Keynote: Marketing Q&A
Presented by Oozle Media Speakers
Oozle Media
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Chris Linford:
Okay. All right, everybody, we are just about there. We are approaching our panel discussion of our marketing experts. You guys have had a bunch of questions in the chat. It’s not too late to get them in. Certainly during the live session of it, you can ask questions. We’ll be monitoring the chat and then also we’re doing our big giveaways after the panel discussion, so make sure you stick around to see who the winner will be of the $11,000 towards a new Oozle Media website. We also have a giveaway from Light Heart Sanders. They’re going to be giving away some Visa gift cards, so money talks.
Okay, we’re going to get into it. this next session, it’s the marketing panel level up your beauty school expert insights with Oozle Media’s leadership. You’ve heard from all of them today and we’ve been collecting your questions. Now you get your answers. Join us for an illuminating finale at the Beauty School Summit featuring a dynamic thirty-minute panel Q&A session with Oozle Media’s experience director team, and moderated by Stephanie Carter, Oozle’s COO as part of our Level Up Summit theme.
This session assembles Oozle Media’s directors to share invaluable advice and forward-thinking strategies tailored for beauty school excellence. Tapping into questions from our community will delve into advanced marketing, operational enhancements and growth tactics to help you ascend to the next level. This is your chance to interact directly with industry pioneers and unlock actionable insights that can transform your institution. If you’ve got marketing questions, this is the time to ask them. We’re going to wait for their camera to turn on.
Stephanie Carter:
Chris, can you hear us first? I’m going to get the camera going, but can you hear us okay?
Chris Linford:
Yeah, yeah, we can hear, I can hear you.
Parker Dickens:
Chris, we need a test from back here. We still good?
Chris Linford:
Sounds good to me, yeah.
Parker Dickens:
Perfect.
Stephanie Carter:
Sweet. There we go. Are we good? Hang on, let me just adjust the camera here. Can you see everyone?
Chris Linford:
We can see everybody. We can hear you. Yep. Y’all look great at the Oozle Media Headquarters here in South Jordan, Utah.We got a team here of experts. I mean, in the room, if you’re talking beauty school marketing, years of experience combined there. It’s got to be decades.
Stephanie Carter:
Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, I was just saying these are definitely marketing leaders at Oozle. I’ve had the privilege of working with these folks basically the entire time I’ve been at Oozle, and chances are if you have worked at Oozle, if you have ever been an Oozle client or worked with Oozle, these folks have worked on your school as well. They’ve done great things for you, so I’m excited to get in and pick their brains and let them answer some questions that we’ve got today.
Parker Dickens:
Thanks, Chris.
Stephanie Carter:
Alrighty, let’s get into it, shall we?
Parker Dickens:
Lay it on us.
Stephanie Carter:
Okay, so I’m going to open with a question. I’m going to do kind of a round-robin. Everyone’s going to get one answer to this. All right? And then we’re going to go to some specific folks for specific topics. But the question that we’re going to open with is, if you were talking with a school and you could only share one thing that they could do to increase their leads or enrollments, what would you tell that school to do? Pat?
Patrik Connole:
So the number one thing that I end up telling schools every single time is get more reviews, and that’s specifically on Google and Facebook, but that’s definitely the biggest thing for me.
Stephanie Carter:
Cool. Okay, so Patrik’s going with reputation management. How about you, Parker?
Parker Dickens:
If I’ve got an urgent need for leads tomorrow, I’m putting that in Google Ads. PPC, bottom of the funnel. I mean, hopefully I have a good website, but if I get one answer it’s going on Google Ads.
Stephanie Carter:
Turn on those ads.
Parker Dickens:
Yep.
Stephanie Carter:
Dave?
David Steiner:
I might be biased because I’m a Google Ads person, but I would have to say, I agree with Parker on that one.
Stephanie Carter:
Okay, we’ve got two Google Ads, folks.
David Steiner:
If there’s a need for speed, Google Ads, otherwise, I think Patrik’s answer is also my second answer.
Stephanie Carter:
Cool. Okay. Chelsea?
Chelsea Owens:
I think all of our answers are probably in the Google Ads area, but I would say Facebook and Instagram ads for me.
Stephanie Carter:
Cool.
Chelsea Owens:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. That makes sense. Definitely. What about you, Becky?
Becky Banks:
If you can’t literally get a form… Get a form on your website. If they can’t submit their information at all, you’re not going to get a lead.
