– Surefire is an industry-leading mortgage marketing automation and creative content solution

– Features geared specifically toward brokers give lenders everything they need to drive wholesale division growth

– Surefire’s new broker portal lets brokers and other third-party originators (TPOs) easily access white-labeled marketing collateral from their wholesale partners for distribution to customers and prospects

– Wholesale lenders can better manage their TPOs and create value-added marketing materials at scale that their brokers can use to connect with customers and promote their individual brand

– By enhancing its contact management system with a new, smart broker assignment feature, Surefire also makes it easier for wholesale account executives to manage brokers within their assigned territories

To help improve marketing performance for mortgage lenders’ wholesale divisions, Black Knight, Inc. (announced the launch of a new broker portal and a smart broker assignment capability within Surefire, its industry-leading customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation software.

Marketing Technology News: AX Semantics Wins Gold for Best Business Technology Solution – AI and Machine Learning in the…

Surefire is the mortgage lending industry’s most widely used marketing automation and creative content solution. From individuals to enterprise lenders, Surefire helps thousands of mortgage professionals win new customers, earn repeat business and gain referrals. With intuitive, automated workflows and award-winning content of interest to borrowers, mortgage professionals can effortlessly maintain and deepen their emotional connections with clients. Surefire’s new broker portal makes it easy for brokers and other third-party originators (TPOs) to access white-labeled marketing collateral from their wholesale partners for distribution to their customers and prospects. The portal now features a new tool that gives TPOs real-time access to deal status and contact data, so they can stay informed as brokered loans progress from application to underwriting to clear-to-close.

“For a long time, mortgage lenders have looked for an efficient way to deliver marketing support to their wholesale operations while honoring their broker partners’ preference to keep individual branding front and center,” said Rich Gagliano, president, Origination Technologies, Black Knight. “Our new Surefire broker portal empowers wholesale lenders to better manage their TPOs and create impactful marketing materials at scale that their brokers can use to connect with customers and promote their individual brand.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Ajay Khanna, Chief Marketing Officer at Explorium

In addition, Surefire has enhanced its contact management system with a smart broker assignment feature. This new capability makes it easier for wholesale account executives to group and manage brokers within their assigned territories.

“Surefire has a well-established reputation as the marketing engine that drives retail and consumer-direct mortgage operations,” Gagliano continued. “We are pleased to now offer a well-rounded set of features geared specifically toward brokers that gives lenders everything they need to drive wholesale division growth.”

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Verisk’s artificial intelligence analyzes unstructured data and ratings in Yelp reviews to provide insurers with a more holistic assessment of businesses

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many small businesses to pivot or expand. As a result, new insurance coverage needs have emerged. To help insurers serve the changing marketplace, Verisk , a leading global data analytics provider, is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and image analytics to generate insights from more than 200 million reviews on Yelp, the company that connects people with great local businesses.

Verisk is using AI to analyze unstructured data in Yelp reviews, including images that might indicate how a business has evolved. Insurers can use these insights to inform discussions about coverage with potential customers, see how employees are mitigating risks and make underwriting decisions with greater speed and precision.

Marketing Technology News: Sensibill Named a Top Growing Company by The Globe and Mail for the Second Consecutive Year

“Finding current and robust information online to underwrite small commercial insurance can take significant time and effort,” said Tracey Waller, director of small commercial underwriting at Verisk. “By working directly with Yelp, Verisk is augmenting its high-quality and consistent analytics on millions of small businesses with information that is up-to-date, organized and easy to digest.”

Through Yelp, Verisk can seamlessly integrate millions of data points, including Yelp’s trusted reviews and images in real-time, which supports Verisk’s ongoing effort to help insurers accelerate their digital transformations and win the race to zero questions on insurance applications. Yelp’s platform, which enables consumers to discover, connect, and transact with millions of local businesses of all sizes, provides a powerful source of data for insurers that’s constantly being updated.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Phil Gray, Chief Innovation Officer at Interactions LLC

“At Yelp, we’re committed to helping businesses grow and thrive,” said David McKie, Yelp’s vice president, business development and data licensing. “Using Yelp’s trusted data on local business, Verisk’s AI technology can now help businesses more quickly and easily obtain the insurance coverage they need.”

The Yelp data will be integrated into LightSpeed Small Commercial, a Verisk solution that leverages robust data and analytics to automate underwriting, improve customer and agent experiences, and ultimately reach the finish line in the “race to zero” questions on small commercial insurance applications.

