she’s more or less head of social media, but she actually had 212 departments and she’s not doing it for everybody, but she’s trying to be that cat herder. And I just thought, man, you must have to have the patience of the clergy or something, or a therapist or something.
Brian Piper (50:11)
Yeah,
and those don’t even include like all the student social channels and the news, all the different newsletters. We have like 300 different newsletters that go out across our institution. So, you know, we’ve looked at some of the messaging that goes out and sometimes we may send one particular audience, may get 10 to 15 different newsletters each week from the institution because we’re just not aware of
Douglas Burdett (50:17)
Right.
Brian Piper (50:38)
what everybody else is sending out. So they end up just ignoring them because they don’t have the time to read that many newsletters.
Douglas Burdett (50:41)
Ugh.
Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to quote from page 85. I like the way you write, Brian Piper. I guess that’s kind of obvious by now. You write, this is in the chapter on, what’s this? How to use content marketing in higher education. Most brands have a fairly clear understanding of the features and benefits of their products. With traditional marketing, that is all they talked about, how great their products were. Once they got into content marketing, they had to make the switch to talking about how the…
They had to make the switch to talking about the problems their users were trying to solve and the questions they had in the areas where their products or services could help. It sounds like a minor difference, but it is an ocean between those two. And back to something you mentioned earlier about talking about yourself in the, I remember once at a talk I attended, this fellow was talking about how a lot of business to consumer, well, any kind of business, he said they’re weeing all over themselves.
And of course we all started thinking about your weeing on yourself. He goes, yeah. They’re saying, we’re the best. And it made me think of every local community bank ad. We’re the best. We have, know, we, we, we, we. Just count the number of times they say we in the script. So I just wanted to mention that. I like that. what advice do you have? Because I have a feeling you get this all the time, this question.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to just start doing content marketing for their department or their team, and they don’t have the ability to start influencing changes in the larger institutional landscape like we all dream about? Should they? Should they do it?
Brian Piper (52:24)
Yeah. And we always,
absolutely, definitely do it. That’s your opportunity to make a change and to set up some, I mean, what we’re doing is we’re building use cases. Find one story, start with one story. And that’s what we always say, start small. Start with one piece of content that you can create that really focuses on your audience’s problems. What are the issues that you can help them with? What are the questions that they have that you can answer with your content?
and create that content. And while you’re creating it, think about, mean, just like Warren Buffett did when he wrote his annual letter to his stakeholders. He started off by writing his sister’s names as the title of it, or as the two in the email. So that the whole time that he was writing that letter, he was just thinking about what they were interested in and what their problems were and how he could help them solve those.
So really focus as you’re creating that content on how you’re adding value for that audience. And then put that content out there and watch how it performs and promote that content and go back and look at it see how you can tweak it and how you can adjust it to make it perform better. And do that with a few pieces of content. Maybe do one article a month like that. And then after a year or so, you’re going to have a whole bunch of different data.
Douglas Burdett (53:21)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (53:49)
a bunch of different stories that are out there performing well, adding value, and then you can take that to leadership and say, look at these stories, they’re performing way better than all these other stories we have. Right, yeah, and actually, Allison Tursio from Sienna College has a quote in there that they actually were able to show with data that content marketing had as much impact on enrollment as visits to campus.
Douglas Burdett (54:00)
stuff about us.
Brian Piper (54:18)
So I mean, if you have data like that that you can show leadership, eventually they have to look at that and say, well, maybe we should be doing more of that.
Douglas Burdett (54:18)
Ugh.
Yeah, you’re not saying this is
my opinion, boss. It’s, let’s start with the numbers is a good meeting. kickoff always says, let me ask you a question. It’s about around about page 106 for those playing the home game. And then this looks like one of the thorniest, issues it’s about differentiation. write differentiation can be difficult in higher education because fundamentally all higher education institutions have a similar purpose to educate their students.
Brian Piper (54:30)
Yeah, it’s fact.
Douglas Burdett (54:55)
If you stop there, there’s no differentiation. So what are some of the ways that a higher education institution can differentiate itself successfully?
Brian Piper (55:06)
Yeah, well actually Mark Schaeffer has a great thing that he does, a great tool that he uses when he’s working with brands to help them find their differentiation. And he goes in and he says, finish this sentence, only we.
What is it that your institution does that other institutions don’t do? What is it that your students really like about your institution? And the best way to find that out is to talk to them and ask them, why did you stay here? Why did you choose us? I mean, that’s the great thing about higher ed is that we have our focus groups walking around all day long, walking around us and going into classrooms. It’s so easy to say, hey,
I’ll buy you a free coffee if you come over and tell me what you like about our institution and then figure out, yeah, our pizza, absolutely, absolutely. So, yeah, absolutely, we’re surrounded by all of the great use cases that we need and all the stories that we need because now not only can they tell you what it is they love about your institution, but they can give you stories about
Douglas Burdett (55:56)
Pizza. Students love pizza.