Stephanie Carter:
Okay, I’m going to take a minute here to climb on my own soapbox. Y’all, it is, if you don’t have a form above the fold, what are you doing? What are you doing? Also, if your website doesn’t work well on mobile, what are you doing? I totally agree. Amen to that, Becky.
Parker Dickens:
Steph, I’ll just add real quick to the room, the questions we’re asking, we’ve been collecting throughout the day, but if you have questions, Patrik is sitting here with a laptop, not to ignore you guys, but rather he’s got your chat open. So if you have additional questions, I can’t promise we’ll get to everything. We’re going to try and answer as many that have already come through throughout the day, but we are monitoring the chat from where we’re sitting and again, we’re going to try our best to get to as many things as possible.
Stephanie Carter:
Yes. Yeah. Now one of the things that came earlier today, it was sort of mentioned in passing, but it caught a lot of people’s attention, which I’m glad that it did because this is, I think, a pretty impressive feat.
As a digital marketing agency, of course, we have been at the forefront of discussing how is AI going to change things, how is AI going to impact our own work that we do as digital marketers? The Oozle team has been fantastic about embracing AI, incorporating it, and a lot of folks out in the audience perked up when they heard that Oozle has some sort of AI chatbot that checks compliance or looks to make sure things are compliant. So a lot of folks asked about that, chatted us saying, “Hey, what’s this thing? I want to hear more about that.” Pat, do you want to start with telling the story behind that?
Patrik Connole:
Yeah, so this is a, as we were kind of delving more into ChatGPT and its capabilities and the AI functionality, we realized that it could be repurposed to help us speed up some of our processes and help us be a little bit more clean in what we do. And so we’ve been keeping track of manually in a Google doc with a lot of information that we had compiled over years of working with a lot of different beauty schools, and we use that doc internally to train our employees or anyone else who works with us, and especially with our content writers in particular because that’s where we feel it the most, but also on social media and in the paid ads realm.
And so, I was looking at that and I realized that we can plug in that information into a custom GPT, which would then be able to do some of that hard work, hard lifting of us, of our editing, of anybody who’s editing. And so, ChatGPT, if you go into the settings and you’re a paid subscriber, you can actually create your own custom GPT for pretty much anything. And so upload that information as well as a few tweaks as we went along, just kind of as we go. And it’s not perfect. It does a pretty darn good job, as Parker mentioned-
Stephanie Carter:
Still need humans.
Patrik Connole:
Yeah, you still need a person. Parker’s building one that was comprehensive. Some schools are okay with it, some of them are not, and we try to be pretty rigorous on our standards with it, but it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it is the really nice part. And we can upload full long content docs, or we can upload an email or pages of information and just say, “Just make this compliant,” and it’ll take out the information that was not compliant and plug in something that is compliant as a replacement. Really helps speed up the jobs, and it’s really something that, the reason why it works well, I think in particular is because we have years of experience working with schools that we just kind of dump that into a data learning algorithm and said, “Please do more of it.”
Becky Banks:
Yeah. I want to chime in a little bit because I remember playing with it too. So what you are literally doing is that you are giving it a data to pull from. So you could literally do this with your school. You could literally plug in your school catalog from start to finish and say, “This is who I am, this is what I offer. Here are the hard details of the programs,” and then generate content that is so specific to you because you created a bot that only knows you.
Stephanie Carter:
Right.
Becky Banks:
Now- on the paper.
Parker Dickens:
On the paper.
Stephanie Carter:
On the paper.
Parker Dickens:
Just to be clear. And yes, I think that is great. The crude version of that is what I showed; copying and pasting the program page and giving it a little bit of context. But yes, if you had the paid version, you could make a, just like we have our compliance guru, you could make my beauty school name guru and feed it your catalog and all the information in a more meaningful way and give it context to what those things are rather than just copying and pasting things in. And it will follow the rules of what it knows based on what you fed it kind of behind the scenes. You don’t have to go in every time and tell it, “This is me, this is what I need you to do.”
Stephanie Carter:
Now, Parker, I’ve heard that despite being able to do that, open AI is not recommending that people use this in a client-facing way, like somebody creating a chatbot to answer students’ questions about their school, but maybe we’ll get there in the future. I don’t know. What are your thoughts about that?
