EMS Leaders Lean Into Program Promotion

September 18, 2024

Enrollment is up again in Motlow’s Emergency Management Services program (EMS). Congratulations to everyone on Director Houston Austin’s EMS team! Leadership challenged EMS to raise credit and non-credit enrollment to 300 by 2023. The final count for 2023 was 315! Last year’s count was 407. Their new goal calls for reaching 500 EMS students by 2025—and they are off to a strong start. Why does this matter? The rising water created by EMS growth is good for other programs, too.

Why is EMS enrollment growth good for other programs?

For Motlow, EMS is an excellent market penetration product. The claims we can make about EMS (largest program, fastest-growing program, high-demand career, earn a credential in as little as three months, etc.) are powerful declarations that motivate new prospects to explore more about our College—and all of our programs. Kenny Moffitt, Intake Coordinator for EMS, is on the front line of incoming phone calls generated by marketing, and he shared with EA that new student prospects often call him to learn more about ALL of Motlow programs, not just EMS. That means that enrollment growth in EMS has a halo effect on the institution as a whole (and vice versa!).

Why is increased enrollment a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) we track at Motlow?

At Motlow, we track a lot of data. Enrollment is just one of the thousands of pieces of insight we assess in our student success mission. It’s a central metric to benchmark against because so many Tennessee residents in our service area still don’t have the benefit of the advantages that come with a college education (be that credit or non-credit). We work to increase enrollment for the sake of those we must serve. The more students we enroll, the more families we reach, and the more lives we improve. So, growing enrollment is one of many measures that reflect how successful we are in meeting the needs of our service area.

Jump Campaign

In working to reach more students in need, EMS Director Houston Austin recently collaborated with External Affairs (EA) to create a unique campaign called Jump. This article is the first in a series of short stories about the momentum taking place in EMS.

The series aims to be the first of many stories featuring the many successes taking place across Motlow campuses. The goal is to share stories of momentum from one department to the other so that we can leverage great ideas an create repeated success. 

During EA’s listening phase of our collaboration with EMS, we found that much of their unit’s language centered on that readiness to act. They talked about students wanting to jump into new opportunities, graduates excited about jumping into an ambulance, staff that always jump in to help, stakeholders that want them to jump into community events, and how jumping into a problem was part of their unit’s culture, etc. That’s why a central facet of their program’s new marketing promotions features the concept of leaping forward. Thus, together, we created the Jump Campaign.

Momentum

In some Momentum Newsletter articles like this one, we want to cultivate collegewide education industry marketing dialogue. Here, we launch that effort by sharing a behind-the-scenes look at some elements of the Jump Campaign. We want to discuss what we did, explore the why behind the decisions, and identify momentum worth replicating. The aspiration is to share collaborative ideas and insights that reveal or fuel more successful momentum stories. Toward that, it’s Momentum’s honor to share with readers that EMS recently jumped on a request to participate in some A/B testing!

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is a marketing experiment that controls the variables in an advertisement or ad set to conduct measurable comparisons of two versions of promotional content to see which performs better. It’s a type of marketing randomized controlled experimentation that involves splitting a target audience and measuring the results of exposure to separate stimuli. 

How Did EMS Play Into A/B Testing? 

In the EMS A/B testing, we explored how voiceover resonance might affect video completion rates. Some of the most significant challenges in the current advertising environment are finding your target market, cutting through the noise of competing ads, and getting prospects to engage, watch, and listen to your message. For the Jump video, and TV spots, we measured success in the percentage of the video viewed through to completion.

We created spots using the same script, same visuals, same target audience, and the same media budget. The only difference in the ads was in the voiceover (VO). In one ad, we used professional talent VO. We asked Kenny Moffitt, Coordinator of EMS, to VO a second version. We aimed to assess whether prospective healthcare students would respond better to a flawless, powerful, professional voice or whether a passionate, local, authentic tone would resonate better.

Results of the EMS A/B Testing

The Jump campaign, as a whole, performed better than industry standards and yielded exciting results for our A/B tests. We were shooting for 35,000 completed views, and we got 35,460.

Drumroll, please!

The big news is that Kenny Moffitt’s voice beat out the pro!!

In full transparency, Coordinator Moffitt beat out the pro by just tenths of a point. The video completion rate for YouTube pre-roll for the professional talent VO spot was 37.21%, and the rate for Coordinator Moffitt’s VO was 37.63%. The national industry standard rate is 31.0%--so the campaign did better than the benchmark for YouTube pre-roll. The highest video completion rate industry standard for television streaming is 90%. In our campaign, the professional talent’s rate was 94.46%, and Kenny’s rate was 94.59%. So, while the difference is not statistically relevant, it is informative when creating new content. We demonstrated that passion beats perfection. Thus, all in the Motlow family join me in saying, “Hail, Kenny Moffitt!”

These numbers may seem like a small difference, but it gives us huge insight.

Here’s What EMS A/B Test Results Mean for Other Programs

The A/B testing results confirm that different prospects respond to different stimuli. Heuristically, any marketer would, of course, anticipate that different voices will have different audience impacts. Still, the neck-and-neck split between professional and amateur VO surprised our media consultants, and it tells us at least two things. First, campaigns need more than one ad set. That's a strategy that Motlow already practices. Second, we’ve established that despite the very high bar for credibility requirements in marketing a healthcare program, the authenticity of a leader-spokesperson resonates as well as or better than a professional spokesperson’s flawless delivery.

Correlating that finding to the College’s mission, we would say that:

It’s not enough to meet students where they are....

We also need to meet NEW prospects where they are, too.

We need to speak in the voice(s) that resonate most with those we need to reach.  

New student prospects do value and respond to the flawless, polished delivery of a professional voice. New student prospects also respond to the passion and authenticity of a local voice--sometimes even more so. While the market was truly evenly split on response rates to perfection vs passion for EMS, this tells us that creating dual assets merits ongoing consideration for future of all marketing efforts.