You’re swimming in a sea of free insights.
Brian Piper (56:18)
Well, here’s how this happened to me and here’s when I realized this. So now you’ve got your stories, you can create that emotional connection. Now you’ve got the data, now you’ve got the insights from them, or you can say, this is what our students love about us. If this is something that you would like from an institution, we’re the right fit for you. Because it’s really about, it’s not about finding the most students you can that will apply and come to your school.
Douglas Burdett (56:18)
Hello.
Right.
Brian Piper (56:44)
We have to really start thinking about retaining the students we have. And to do that, we have to make sure we have the right students for our institution.
Douglas Burdett (56:48)
Yeah.
You know, back to my ad days, I can remember the time that the clients would always be quiet. is whenever we would do like intercepts or man on the street interviews about, let’s say they’re, maybe not really might ask questions, but it was just one or two questions. We would ask these opinions like, which ones are you aware of? Or what do you think about this or whatever? We would play these videos of.
real live people in the wild talking about their category or their products or their competitors. And they would, they would really listen. It really is a superpower. The more dialed in you are as a marketer to your prospective customers. And there’s a great book that just came out second edition called buyer personas, which is really, really good for that. You like he already has it. Don’t take my word for it. Yeah. you’ve got the second edition. is fantastic for that.
Brian Piper (57:41)
I’ve got it right here. Yeah. And
a great interview, by the way, with Jim Krause. Yes, excellent, excellent. Yeah, and you know, I mean, that’s what Steve Jobs says, right? Your brand is what people say when you’re not around. know, what they say about you when you’re not there. so, great.
Douglas Burdett (57:49)
thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah, yeah. And you can’t control it. I mean, you can
control the certain amount, but you can’t, it’s not like the old days where, like, again, back to the good old days of my Don Draper Mad Men days where you could just run an ad and that was pretty much all the information people had. Sadly, those days are over. there was one other thing. Well, I can, I still do that, but yeah. So that’s why I think I’m retired.
Brian Piper (58:17)
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. You could also drink martinis at noon at work. So, you know, it’s a different, different time. You can, right? Well.
Douglas Burdett (58:30)
There. There’s another concept in your book that’s just really important, which reminded me of you may know Jean Bliss. She’s the godmother of customer experience. She worked at these enormous companies and showed them how to quantify the customer experience. And she wrote these great books. I think one of her last books was titled, Would You Do That to Your Mother?
Which is a good question to ask. But I remember in her book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0, she wrote about how if you are the head of marketing somewhere and the CEO says, hey, you marketing person, I want you to be in charge of customer experience. She said her advice was to say no. And the reason why is because the marketing person has very little control over how the overall organization works.
what the experiences that people have. So you’re right that not to try to launch a content marketing strategy without leadership support. Okay, so this really, really seems important. What happens to those poor souls who don’t have leadership support?
Brian Piper (59:45)
Yeah, typically you just can’t make, mean, one of the key aspects of good content marketing of Epic content marketing is it has to be consistent. It has to come out on a regular basis so that your audience expects it and they want it and they’re looking forward to the next time that your blog or your podcast or your, you know, your homepage on your website changes. So it has to come out at a regular cadence. And if you can’t get leadership to support the fact that you’re going to need
to devote time every week to creating this newsletter or that you’re going to need to, know, every month you’re going to have a new podcast episode that’s going to come out. Then it’s eventually going to get pushed to the wayside and the audience that you’ve really started to build and cultivate is going to wander off and look for somebody else that’s providing that same value. So you have
Douglas Burdett (1:00:35)
Yeah. And I got to guess
the CEO or the, excuse me, the university presidents or whoever the management is, they’re thinking, what are those people doing? You know, I see this in companies all the time, but what, in your experience, talk about where the leadership of the university or the educational institution, because we’re talking about, you know, this could be prep schools or, you know, not just universities. What is it, are there any commonalities you’ve seen where
the leadership starts to buy in to this idea. Because without buy-in, it really seems like you might want to update your resume.
Brian Piper (1:01:15)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, when, you look at the examples that we had in the second edition of Epic Cleveland Clinic was one of those and just an incredible case study of how content marketing and leadership support of content marketing changes the entire face of marketing within an organization. And they started off with three people on their content marketing team. They started off with one person who was
passionate about the idea of content marketing, pulled two other people together and said, we’re gonna try this. We’re pilot this program for a year. We’re gonna see what we can do. All the content that we’re gonna create is just gonna be focused on our audience. 10 years later, they had over 100 full-time employees on their content marketing team and they hit a billion visitors on their site. So.
Douglas Burdett (1:02:06)
And
I can’t remember, was the management indifferent? in other words, what I just heard you say was pilot something. And that’s one of the most important things a marketer can say, particularly content marketers, to say, we want to test this. It’s just a lot less threatening. Management doesn’t feel like it’s a failure. Instead of saying, it fail? Well, what did you learn? What was the situation? Was management ready to try anything?