Verisk creates innovative solutions by applying scientific methods to massive volumes of data—from information about properties and communities to fraud, catastrophe, weather, consumer behavior as well as societal and environmental risks. Complemented with Verisk’s deep domain expertise, the company is able to combine data, analytics and decision-support platforms into comprehensive, industry-leading solutions.

Marketing Technology News: Audience Targeting in Local Media Markets: More Than a Sum of Its Parts

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FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) has faced a series of hurdles over the last few months, from a U.K. regulatory requirement that Google not discriminate against its rivals in favor of its own advertising business to internal discussions revealing that a consensus on tracking cohorts (as opposed to, say, topics) has yet to be reached.

Google had already backed up the deprecation of third-party cookies until 2023, but now the testing of FLoC itself — Google’s favored alternative which would track user behavior at cohort rather than individual level — is facing delays.

Google’s monthly Privacy Sandbox timeline update indicates that the company will push back FLoC testing from Q4 2021 (announced in July) to Q1 2022. Testing of FLEDGE, the company’s remarketing solution designed so that third parties cannot track user behavior across sites, is being delayed to Q1 2022 as well.

Read next: Does Google’s FLoC alternative to third-party cookies make sense?

The Privacy Sandbox timeline, as of October 1, 2021.

The “Discussion” period, originally set to end in Q3 2021, in which “technologies and their prototypes are discussed in forums such as GitHub or W3C groups,” has been extended through to the end of Q4 2021. This also has an impact on when testing is estimated to end, pushing that back from the end of Q2 to the end of Q3 2022.

What’s more, these changes may have a knockin effect on the deadline for phasing out support for third-party cookies. Google has eliminated the “Ready for adoption” stage from the FLoC and FLEDGE parts of the timeline and another delay may mean a shorter testing period or that Google will have to push back its planned Stage 1 period (the green column in the table above, expected to last from Q4 2022 through to the end of Q2 2023). At some point during Stage 1, the company will announce a new timeline that lowers third-party cookies’ “Time to Live”.

Why we care. With enormous concern among advertisers and publishers that the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome will crush their ability to target users with relevant ads, comes an urgency to see whether FLoC is a workable alternative (as well as whether Google, despite the U.K. regulator’s warning, will try to implement FLoC as a walled garden).

Getting early answers to these questions would be welcome, but right now FLoC-related deadlines seem constantly to be receding.

Read next: How FLoC poses a threat to identity solutions and advertisers

Additional reporting by George Nguyen.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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The added pressures of the pandemic had marketers taking a hard look at the value in their technology stacks and weighing the benefits of new features. 

“Over the last 18 months, you know during this COVID time, a lot of organizations had their budgets frozen or were asked to reduce costs in marketing,” said Anita Brearton, CEO of tech management platform CabinetM. “So there was a lot of analysis happening around the tech stack.”

With 70 percent of the companies we surveyed having made some kind of marketing technology replacement in the last year, we asked Brearton to share some thoughts about the findings of the MarTech Replacement Survey at our recent MarTech conference.

“They have the opportunity to assess new products, and they find that they get more features for the same or less money then that’s a motivator to move forward,” Brearton said.

Here were some other considerations weighing heavily on organizations.

Scale

As organizations, or their marketing operations, continue to grow in scale, they have to look at other options.

“They tap out on what is probably a simpler, smaller platform and need to go to a bigger platform,” said Brearton. “And so we see that a lot.”

It’s less likely that a business will replace a big system that is integrated into so many marketing functions.

“That’s fairly unusual because those big systems cost a lot of money, and they require a lot of skill to operate them,” Brearton said. “So there’s a cost in terms of employee skills when replacing them, particularly in marketing automation. And then those marketing automation platforms are connected to so many other platforms.”

Because of the work involved in the replacement of a larger hub system, like the kind that runs marketing automation, often these replacements are planned a year or more in advance.

Anchor platforms

Especially when budgets are tight, it’s taxing and potentially risky to replace an “anchor” system that’s foundational to marketing strategies and operations.

This includes marketing automation, email automation systems, CDPs and the CRM, according to Brearton.

“Those are the central part of everybody’s tech stack,” she said.

CRM

Having said that, Brearton shared that CabinetM did replace their CRM during this time period. This helped the company streamline some of their automation.

“We were able to combine our marketing automation and CRM and do a lot more,” she said. “So I do think it’s a functionality issue. It’s a scaling issue.”

