A bit over a year ago, I made a financial bet against Google.
I bought a put option that would make good money if the share price of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) dropped.
Alas, the share kept rising and a few days ago, the put option expired with zero value.
What was I thinking at the time?
- I saw that generative AI improved search so much that people would find answers right there and then.
- Google would be compelled to provide such AI-style answers in their search result pages (which they are indeed increasingly doing with AI overviews)
- That would erode their ad revenue (why click on an ad if the answer is right there?)
I still believe that what Google is doing in the advertising side is short term. They are eroding the quality of their search results and leaving an opening for competitors.
So far, Google’s ad revenue hasn’t dropped. My timing was off, my option expired worthless.
Fortunately, my bet on Google’s drop was just a small one. When investing, even when I think what I’m doing is a “sure thing”, I always consider the possibility that I may be wrong.
Is your marketing diversified?
Let’s look at your marketing channels as if it’s an investment portfolio.
What if people switched away from Google, or your visibility dropped dramatically?
What else are you doing then to attract prospective students?
When you’ve found something that works, it makes sense to double down on it.
But you can’t depend on just one channel, no matter how successful.
Especially in this environment.
What to do?
Ask yourself where your current students come from.
How did they first find out about you?
This doesn’t need to be a detailed exercise in attribution.
Just rough percentages will do.
Then ask yourself: what would I do if my biggest source of new students went to zero?
Not that it’s likely that it will happen this abruptly. But it’s a good way to think things through.
If one or two channels are really dominant, don’t make any abrupt changes.
They’re probably working quite well for you.
But eke out some time and budget to start experimenting with other sources. Develop a back-up option that you could expand if things changed abruptly. Just having the option will make sure you sleep much better.
A practical example
A cooking school I worked with had the opportunity to work with a third party that could get their students 100% government funding. They asked the school to put a link on their website, so students could click through to this organisation’s website and apply there.
What we did instead: We put up a page explaining the grant and added a short form with an autoresponder that told people to apply through the partner’s website. This way, the school collected an average of 10 email addresses a day.
After several months, the school had a falling out with the partner and they realised they could be approved for funded courses directly. All they had to do at that time, was to email to the list, which had grown to be quite considerable!
This goes to say, one of the easiest ways to get started diversifying is to build a mailing list of interested prospective students and keep it warm by emailing it regularly.
Then, when your Google / Meta / TikTok campaigns suddenly don’t work any more, or like Dutch institutions, you aren’t allowed to spend on them, you’ll still have the list. And that will buy you some time to figure out what to do next.
That’s all for this Field Note
This article first appeared as a Field Note
In the Field Notes, I share one practical idea you can try on your site or in your campaigns. Every two weeks. Get it in your inbox by signing up here.