Brian Piper (1:02:20)
Yes, absolutely.
Right.
No, I think management was open to new ideas. They wanted some change in their marketing, but I don’t think that they understood what content marketing is. And Amanda Todorovic, who led the initiative, said that most of her time, even now, most of her time is still spent doing little internal road shows where she goes around to the different teams and says, this is why we’re doing this. This is the impact that it’s having. This is why it’s important.
and this is what content marketing is and why you shouldn’t just be doing random acts of content and just throwing things out there. You need to really be intentional and focused about why you’re spending your time creating this.
Douglas Burdett (1:03:14)
Yeah. And you know, you’re right that having leadership support, we touched on this earlier, helps you to say no to other types of content that you’ve been traditionally creating or that people have been asking you for, do me a PowerPoint template. And it reminded me of years ago had a healthcare, health system, whole health system, a couple of them. And when you had a plan, they would understand, okay, there’s actually just a four
things we really want to market. For instance, maternity for a health system. The statistics showed that a woman would be more likely to have a second child if the first experience was a good one at that hospital. Well, then that also led to her being the decision maker for the family, and that includes her parents and her in-laws. so that was like everyone seemed to understand that was one of them. That was one of the focus areas. You don’t want to advertise your ER services.
Brian Piper (1:04:12)
You
Douglas Burdett (1:04:13)
But people
could understand how that was a beachhead to getting them into the system. the pathologists and the radiologists weren’t upset that they weren’t getting, in that case, advertising. But they all started to understand, OK, that’s how it all fits together. Let me kind of relate it to that. The temptation is probably to want to boil the ocean, to do everything all at once. And it can be really overwhelming.
And that’s when I could hear a CEO saying, well, who’s going to do all this? And that’s where on page 136, you write, whenever someone asks me, how do I start doing content marketing? And you know that’s a desperate cry for help, Brian W. Piper. You always tell them to start small. Pick one audience, one goal, and one channel.
explain why you recommend that.
Brian Piper (1:05:08)
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, especially when you’re doing one of these pilot projects, you want to pick a place where you know you can win. You want to find the low hanging fruit. Where’s the biggest gap? What’s the biggest goal you’re trying to accomplish? What’s the main audience that you’re trying to, I mean, once you nail down those very specific things, it makes it much easier to figure out what content you need to create.
Douglas Burdett (1:05:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (1:05:38)
You can look back at your data and see what content was successful for those audiences. You can do focus groups and figure out what do you need to hear more of? What are your main pain points? You’re creating your personas for that audience. You figure out specifically what their decision criteria are, what it is that’s gonna make them choose you over someone else. So now once you have this very focused, very intentional
Douglas Burdett (1:05:43)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (1:06:06)
idea of what you need to create and what you need to do and what channel they’re consuming your content on, then you can start creating that content. But if you try to think of, you know, we need to grow our enrollment for every different group, for non-traditional students and prospective students and every school, right, we need to pull in for every program yet you just can’t do it. So start small, start with one place where you can make a difference.
Douglas Burdett (1:06:22)
At every grad school, right? Yeah.
Yeah, and-
What’s interesting is that that also gives you an opportunity to say no, because you’re doing a test, you’re doing a pilot. I think a lot of people don’t understand that you will learn a lot and you can focus on what really does work well. And you want points on the board, which you touch on a few pages later where you write the key to selecting an audience to target with your first content marketing strategy is to think about where you are most likely to succeed.
If this is your proof of concept, you want as big a win as possible. So
Brian Piper (1:07:07)
Yeah. And
that works with any new initiative that you’re trying to prove out. We did that with SEO. We’re doing that with AI. Look for those places where it’s going to have the biggest impact first, because then once you sell it in, now you can start figuring out, right, now what are all the different places that we can reach out and have an effect. It might not be as big an effect, but over time, those are all going to add up to this huge, you know, to a billion page views to your site.
Douglas Burdett (1:07:36)
It reminded me of some of the books that were on the marketing group podcast about account-based marketing. And one of the authors wrote about how they would do just what you described. Let’s say these were usually larger organizations doing account-based marketing. You didn’t want to do it for everybody. You want to do like a pilot or a test with one group. And he said one of the biggest problems they ran into is that everybody wanted it right away.
Brian Piper (1:08:02)
Of course.
Douglas Burdett (1:08:03)
And usually it was actually after they would do it like with one division and they would see the growth from taking that new approach. So you got to pump the brakes actually. So I want to jump down to page 142 with a quote that just made this guy laugh. You wrote, a high school junior or senior does not want to hear from some 50 year old marketer about why they should come to our school.
They want to hear from someone their own age, someone who was recently in the same situation they are in, someone who gets them and knows the issues and decision factors going through their head. I thought that was great and my feelings weren’t hurt at all because I’m no longer in my 50s. yeah, but even you started talking about this earlier, but you write then that several marketing leaders that you spoke with, as we’ve discussed for your book, have had student-led
Brian Piper (1:08:47)
See, there you go.