As a consulting tool for other marketers, this process has led CabinetM to rethink the CRM category, taking into account all players that have entered the scene.

“We’re rationalizing the CRM category on Cabinet M,” said Brearton. “At the moment there are hundreds of platforms in that category. It’s extraordinary, so I have to imagine that the sales people from all those platforms are busy knocking on doors and are finding some takers.”

Workflow and events tools

The popularity of adding workflow and events management tools to many stacks reaffirmed what many of us (including MarTech and the evolution of our virtual conferences) have experienced in the last 18 months.

In order for real work to be done virtually, organizations are upgrading their workflow platforms.

“I’m really encouraged to see this focus on workflow because I think it’s been too easy to rely on spreadsheets,” said Brearton. “And when you’re working remotely, that doesn’t give you the picture of the tasks and the flow of the tasks. So, I’m glad to see that people are adopting different workflow tools.”

E-commerce updates

For organizations that had an e-commerce business model before the pandemic, it would be a big ask for them to replace their core platform, especially when business through that channel was ramping up. But this didn’t mean that marketers weren’t considering ways to boost performance, experience and services for their e-commerce customers.

“I think people are not necessarily replacing their core e-commerce platform,” Brearton said. “But my guess is that they’re adding and swapping out all sorts of things that sit around it to improve their connection with customers, to improve personalization, or to enhanced loyalty and engagement.”

She added, “I think if somebody was answering a black and white question, did you replace your ecommerce system, they would be likely to say no. But if they were asked, did you replace e-commerce tools, you might have gotten a different answer there.”

Data & CDPs

Implementing a CDP is still a big project, especially for smaller organizations. With all the other fires to put out, this might not have been something high on a lot of lists. In many cases, orgs are using other anchor platforms for the time being.

“There’s the classic CDP platform which is storing all of the customer information and cleansing it and appending it and serving as a single source of truth,” said Brearton. “Other companies use one or more of their anchor platforms that serve that purpose. So a marketing automation platform could, for some companies, serve that purpose.”

She added, “We do see adoption of CDPs. We do believe it’s jumped over the chasm from marketing hype to actual adoption, and I think the numbers (for CDP) adoption are higher for bigger companies.”

Watch the full presentation from our MarTech conference here.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.

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WASHINGTON — It was the personalized emails that got Jadyn Turner to consider Catholic University when she was choosing a college. 

She still has them in her phone, along with a photo of herself holding up the Catholic University banner that came in the mail. Those and other inducements lured her to an open house at the business school, where she’s now majoring in entrepreneurship.

Even though marketing played a central role in her decision, however, Turner was surprised to learn the university, founded by U.S. Catholic bishops, is spending $5 million on a marketing and branding campaign and hiring five new marketing employees.

Jadyn Turner a student at Catholic University, was drawn there in part by aggressive marketing. Still, she says she was surprised to learn the university is spending $5 million on a new marketing and branding campaign. Credit: Noah Willman for The Hechinger Report

“Five million dollars — that’s a lot,” said Turner, who hopes to go into nonprofit work, as she took a break from studying outside the student center. “I mean, wow.” Of higher education institutions advertising, she said: “I didn’t know that was a thing”

In fact, the sum is small compared to what other colleges and universities are investing in advertising, marketing and promotion, which has been steadily rising and is on track this year to be nearly double what it was last year.

Among the reasons are a steep ongoing decline in enrollment, made worse by the pandemic, and increasing competition from online providers and others.

“Private schools in particular are acutely conscious of the demographics in this country. They’re competing for students, and marketing is how you have to do that.”

John Garvey, president, Catholic University

“Part of it is necessity and part of it is adapting to circumstances,” said Catholic University’s blunt-spoken president, John Garvey, in his office near the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with which the university shares its campus. Schools like his “are acutely conscious of the demographics in this country. They’re competing for students, and marketing is how you have to do that.”

America’s total number of students has declined by an unprecedented 2.6 million, or 13 percent, over the last decade. Another drop of 15 percent is projected, beginning in the mid-2020s, in the number of prospective college students graduating from high schools.

Before this downturn began, said Garvey, “there were more kids every year and people had the money to pay for college. And that’s no longer true.”

The marketing and advertising boom is also a response to increasing public skepticism about the need to go to college in the first place, said Elizabeth Johnson, chair of the higher education marketing agency SimpsonScarborough.