Parker Dickens:
I mean absolutely, I think we’re going to get there. What we want to avoid is these, there’s a couple horror stories. You’ve got I think Air Canada and then a Chevrolet dealership in the Midwest, both of which, the Air Canada one was interesting because they lost a lawsuit where they tried to argue that the chatbot was not a representative of their company, which had promised a bereavement refund on a ticket that was purchased. And then someone had negotiated an interest rate with the chatbot on a Chevrolet pickup truck. And I believe that that dealership was also forced to basically honor or pay out the difference on what their chatbot had committed because the chat was a representative. And so at this point, I would not recommend schools use AI only chat features-
Patrik Connole:
Unless it’s in a restricted box. It could only answer X amount.
Parker Dickens:
Correct. Now, one of the things you could do, and I think in my QR code that I gave out earlier, there may be something along these lines is you could actually create a script that you want outsourced partners. So it’s a lot cheaper. There’s companies out there, I know we work with Ron from Robert’s company. I don’t remember it off the top of my head, but there are companies that outsource to other countries and they’re real employees that have a script that they follow.
And you could have ChatGPT come up with a really comprehensive script for what you want it to be able to answer using those frequently asked questions and things like that and give it a guideline while still having the safety net of a real human that knows when to pass it along to your admissions team or the actual business and that is the go-between.
But I do think we’re rapidly, like I said on my presentation, we’re at the worst AI is ever going to be. It’s only going to get better and it’s getting better every day, so someone watching this a year from now might be like, “Wow, that’s such an archaic take,” and I’m fine with that.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. Yep, yep. We’re in a time of innovation. That’s awesome. Well, another thing that we saw come up multiple times in the chat, I thought this was really interesting. Despite concerns around a TikTok ban, obviously all of us know that the younger generation is there and schools want to tap into that. However, it does sound like from comments you all have made that some of you have tried this and you’re still trying to figure out exactly how this should look like, exactly how it should work.
There’s some pros and cons, there’s some concerns that maybe if I put something on TikTok, how can I be sure that students who could actually attend my school are seeing my content? Do I need to wait a little while before I do this? Chelsea, I’m going to start with you. What’s your advice to schools that are trying to understand how should we show up on TikTok? How can we incorporate it in our marketing?
Chelsea Owens:
Yeah. I mean, first things first, if you’re just getting started, maybe kind of go look at your competitors and see what they’re doing first, see what kind of videos are getting engaged with on their profiles and whatnot as well. And kind of search for what is trending; trending sounds or trending video types and maybe trending dances that TikTok is kind of promoting out there. And that’s a way to just get started creating content.
There is not necessarily a wrong answer because if you post a video that doesn’t get engagement, but then you post a video that gets a ton of engagement, then just get rid of the other video. It’s all about A-B testing, and you’re not going to find what works for your specific business until you get started.
You got to start shooting content B-roll. Keep that in your back pocket. And then as you go throughout your week or your month, you’re kind of piecing things together and seeing how that works for your business. I do think that maybe every other, maybe every two videos should have some sort of call to action because we are businesses and we want people to take some kind of action with us, whether it’s just engaging with our videos through shares or comments or likes, or if we want them to go visit our website, we should be posting some kind of call to action every so often.
Stephanie Carter:
Don’t be scared to say, come in for a tour.
Chelsea Owens:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Don’t do it every video, but don’t be afraid of the call to action.
Chelsea Owens:
Yes. Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
And then it sounds like if you want to have more control over what audience is seeing, you got to pay to play, right?
Chelsea Owens:
Absolutely. I think the algorithms on social media platforms are getting better at organically targeting people based off of the things that they’re interacting with, both on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, but you’re not going to guarantee that, say people in Utah are going to see Oozle Media on TikTok. We’re not going to guarantee that. And so the paid version of all of that is going to guarantee it and push it out to the people-
Stephanie Carter:
That you want.
Chelsea Owens:
… sending out the right message at the right time.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah.
Chelsea Owens:
So, to the right people.
Stephanie Carter:
Awesome.
Chelsea Owens:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Anyone else want to add to that about how schools should show up on TikTok or advice for TikTok marketing for schools?
Parker Dickens:
For a lot of small businesses, TikTok is a little bit daunting. Even for us as an agency, the best TikTok content is going to be filmed at your school, and we’re just, frankly, most agencies aren’t going to go to your school every day and film that new or there’s going to be an enormous cost to do so. And the ones that are doing it well are hiring part-time help, be that family members that comes with its own set of risks, or we’ve got one client that gets interns from the local college that seems to be doing quite well. But you’ve got an early adopter’s advantage right now.