Douglas Burdett (1:08:59)
and run, student run social media teams and even marketing agencies on their campuses. Talk about that and I gather also later that a lot of universities balk at wanting to do that.
Brian Piper (1:09:15)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, Karen Freberg at University of Louisville have created the Bird’s Nest Agency. So this is a student run, student led, full service marketing agency that works with brands like Starbucks and the US Army and Kentucky Derby. So they’re doing big projects and they’re getting this real world experiences, which is exactly what students want. It’s exactly what employers want and it’s what
Douglas Burdett (1:09:43)
Yeah
Brian Piper (1:09:44)
It’s what higher ed should be giving them, right? We can’t just teach them the fundamentals. We need to give them the experience of really interacting what it’s like to work with a client because we all know that that can be challenging and what it’s like to run a campaign and to come up with these ideas. And then, you know, all of that can be led and monitored by, you know, faculty or by the marketing team. And there are a bunch of schools out there that are creating
Douglas Burdett (1:09:47)
Yes!
Brian Piper (1:10:12)
you know, student intern programs, student creator programs, where they’re teaching their students who all want to be YouTubers and social influencers and content creators, they’re teaching them how to stick to brand strategies, how to have a unified voice, how to follow different guidelines for posting. So now they’re not only getting to create content and do what they enjoy doing.
but now they’re getting to figure out how to do that within certain constraints that you have to follow. And sometimes, yes, they will probably veer outside of those constraints, but that’s when you just, that’s right, that’s right. And that’s what the other students who are watching the content wanna see. They wanna see the bounds being pushed a little bit, but pull them back in.
Douglas Burdett (1:10:48)
Yeah, back to your authenticity though.
Yeah. And it also tackles
the issue of, who’s going to do all this? Well, I’m glad you asked boss.
Brian Piper (1:11:04)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, who else? Yeah. Yeah. And we have all these students just sitting around looking for opportunities to make a few dollars. And Carroll Community College actually took it a step further. And they’re teaching personal branding classes to their students, their faculty, and their staff for free. So come learn how to build your brand while at the same time, we’ll help you promote your content if you include content about us.
Douglas Burdett (1:11:05)
It works on so many levels.
Yeah!
Yeah.
Brian Piper (1:11:33)
And this is good for you. This gives you experience and exposure. And it’s good for us because look at all these people that are now talking about us, that are all members of our community, that we’re helping to go out and get better jobs and find better experiences.
Douglas Burdett (1:11:47)
It works
on so many levels. And as a person who used to hire people, can you imagine if if one of the universities around here was doing that, maybe they are now but what I what I would do to get out to to get over there and try to meet some of those students, because they would be very, very valuable. In fact, it reminds me of a lot of companies, they’ll hire someone young saying, we don’t know what to do. Just you show us a student right out of school could help them.
Brian Piper (1:11:51)
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
in this age of AI and social media, they know these technologies way better than we do. they can actually, as we’re teaching our student creators about how to integrate AI into their processes, they’re like, but you can also do this. We’re like, yes, you can. That’s great.
Douglas Burdett (1:12:22)
Yeah.
Yes, yes. Well, I want to jump to another thing that was just very interesting and I didn’t see a lot. And I think even somebody who’s maybe read a whole bunch of content marketing books like me, this is really, it was a very important thing to remind me of. And that’s where you quoted Jay Baer, the author, who said, now this is, and a lot of people listening to this conversation are to be thinking content marketing, that’s what we’re making.
Okay. Yeah, sure. There’s a lot of content that we’re responsible for, but he said, make sure that whenever possible, your content marketing strategy is not entirely reliant upon the content that you own and create. Explain. Yeah.
Brian Piper (1:13:14)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
I mean, people don’t trust messaging that comes from you because they know you’re trying to get them to do something. You’re trying to sell them something. But if you can get someone else to talk about you, if you can get a third party to talk about what a great experience they had or what kind of impact they got from you, that is so much more valuable than anything that you can create.
Douglas Burdett (1:13:41)
Yes.
Brian Piper (1:13:43)
So going back to student influencers, they’re gonna be posting on their own channels and talking about you and the opportunities that you gave them. And it’s the same with your staff and your faculty. I go to a lot of higher ed conferences where all these staff members are getting up there and sharing their knowledge with other staff. And then everybody else is going out and talking about them, about all the great insights they got from them.
representing their institutions. And enough institutions aren’t figuring out how to take that content and use that themselves and promote that content on their own channels so that they can see, look at all these people we have out there representing us or that we have educated who are now succeeding in life or getting all these opportunities or finding this exposure. We often talk about finding those
Douglas Burdett (1:14:13)
Mm-hmm.
huh.