Related: Colleges face reckoning as plummeting birthrate worsens enrollment declines

“This anti-college narrative has been building, and that’s something [universities and colleges] have to market against,” Johnson said.

A Gallup poll found that the proportion of Americans who consider college to be very important had fallen from 70 percent in 2013 to 51 percent by 2019. And that was before the shutdowns and confusion of the Covid-19 pandemic, which other surveys show has further damaged public confidence.

Spending on marketing by universities and colleges is hard to track; it’s often spread among many departments, including student recruiting, athletics and fundraising, and not required to be disclosed.

Catholic University President John Garvey. Private universities “are competing for students, and marketing is how you have to do that,” Garvey says. Credit: Noah Willman for The Hechinger Report

A SimpsonScarborough survey, however, found that institutions spend between $429 and $623 per enrolled student, per year, on marketing.

As for advertising, colleges collectively spent $2 billion on it in 2018 and $2.2 billion in 2019, according to the brand consulting company Kantar, which monitors this. While the total declined at the peak of Covid-19, it nearly doubled in the first quarter this year compared to the same period last year, to $870 million. While higher education advertising has historically been dominated by for-profit providers such as the University of Phoenix, spending by those schools began to flatten out or fall in the mid-2010s while advertising spending by public and private nonprofit universities began to rise, another analysis, by the Educational Marketing Group, found.

Colleges and universities spend between $429 and $623 per enrolled student, per year, on marketing.

“Some people may be doing it with reluctance, but they’re definitely understanding that this is something that has to be happening now,” said Fox Troilo, managing director and head of higher education at the consulting firm Hanover Research.

Among the biggest players are online giants including the nonprofit Southern New Hampshire University, which tax documents show spent $144 million on advertising and promotion in 2019. Nonprofit Western Governors University spent $127 million that year. The University of Maryland Global Campus announced in 2019 that it would spend $500 million on marketing over the following six years, half of it on digital advertising.

But other private nonprofits, including some that are highly selective, are also channeling tens of millions into advertising. Johns Hopkins reported spending $29.6 million in one year; New York University, $28.5 million; the University of Pennsylvania, $25.7 million; Northwestern, $25.6 million; the University of Miami, $23.2 million; Columbia, $13.2 million; Boston University, $12.7 million; Georgetown, $11.6 million; and Stanford, $10.3 million. The figures are from 2018 or 2019, whichever was the most recent tax year for which the institutions have provided documents.

Related: Poll: Nearly half of parents don’t want their kids to go straight to a four-year college

A spokesman for BU said the money went to promote online and continuing education, fundraising and events. Columbia advertised executive education, some degree programs, fundraising, hospital services, employee recruitment and athletics, a spokesman said. A Stanford spokesman said the advertising was for continuing and executive education, new hybrid graduate degrees and seven new graduate certificates. The other universities did not respond when asked why and on what they spent those dollars.

Kean University in New Jersey announced in September that it was becoming an “official education partner” of the New York Jets, citing the marketing advantages of the deal. A spokeswoman would not disclose details of the arrangement but the contract — which called for the financial terms to be kept secret but was obtained by The Hechinger Report through a public-records request — shows the public university is paying the Jets $250,000 a year for three years, with the option of a two-year extension at an additional $250,000 a year.

Some student advocates say this money could instead be spent on such things as support services.

Catholic University was founded by U.S. Catholic bishops. It has announced a $5 million revamp of its marketing and branding. Credit: Noah Willman for The Hechinger Report

“They could probably use those resources in another way — financial aid, lowering student-to-faculty ratio, adding course sections so students didn’t wait on waitlists,” said Stephanie Hall, senior fellow at the progressive think tank The Century Foundation.

These advocates also raise concerns about the targets of this marketing — often wealthier students who can afford to pay at least some of the tuition, as opposed to promising lower-income prospects who are often racial and ethnic minorities.

“If you need full-paying students, you are going to market to those students,” Hall said.

But Garvey, at Catholic University, said there’s a simple and critical reason universities need to spend money on marketing. “It’s essential to the financial health of the university that we attract students to come here,” he said.

“They could probably use those resources in another way — financial aid, lowering student-to-faculty ratio, adding course sections so students didn’t wait on waitlists.”

Stephanie Hall, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Meanwhile, at a time of renewed emphasis on diversity and equity, 61 percent of chief marketing and communications officers in higher education are male and 93 percent are white, according to the executive search firm Russell Reynolds.

“I would be nervous if I were a president of a university, and I’ve said publicly that our goal is to increase access, and my marketing staff is 61 percent male and 93 percent white,” Hall said.

