GP: What was your motivation to speak at Converge 2014?

KH: I love to talk about digital advertising and education marketing so Converge 2014 provides an ideal platform to talk with people who share those passions. I hope the insights I share will be helpful to education providers who are looking to embrace digital marketing to communicate with prospective students. I am also sure there will be many people at the conference from whom I can learn.

GP: What is your role at Google?

KH: Head of Industry in the Large Career Education sector. I manage a group of large customers and a team of account executives, managers, digital specialists and analysts who partner with our career education marketers to develop and execute innovative digital marketing strategies.

GP: What are the trends that you have seen over the past 6 months in relation to the Higher Education market?

KH: While we haven’t seen major fluctuations in demand, we are seeing more schools enter the marketplace for adult learners and some genuine innovation in schools developing their digital brands.  We also see that prospective learners are taking longer to make to their decisions, extending the research cycle and visiting more competitive websites before they apply.
While overall demand has been relatively stable we are seeing growth in program-driven interest. And we are seeing schools getting deeper into program-specific messaging.  Schools are using their site visitor insight to determine the program of interest and then using re-marketing to educate that prospective student about the benefits of their program throughout the research process.

GP: In your session you will be discussing mobile and video in Higher Education.  Are there any sound bytes that you are interested in sharing as a preview to our audience?

KH: Mobile plays an increasingly important role across all digital.  Mobile queries related to EDU were up 23% in the second quarter of this year and accounted for about one third of all search activity. According to a Google sponsored Compete data in 2013, nearly half of prospective students report using a smartphone in their research process and 1 of 4 students prefer to research via mobile.
YouTube is obviously important from a scale perspective, but the most innovative schools who are providing students with video content to address common questions.  Content needs to be authentic, not just commercial. The key is really to create and curate content to harness the collective love of your school to educate current and future students.