Brian Piper (1:14:40)
good alumni stories and we’re always looking for the big, know, the big, like the alumni that won the Nobel Prize or, but look at all these small stories, look at all these people who are getting these good jobs or are, you know, starting families or creating lives and doing that because of, you know, what they learned at our institution or the experiences they had here. There are ways we can promote that and work with our, you know, different alumni, staff, students, faculty to share those messages out.
And then we don’t even have to create the content. We don’t have to spend our time making it, because they’re making it for us.
Douglas Burdett (1:15:15)
Yeah, you know, that reminds me of yet another book by Mark Schaefer. I can’t remember which one. I interviewed him about 10 different books. He is the king of the marketing book podcast. But I can’t remember which think tank it was, you know, but a big one where they showed that in a study that came out like 15 years ago. Okay, first, let me back up.
Brian Piper (1:15:24)
He’s the king. He’s the king.
Douglas Burdett (1:15:42)
In the old days, years ago, most of what was said about a brand was said by the company. Like let’s say 75%. Okay, back in good old days, right? It’s what the company would say. That’s where you got most of your information. 15 years ago, at least, it was determined that 75 % of what is said about your brand is not said by the brand anymore.
Everyone else is talking about it and that’s why a guy like Jay Baer wrote a fantastic book called Talk Triggers. Word of mouth marketing really is very, very some of the best marketing along with referrals. But this is such an important part. Again, you don’t have a captive audience. And just to quote Jay Baer one more time, he wrote, the reality, either he or you did, I he was a good writer.
The reality is that content about your institution that does not exist on your own social channels or your own.edu is going to be far more trusted, rightly or wrongly, than the content that you own. Okay. I’m sorry. Sorry to break it to everybody, but I wanted to, to include that. And, one other idea from Jay is, it’s, right. That’s important to remember when distributing content, the difference between owned land and rented land.
Brian Piper (1:16:53)
Yeah.
Douglas Burdett (1:17:04)
So just as a follow up to that, explain the difference between owned land and rented land. They’re both good for certain things, but you need to understand, I guess, some of the perils of using rented land.
Brian Piper (1:17:19)
Yeah, and so when we talk about rented land and content marketing, we’re talking about your social channels. We’re talking about places where, you know, like YouTube, where you can put the content out, but you don’t control the distribution. You don’t have access to all the data. And most importantly, you don’t have control over your followers or in a lot of times, even awareness of who all your followers are on those channels. So.
Douglas Burdett (1:17:43)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Piper (1:17:46)
You also don’t control whether or not your account stays active. They can shut your account down at any point. And we’ve seen that happen even in some higher ed institutions have had their accounts just shut down on different channels.
Douglas Burdett (1:17:58)
or the
and the platform may go away. I I put all my money into Google Plus years ago and I got wiped out. I’m kidding. No, but I mean, the whole thing just went away. And there were people that wrote books about how to use Google Plus. And it’s not to say you shouldn’t have tried it, but they can take it away. And also your point is a very good one. And I want to talk about your publisher, the Tilt, Tilt Publishing. Okay, so.
Brian Piper (1:18:03)
wow, yeah, I mean, that was the biggest.
Douglas Burdett (1:18:24)
Normally authors would sell their books right away on Amazon explain why Joe Pulizzi and the tilt why they Don’t do that. You started to touch on it right there. I think it’s a very important point to make It has to do with data
Brian Piper (1:18:41)
Yeah.
And I mean, there it does. And it’s about collecting your data. If like through the tilt, I am only selling my book on my website because I don’t, you know, I’m not trying to make this a number one best seller. You know, it’s a business book. It’s not going to get the traction that I want, but what it is going to do is it’s going to be sold within the target audience that I have. It’s going to be sold within the higher ed industry.
And I want to know who’s purchasing it. And so selling it through my site allows me to process all the payments and to collect all that information. So I know the name and email and.
Douglas Burdett (1:19:20)
Right, and instead of Jeff Bezos
having all that information, which he’s not going to share with you.
Brian Piper (1:19:25)
Right, absolutely.
He is not gonna share. And plus, you know, he gets, they take a portion of whatever the sales are and the publisher takes a much larger portion of whatever the sales are. So when you go through a self-publishing company and the way that the Tilt has it worked out is you get a much larger percentage. They are basically just taking the printing costs out and then the shipping costs, you can either pass that along to the purchaser or include that in the price.
So then you get to determine what the price is. Whereas, like with the second edition of Epic, the publisher that we went through determined the price. They determined how much we made off of each book. And then they managed getting it onto Amazon, which was the initial place that it was sold. So I’m collecting all of that information now. I’m getting all of that data. now.
Douglas Burdett (1:20:16)
Yeah, and you’re getting deeper insights into who’s
buying it and yeah, and you’re able to communicate with them.
Brian Piper (1:20:20)
Exactly,
exactly. that is now owned land. So that book is owned land, whereas the last book that I wrote was rented land, because I didn’t have access to distribution or to the data. So that’s why we always tell people.
Douglas Burdett (1:20:34)
Now think you mentioned that later on, later
on you will be selling it on Amazon.