Several bills in Congress, including the 2020 College Affordability Act, have proposed requiring colleges to report what they spend on marketing and advertising or ban them from using federal money for marketing if they fall below a minimum amount of spending on instruction. So far the legislation has not gone anywhere.

Another impact of Covid is that student recruiters have been unable to travel, and some universities moved the money they usually spend visiting high schools into digital media and other kinds of advertising, said Ardis Kardiu, CEO and founder of the higher education admissions marketing firm Element451; he said his business has doubled since before the pandemic.

Related: Beer making for credit: Liberal arts colleges add career tech

Because fewer students took the SAT and ACT during Covid, colleges lost an easy route to capturing their names and contact information. So they’re spending more on marketing technology from firms like Kardiu’s that can track and target prospective applicants by, for example, monitoring what pages of an institution’s website users checked out, in much the same way consumers suddenly start seeing ads for products they searched on Amazon.  

It’s a huge turnaround from a time when administrators hesitated to talk about marketing, never mind throwing around terms such as “earned media” and “brand spend” and coming up with advertising slogan-style taglines (“A journey to excellence,” “A foundation for life,” “Be the change,” “Dream big”). A story about higher education marketing in 2006 was titled “The M Word.”  

“Say the word ‘marketing’ and you could hear faculty members gasp,” T. R. Straub, executive search and assessment consultant at Russell Reynolds, recalled of those days.

“Fifteen years ago, it was akin to blasphemy,” said Greg O’Brien, chief growth officer of the enrollment consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz.

Today, however, 56 percent of university chief marketing officers serve at their university’s executive level and 43 percent report directly to presidents, SimpsonScarborough found. They not only market the institutions but apply research to help devise strategies, set prices and decide which programs to beef up or strip down.

Colleges collectively spent $2 billion on advertising in 2018 and $2.2 billion in 2019.

It’s these senior marketers who “are seeing the conversation on social media, and they’re understanding the user analytics and what’s happening on your website or in your digital communications,” said Angela Polec, vice president of enrollment, marketing and communications at La Salle University (“Explorers are never lost”). A small but growing number of chief marketing officers in higher education — 14 percent, according to a Russell Reynolds survey — come from the private sector. These include Dan Dillon, a former senior vice president at Coca Cola and chief marketing officer at Outback Steakhouse, who took the role at Arizona State University (“Innovation drives us forward”). Purdue chief marketing officer R. Ethan Braden previously was a marketing director at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

Chief marketing officers earn as much as $375,000 a year, depending on the size of the institution, and oversee an average of nine to 24 employees, SimpsonScarborough says. The American Marketing Association’s annual higher education symposium has grown from 300 participants 10 years ago to nearly 1,500 in 2019, though last year’s conference was online, and this year’s attendance is limited by Covid.

Related: How a decline in community college students is a big problem for the economy

“In five, 10, 15 years, higher education marketing will look like it looks at GE,” said Bill Faust, senior partner and chief strategy officer of the marketing firm Ologie, whose higher education clients include Stanford, Penn, Smith, Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon.

Braden, at Purdue, has 65 people serving under him, he said, including 13 hired during the pandemic, and estimated that the university has another 250 employees campuswide in marketing or communications roles.

During the pandemic, Purdue doubled down on its tagline (“Persistent innovation. Together”), attracted 90,000 new social media followers and saw a 58 percent increase overall in social media engagement, the university says. It was named the 2020 higher education marketing team of the year by the American Marketing Association; Braden won marketer of the year.

“Institutions vary in terms of their embrace of the ‘M’ word or the ‘B’ word [for “branding”] but generally speaking, you’re seeing a maturation of marketing and particularly brand management in higher ed,” Braden said.

This is no longer a luxury for colleges and universities, administrators said. That declining enrollment means prospective students enjoy a buyer’s market, and Braden likened the number of choices they have to “the yogurt aisle in a French grocery store.”

Or, as Faust puts it, “There’s just no way you can have an industry this big that keeps just saying, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ ”

Karna Lozoya, Catholic University’s vice president for university communications. “We have to really reach out to students and make our case,” Lozoya says. Credit: Noah Willman for The Hechinger Report

This is a particular issue for small liberal arts colleges, which are under worsening enrollment and financial pressure.