Brian Piper (1:20:39)
Yeah, probably, we’ll see. Eventually, once it becomes a huge success and people start recommending it a lot, you might want to increase the readership so that when people search online, they’ll find it on Amazon, which is kind of a more, that’s right, absolutely, HBO maybe, I don’t know. But you want to be careful.
Douglas Burdett (1:20:40)
Maybe later. Okay.
And you get the Netflix special, yeah. So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So that’s the rent. That’s the
owned versus rented. You just got to think about that because I think that there’s a lot of people thinking, that let’s say, Facebook, when they first came out, you had a little say you built a Facebook page for University of Rochester. In the beginning days, they would show that to almost anyone that would like it, right? They would follow it. It was called 100 % organic or whatever. Well, then about the time that they went public,
they ratcheted that way down. And now I think the organic is, is I maybe less than 1%. In other words, if you have a TV commercial and you take it down to channel three, they’re going to say, okay, thanks. but you’re to need to pay us to run it. So there’s really, they’re really not going to see everything you have on social media, which is not to say you shouldn’t use it. but you own what’s on your be wary of the rented, the rented land. Just understand some of those.
Brian Piper (1:21:30)
Of
Douglas Burdett (1:21:57)
But those are good ways to reach folks, but invest in your own property.
Brian Piper (1:22:04)
Right. Rented land is a great place to build an audience, to grow an audience, but you always want to be trying to push them to your newsletters, to your websites, to those places where they can subscribe and share their email address so that now you can communicate to them when you have something to share and know that they’re going to at least receive it. Whether or not they open it is a, you know, it’s a whole nother topic of, you know, subject lines and who it’s from and things like that. But.
Douglas Burdett (1:22:30)
Yeah.
Brian Piper (1:22:33)
Yeah, that’s why owned land is so much more important and why you should always be trying to drive your audiences to your own properties.
Douglas Burdett (1:22:40)
Yes,
and getting an email address, I know it sounds really old fashioned, it’s really, they have raised their hand and said, I’d like to hear from you. You got to be careful with that. Yeah. So let’s talk about a subject that you know amongst many very well, some AI related things. A study from search engine land predicted that websites could lose anywhere from 18 to 64%.
Brian Piper (1:22:49)
That’s right. I want more.
Douglas Burdett (1:23:08)
of their organic traffic due to SGE, Search Generative Experience or AI-powered search. And you started that chapter on discoverability of your institution’s content. You write that SEO by itself is not enough anymore. SEO by itself is not enough anymore. Explained.
Brian Piper (1:23:33)
So we used to primarily reach our audiences by them coming in and searching on Google. But the search landscape has changed dramatically, especially in the last few years, and especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are the audiences that we’re trying to connect with. So they’re searching through voice. They’re just asking their phone questions. They’re searching through social, right? They are looking for content about institutions.
on social channels. They’re searching in YouTube, they’re searching in communities like Reddit, and they’re searching using AI tools like ChatGPT. So we have to now figure out how to get our content into all of those different spaces, onto all of those different channels that they’re gonna go and search and make sure that we’re not just optimizing for our website anymore. We have to optimize.
for all of these channels and get our content into all of these places. And not just like normal content, because AI is creating a ton of normal content that’s flooding the internet. We have to create the best content. have to create… That’s right, that’s right, absolutely. We have to show our authenticity with the content that we put out on those channels. So sharing stories of failures in Reddit.
Douglas Burdett (1:24:42)
We have to insert us into our podcast now.
Brian Piper (1:24:56)
can actually help your brand. So yeah, it’s changing dramatically. And we’re watching our organic traffic decline because people aren’t searching the way that they used to. But we’re also seeing our traffic increase from social and from AI websites.
Douglas Burdett (1:25:16)
And that’s why marketers who know what they’re doing are starting to command higher and higher salaries. In other words, those marketers that are teaching themselves and sort of the auto didacts. Let me jump to another somewhat related thing from chapter 12 on repurposing and redistributing. want to read a brief, a short paragraph. The additional capabilities created by AI tools will provide efficiencies
Brian Piper (1:25:21)
That’s right. That’s right.
Douglas Burdett (1:25:44)
that will change our workflows. Tasks will take longer initially as we figure out how to use the tools most effectively, but later the time savings will enable us to focus our efforts on other areas like creativity and strategy. And I want you to elaborate on this final sentence. We must be careful, however, to monitor the output from AI to ensure that we are not improving productivity at the cost of connection.
Brian Piper (1:26:15)
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things that these AI tools can do, but it’s up to us to decide what they should do because we don’t want to replace our humanity and our authenticity just because we’re saving some time at creating some content. So I love the way the Marketing AI Institute does this. They do a weekly artificial intelligence podcast that is their one piece of
Douglas Burdett (1:26:24)
So well said. Yes.