“For a lot of smaller institutions, it’s taken a while to get to this point. But people are beginning to understand the necessity” of marketing, said Kristen Lainsbury, vice president for marketing and communications at Earlham College, which has been running annual deficits and suffered budget cuts and layoffs when enrollment dropped off earlier in the pandemic.

“For the most part, we felt like we didn’t really have to do marketing, and a few years back that all changed,” said Lainsbury, who started in the job in February. “We saw that our competition was really investing in digital marketing in particular, and we realized if we didn’t start investing in that way, we wouldn’t be part of the conversation.”

Now Earlham (“Education for good”) is advertising on social media and online.

Done well, marketing “provides a return that makes the institution healthier,” said Teresa Flannery, former chief marketing and communications officer at Stony Brook University and the University of Maryland (“Fear the turtle”) and author of “How to Market a University.” And “there’s never been a better time for higher education marketing professionals to prove their value.”

Not everyone can afford to spend this kind of money. At community colleges, for example, “if you look at it in terms of dollars, we are grossly outspent,” said Debra McGaughey, director of communication services at Houston Community College (“For Everyone, Anytime, Any Way”) and president of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, which represents marketing directors at community and technical colleges.

Community colleges are trying to be more strategic, shifting their limited resources from advertising on billboards and bus shelters to using online and direct mail, on the grounds that many of their prospective students have been stuck at home and not on roads or buses.

Related: Racial gaps in college degrees are widening, just when states need them to narrow

“If we’re not marketing, we’re just not going to make it. It’s as integral as teaching and learning in the classroom,” McGaughey said. “But we cannot compete with an institution spending millions on national campaigns. We have to work smarter.”

Catholic University’s vice president for university communications, Karna Lozoya, went to a higher education marketing conference to learn about what other colleges were doing.

Instead, she said, “what I realized was that marketing was new to the landscape. A lot of these institutions are more than 100 years old, and they still hadn’t figured out how to do communications.”

The world has changed, Lozoya said.

“We’re in a different era right now,” she said. “We have to really reach out to students and make our case.”

This story about higher education marketing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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ROSEVILLE, Calif., Sept. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — The Exception Realty today announced its partnership with Side, the only real estate technology company that exclusively partners with high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages to transform them into market-leading boutique brands and businesses. The alliance will ensure that The Exception Realty, a powerhouse boutique real estate firm that tailors service to each client, is powered by the most advanced platform in the industry.

Andrea Florez is a motivational leader and the founder of The Exception Realty. Florez started in the construction industry in 2003, when she founded a company with her husband. Compounding this related work history, Florez’s experience of buying her first home inspired her to become a real estate agent in 2011. She has since fostered a passion for guiding and encouraging others to achieve the dream of homeownership, and has enhanced her service excellence with an e-PRO® certification and a Military Relocation Professional designation.

The Exception Realty serves buyers and sellers of all backgrounds in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, and Yolo counties, centering on Citrus Heights, Granite Bay, Orangevale Rocklin, and Roseville. Regardless of clients’ goals, the team focuses on providing individualized support to each of its clients. As a result, The Exception Realty agents ensure their clients feel informed, confident, and comfortable at each step of every transaction.

Partnering with Side will ensure The Exception Realty remains on the cutting edge of the evolving real estate market while continuing to deliver premium services to its clients. Side works behind the scenes, supporting The Exception Realty with a one-of-a-kind brokerage platform that includes proprietary technology, transaction management, branding and marketing services, public relations, legal support, lead generation, vendor management, infrastructure solutions, and more. Additionally, The Exception Realty will join an exclusive group of Side partners, tapping into an expansive network from coast to coast.

“At The Exception Realty, we are reinventing and streamlining client support,” said Florez. “Technology and social media offer us more opportunities to customize our services for each client and exponentially expand the reach of our marketing efforts. This makes Side a natural partner for us, and we will benefit from its state-of-the-art marketing, technology, administrative, and legal services.”

Side is led by experienced industry professionals and world-class engineers who develop technology designed to improve agent productivity and enhance the client experience. Based on its belief that homeownership is a fundamental human right, Side is on a mission to improve the public good by providing top-performing real estate agents, teams, and indie brokerages with the best system, support, service, experience, and results.

About The Exception Realty

The Exception Realty is a full-service real estate firm serving the California counties of Placer and Sacramento. Because it nurtures a diverse clientele — including first-time and move-up buyers, relocating military personnel, and empty nesters — the team provides custom services to each buyer and seller. The Exception Realty agents listen to each client, are compassionate about their needs and concerns, and help them make educated decisions without stress. In the process, they strive to create lifelong relationships. For more information, visit http://www.theexceptionrealty.com.