Brian Piper (1:26:44)
original unscripted, unaided content that they create. And that’s the foundation for all the rest of the content that they’re gonna create. So then they use AI tools to help repurpose and cut that up and create social posts and newsletters. And then they put that out on all those channels. But it’s all based on quality, authentic, human opinion and thought.
that feeds all of that. So we have to be careful when we’re creating these experiences for our consumers, for our audiences, that we’re keeping the humanity central part of the work that we do. So I mean, there’s a ton of time that we spend doing repetitive work or doing like data research work. We can automate all of that and spend more time.
looking for those stories and telling the stories and connecting with our audiences.
Douglas Burdett (1:27:43)
Yes.
There are certain things that humans will always do better than some of these tools. And they’re tools. can help you dramatically. And I would just say, maybe because I’m an older guy, calm the hell down, people. It’s not going to kill you. But the thing I keep hearing about this expression is AI won’t replace your job. Someone else using AI tools will replace your job.
That’s the right way to think about it. everybody calm down. So there’s just a couple of quick things. I mean, I can’t believe how much you packed into this. This is like a super concentrate. You could add water and turn it into a 500 page book, but it’s only like one set. a quick read. In fact, it reminds me of a book that was on the marketing group podcast years ago about sales and marketing alignment by Jeff Davis called Creating Togetherness. It was a hundred pages long.
Brian Piper (1:28:15)
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Douglas Burdett (1:28:42)
is harder to write than a long book. And I said, what was behind that? And he said, I wanted a CEO to be able to read it on one flight. And the same thing applies to your book. The college president or the head of marketing or any of those people could read this just on the weekend, pretty fast. I know I did. But this is again, another
Brian Piper (1:28:51)
you
Yeah. Yeah.
Douglas Burdett (1:29:10)
a very important part of your book and every single chapter, in fact, every parts of every chapter, entire books have been written about with this, which is why I keep mentioning, that reminds me of this book or that book. But you write that one of the biggest opportunities you see for connecting with audiences in higher education is the use of community. And of course, that warmed the cockles of my heart as a guy that used to be on the Alumni Association trying to explain to the organization that we were trying to rekindle
relationships with folks that spent four years here. Explain what this use of community is. It seems like it takes a long time. You have to work hard. But I think it’s one of the most powerful things for the marketing of a institution of higher learning.
Brian Piper (1:29:48)
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely. mean, we’re asking people to come spend four years of their life with us in our culture, steeped in our institution. And then when they graduate and leave, off they go. And then we’ll reach out to them every year with an email that says, please donate to our alumni foundation. Talk about missed opportunities. mean, in Mark Schaeffer’s book, Belonging to the Brand, it’s all about how important
important it is to maintain those connections. And we have so many opportunities to, know, not only while they’re on campus to start growing the idea of lifelong learning of these incredible opportunities that we can offer after you graduate and all the different ways we can have you come back and connect with our students, with our alumni, with our faculty.
there’s missed opportunities going on from institutions. Now some institutions are doing a great job with this. They create different engagement opportunities for their alumni to come back and share what they’ve learned with students, to mentor students, to create opportunities for jobs for upcoming students. So there’s so many different ways that we can leverage these.
people who have been part of our culture and part of our on-campus community for so long, but we just kind of let them go off there and we just hope that they’re gonna come back and give us money. A lot of times they may not be able to donate financially, but they can certainly donate time, they can donate their interests, their ideas, their insights that they’ve gotten from their experiences and share those. And that’s another great opportunity to reach out to
potential undergraduate students is here’s what my experience at the university helped me do in my life and helped me attain in my life. So many connections, so many opportunities that just kind of float away from so many institutions.
Douglas Burdett (1:31:58)
Yeah.
Let me just read this one quote from Mark Schaeffer because his book Belonging to the Brand, which was on the Marketing Book podcast, not to brag, but I think the subtitle of that book was something like, the only marketing left. But he wrote, this is so important. This is so important. Once people subscribe to your content in a virtual way, they are opting into you. They are saying, I believe in you. I love what you are doing. I want to learn more. It’s okay for you to market to me.
Unfortunately, that is where most universities stop. They do not go to that extra level, which is community, the ultimate emotional connection. Not only do people connect to the brand, they also connect to each other. And the research suggests that bond, that bond is even stronger. The strategy in a community is not building the connection to the brand. It’s building the connection to each other. Because if you get people to become friends, collaborate, co-create, and work together on things in a community, they are never going to leave you.
They are never going to leave that community. They literally belong to the brand. That is just such an overlooked strategy. It could be the biggest idea for universities because there is so much emotion and passion inherently built into the brand. So the last chapter was about predictions. Really interesting. And not one bit of that final chapter had anything that Austin Powers predicted.
for the future, which is that we’ll all have flying cars, entire meals will come in pill form, and the world would be ruled by damn dirty apes. one thing that you quoted, again, some of the authors that I’ve mentioned and number of these higher ed folks, you wrote, we are at the beginning of a new era in higher education where the power of content marketing, storytelling, and technology will drive the survival and success of institutions, especially smaller ones. And then
you go on much further, there’s some, the chapter is, that final chapter might help people finally wake up if chapter five didn’t do that for them, but I think it’ll also inspire folks about the possibilities. So Brian, if readers took only one thing away from the book, what would you hope it would be?
Brian Piper (1:34:26)
that your content has value, that your content is a product. You never see a manufacturing company come out with a product and release it into market and just leave and go on and do something else. They’re always looking for ways to improve it. They’re always looking for customer feedback. They’re looking at their data. They’re analyzing the performance. They’re seeing what worked and what didn’t work. And they’re tweaking and adjusting and massaging it. And then
figuring out what the next version of that is gonna be like. So we need to start thinking of our content as a product, as having value and realizing that all that content that we have and that we’ve created can be reused and repurposed. And it can inform our decisions about what new content we should be creating.
Douglas Burdett (1:35:15)
It’s easy to say, so difficult for organizations to do. But again, like we talked about earlier, is it something that people would say thank you for? Is it a value? And if it went away, would they notice? That’s how you’re in the sweet spot. Well, let’s give the listener or the viewer something to do. Let’s give them some homework, as they say in higher ed. What is one thing a listener could do today to put in action?
Brian Piper (1:35:19)
So difficult.
Right.
That’s right.
Douglas Burdett (1:35:43)
just one idea from your book to kind of get them thinking in the right direction.
Brian Piper (1:35:48)
The next time you’re creating content, whatever kind of content you’re creating, ask, what? So what? Does this help my audience? Does this add value? Is this solving a problem or answering a question? Why am I spending my time writing this? What’s it going to accomplish? That’s what I did as I was going through this book. I was writing each part of it and looking back at it going, so what? Who cares? Who’s this going to help?
Douglas Burdett (1:36:18)
Yeah.
Brian Piper (1:36:18)
and then
sometimes just deleting it and writing it again. But that’s right, absolutely. Yes, yes.
Douglas Burdett (1:36:22)
Kill your darlings as Ann Handley would say.
Well, you know, that also brings to mind the so what test. That’s gold, folks. The so what test also helps when I’m just envisioning a poor marketing person, you know, we’re doing everything they can, probably doing as good a job as they can at university and they’re getting endless requests for something. Maybe you don’t want to say so what.
But if you could just sort of embed that into your head so that you can ask a few follow-up questions, that’s so valuable. Like they say, well, we want to get the word out. Really? Who do we want to reach? Just.
Brian Piper (1:37:03)
Yeah, and that
did that actually did come from one of Ann Handley’s newsletters was the so what question, you know, so that’s what you need to think about when you’re writing or creating video or doing a podcast.
Douglas Burdett (1:37:09)
Ugh.
Yeah, yeah. and she wrote she wrote a book that
she wrote a book called Everybody Writes, which he probably has on his desk.
Brian Piper (1:37:23)
to two copies of it, or both editions.
Douglas Burdett (1:37:24)
Yeah, the second
edition came out rather recently and that book was so I’ve recommended it so many times I’ve given it to folks and she the first I read the first edition years ago like in 2014 I think but ever since then whenever I was writing something I felt like she was sitting there with me going you’re doing a great job don’t believe what that asshole seventh grade English teacher told you you can write so anyway
Brian Piper (1:37:33)
Yeah, so good.
Ha ha.
I have
a quote right here taped to my monitor. Be an amateur. Not everything you do has to be good, especially at first and handily. So yeah.
Douglas Burdett (1:38:02)
one of my favorites that I had by my desk was hers, which was a barf up a first draft.
Brian Piper (1:38:10)
Good job.
Douglas Burdett (1:38:11)
Or what was it? The Hemingway, I think said, write drunk, edit sober, but just get it out there. Throw that clay on the potter’s wheel and get started. yeah. Well, for the audience, if you’d like to ask Brian a question about any challenges you’re currently facing, get in touch. Just remember Brian W. Piper. So his website is Brian W. Piper. Brian Piper is a musician who has that site.
Brian Piper (1:38:16)
That’s right.
Right? That’s right.
Douglas Burdett (1:38:39)
But at Brian W. Piper, you can sign up for his weekly newsletter about content marketing. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Brian W. Piper, after all the LinkedIn stuff. And on X, he’s at Brian W. Piper. The book is Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education, How to Connect with Students, Alumni, Faculty, Staff, and Others to Build Trust and Reach Your Institutional Goals. The author is Brian W. Piper. Brian, thank you for the opportunity to come out of retirement and interview you about your excellent book.
Brian Piper (1:39:11)
Doug, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this and how funny it is that we were both stationed at the same small little army base in Kitzingen, Germany so many years ago at different times. Rock of the Marne.
Douglas Burdett (1:39:22)
Yes, that’s right. That is amazing.
Rock of the Marne.
Brian Piper (1:39:29)
Thanks so much, Douglas.
Douglas Burdett (1:39:31)
So your turn.