About Side

Side transforms high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages into successful businesses and boutique brands that are 100% agent-owned. Side exclusively partners with the best agents, empowering them with proprietary technology and a premier support team so they can be more productive, grow their business, and focus on serving their clients. Side is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.sideinc.com.

Media Contact

Side Marketing, Side, 415.525.4913, side.marketing@sideinc.com

 

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Tomer Tagrin, CEO at Yotpo, said: “This new platform partnership is a significant milestone in our company journey, in our longstanding relationship with Shopify, and in service to our customers. With the last year’s addition of SMS marketing to the Yotpo platform, we now have five cutting-edge products available to Shopify merchants. We look forward to working even more closely with Shopify to provide smarter, more connected experiences that create real value for our mutual customers.

“Our two companies share a common belief that, for the future of commerce to thrive, merchants must be able to own direct relationships with their customers. This platform partnership directly responds to the enormous amount of time and energy merchants currently are required to spend competing for customer attention. Through deeper integration between our two technologies, Yotpo and Shopify are working together to innovate on the marketing tech stack and dramatically recode the infrastructure of eCommerce.”

Brandon Chu, VP Product Acceleration at Shopify, added: “Yotpo is a shining example of what is possible in the Shopify Ecosystem of partners and developers. We have watched the team deliver incredible value to merchants and have admired their tenacity and passion for building a better version of eCommerce where independent brands own relationships with their customers. Their marketing technology solutions have become trusted by thousands of merchants, and we are thrilled to invest in their growth and create even more impact, together.

“Our hope is that Yotpo’s story, and our strategic partnership, demonstrates to our ecosystem that there is no limit to the size of impact you can have on our platform. As you reach scale, Shopify wants to build a product alliance with you, for the betterment of merchants, forever.”

Yotpo is one of the greatest success stories of the Shopify Ecosystem, a community of developers and partners who make apps that support 1.7M+ merchants. Yotpo’s mission is to help merchants thoughtfully and intentionally strengthen customer relationships with innovative features available through products for SMS Marketing, Loyalty, Referrals, Reviews, and Visual UGC. Mutual customers for Yotpo and Shopify include Steve Madden, Princess Polly, Brooklinen, ThirdLove, UNTUCKit, Chubbies, Sol de Janeiro, Alkaline Herb Shop and Parks Project.

To elaborate on the news and further the discussion on the opportunities this relationship unlocks for merchants and other partners, Yotpo is hosting a virtual industry event on September 14, 2021. To register, visit the event site.

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It’s much more than hyperbole to say that we have embarked on a new phase of customer loyalty. It has become a reality that is a component of digital transformation.

Consumers are evidencing fresh preferences for how they investigate products, gather information about them, and ultimately make purchase decisions. Not surprisingly, retailers are re-thinking their options to connect with their customers, and marketing technology (MarTech) is inspiring all sorts of new approaches as we step into the future.

The options for marketers to consider in the MarTech world are expanding at an equally rapid pace as consumer behavior changes. Furthermore, the breadth of technology available can make a marketing team dizzy from so much choice.

We’ve been on a mission lately to unpack what digital transformation means to a business and have been seeking out people offering real solutions to notable clients to get a better understanding of the topic.

That’s why we lined up an interview with Anthony Aguiar, VP of Sales & Business Development, Snipp. Anthony has over 20 years experience in the MarTech space.

Snipp’s MarTech solution is mobile-based and centered around receipt scanning. The solution has multiple applications for multi-channel engagement and loyalty, adding value to fully developed loyalty programs while powering shorter term campaigns and specific product initiatives.

In this short but powerful conversation, we talk about these highlights and a bit more:

• How would you summarize the changes taking place in MarTech today?

• We’ve heard of zero party data. What’s zero party receipt data?

• How are you able to build a comprehensive basket analysis from a simple receipt?

• CPG’s have always wrestled with connecting the dots on “who” buys their products. Is there finally a solution that can close the gap?

Anthony is visionary in the way he describes the future of MarTech, and with a client base that includes Starbucks, Kellogg’s, L’Oréal, Lancôme, Red Bull, Bayer, Nestle, Graco, Under Armour and others, his point of view holds weight.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

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When it comes to business growth, your employees are a very powerful lever. Startup companies and their founders have become obsessed with building growth teams, defined as a small team of employees with a fanatical focus on growth goals. Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, authors of the book “Hacking Growth,” describe a growth team as a cross-functional and collaborative team made of experts not just in marketing and sales but also analytics, technology and product management.

The concept of a growth team, while frequently used in the tech startup world, may seem like a stretch for the green industry. But the basics of building a growth team can be applied to any organization and any group of employees, whether they be software developers or landscape contractors.

Here are five steps to build your own growth team to help your company thrive:

1. Create a foundation for growth

Building a growth team assumes you have a strategy and goals in place for growth. Without a strategy in place, you have nothing to aim at or use to frame the direction of your organization and the required skills and abilities of your team. As the old saying goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Once you have your growth strategy and goals in place, communicate those to the entire organization. Rally your team around these objectives and make sure they are clear to all the stakeholders. Employees are more engaged when they are clear on how the role they play contributes to the overall growth and success of the company.

2. Hire or develop a team for growth

When you review your growth strategy, identify what key skill sets are needed to meet these goals. Does your team currently possess the skills required to achieve your growth plans? If not, how are you going to acquire these skills? The choices are usually buy, build or borrow. You’ll either buy the talent you need through hiring; build by developing your current team and augmenting their skills, or borrow by looking outside your firm to partner with external resources, consultants or vendors to supplement these missing skills.

When evaluating your organization’s skill gap, consider both hard and soft skills. Hard skills are typically acquired through technical knowledge and are more measurable, such as certifications or qualifications. These skills provide a competitive edge and credibility for organizations looking to grow. Industry associations have a broad range of professional development opportunities to consider for multiple specialties in landscaping and irrigation.

Soft skills are harder to measure and considered more subjective. These are personal habits and traits that shape how you work, whether independently or with others. Examples of these include leadership, communication, creativity and innovation. In the past, soft skills were not considered as important as hard skills — note the terminology. However, there is compelling research that shows soft skills are now equally if not more important for growth and success in the workplace as hard skills. Furthermore, customer service depends upon strong soft skills. This can truly be a game changer for companies looking to lead in a service industry.

3. Build a growth culture

A company’s culture is defined by strongly held and widely shared beliefs that reinforce positive and negative behaviors. These are the bedrock of company culture rather than a set of principles or values hung on an office wall or posted on a website. The intersection of culture and behavior is captured in this quote by Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker, “The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”

When it comes to creating a company culture of growth, leaders need to define the behaviors that support this environment and align those behaviors with their business processes. Creativity and innovation are critical to growth. Creating a culture that fosters these values among others will empower employees to find better ways of doing things when it comes to cost and speed.

Be intentional about hiring new employees that embrace your company values and add to your culture of growth. This will help perpetuate a vibrant and authentic culture that is embodied across the organization, especially at the top.

4. Reward behaviors that foster growth

If culture is defined by the worst behaviors a company tolerates, it can be changed by rewarding the right behaviors. By consistently reinforcing growth-positive behaviors, employees will emulate these desired traits. Research shows that recognition programs are one of the top drivers of engagement. According to research by Quantum Workplace, when employees believe they will be recognized, they are 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged.

By having a growth plan with clear goals and values, it is easier to identify and reward behaviors that successfully drive growth. Creating a rewards and recognition program doesn’t have to be a million-dollar campaign. Small gestures, recognition by peers and on-the-spot bonuses can have a big impact.

5. Watch out for overload and burnout

Driving growth doesn’t mean working harder and longer hours. On the contrary, growth is often created through innovation, less waste and more efficiencies. With an increased focus on growth, employers need to keep an eye out for overload and employee burnout that can crater progress.

The myth that working longer hours leads to great productivity is just that! Studies across the gamut show that working more than 40 hours consistently isn’t more productive but reduces productivity.

Researchers at Stanford University found that the total output produced during a 60-hour week was two-thirds of what it was when 40-hour weeks were worked. Additionally, as overtime increased so did mistakes and oversights that took longer to fix.

When it comes to success stories of corporate growth and development, the headlines are often filled with flashy tales of startups with groundbreaking innovations or “moonshot” products. The reality is that any company can be a growth company by harnessing the resources at your disposal including the products, processes, marketing, technology and most importantly, the people!

Kate Kjeell is president of TalentWell, a recruiting firm that specializes in helping small and midsized businesses thrive by finding and hiring the right people. The firm’s approach can be described in three words: find, fit, flourish. She can be reached at kate@talentwellinc.com.

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