If you’re getting into TikTok, it’s very likely that you’re one of the only beauty schools in your market doing TikTok. And if you’re doing it well, you’re definitely the only one in your market doing it well. And so it’s kind of like what we’re seeing right now with Google Ads. I think we’ve seen some clients, long-term clients kind of making different marketing decisions because Google Ads are not performing in the way that they used to. And I think they’re trying to find why, whether that’s an agency partnership or Google Ads or the truth is people who joined us as an agency 10 years ago were probably some of the first people putting up real dollars in their market on Google Ads. And now there’s hardly a business, a brick-and-mortar business-
Stephanie Carter:
Not doing it.
Parker Dickens:
… not doing Google Ads, and it’s more expensive for everyone. And this data is confirmed by not just in the beauty industry, but across all industries by a number of outside reporting agencies and parties. And I think TikTok is going to be that way right now. I think it’s cheap eyeballs. I think you’re going to be one of the only people in your space paying for those eyeballs, making them that much cheaper. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, in four or five years, TikTok is still around if a lot of your competitors are also now moving into it and you’re not seeing the same ROI.
So you do kind of have to pick and choose your battles. I know when other platforms have been rolled out, people have invested a lot of time in them only for those platforms to fizzle out. TikTok seems like, barring any legislation, it’s here to stay. They’ve got a really deep-rooted…
David Steiner:
User base.
Parker Dickens:
… user base. Thank you, David. So that would be my take on that is you’re probably going to get some cheap eyeballs. It’s going to be fast and loose right now, and if it sticks around, I think competitors are going to move in as well and it’s going to get more expensive and more competitive.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. I think that that’s a really great point. I think that’s something that I’ve heard come up with Oozle clients, not only Oozle clients, but I’ve heard this at basically every conference I attend, people are asking why do things feel like I’m getting less for my marketing dollars? And I think that that’s a really good point, Parker, to talk about how, I remember back in 2015 when I started at Oozle, a lot of schools weren’t on Instagram. Instagram advertising wasn’t really a thing at that point. Everybody was trying to get Facebook ads up and going, and now it’s unfathomable to think a school wouldn’t be on Instagram or wouldn’t be running ads on Instagram and because of that, the price has gone up.
So I do think maybe general Oozle sentiment is show up on the marketing channels, but also be prepared over time to understand that everyone else is going to start showing up and you’re going to have to invest more. And it’s going to start to feel like, this is where we say it’s lead bullets, not silver bullets when it comes to marketing. Maybe silver for a little while and ride that wave while you can, but it’s going to end.
Becky Banks:
And I don’t think people should be afraid of irrelevant traffic. I just thought of this where there is a Texas realtor who shows up on my for you page selling, he sells houses he can’t afford. And obviously I’m not in Texas, we are in Utah and I’m not in the market for Texas. But I did also see one where he is like, “Hey, no, I actually sold a house.” And so it’s like even though he’s not getting 100% relevant traffic, if even only 10% of that traffic is relevant, maybe that’s still a worthy investment.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. If one student came from you posting on TikTok, I think someone would say, “Yeah, that’s one extra student that we wouldn’t have had.” At what point does that become worth it to us? At what point do we argue, “Yeah, we should probably be investing or thinking about this”?
Patrik Connole:
And on top of that, if you are getting more traffic, you’re getting more likes, more comments, more users, more people viewing your site. The same thing applies on Google. If you’re getting more traffic, even if it’s from your other sources, Google’s going to see, “Oh, this is a good website,” or, “Oh, this is a good social media account,” and the algorithm is more likely to favor you as you continue growing, which makes you more likely to show up for those in your local area, so it’s not wasted per se because it does help you in aggregate.
Stephanie Carter:
Right. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to say. Becky, what is a mistake that you see on beauty school website? I know you brought up a form. We talked about, have a form, have it above the page. What are some other mistakes that you’ve seen beauty schools make with their websites that feels important for folks to go back and evaluate their own websites on?
Chelsea Owens:
I would say the biggest thing that I run into is that sites are hard to navigate. If you can’t figure out what programs they offer, how to enroll, how to contact somebody, that is the biggest thing that I think I see. When I go to a website and I’m like, “I have no idea what they offer,” that is honestly the biggest thing and that’s really why it’s such a focus where it’s like, who are you? What do you offer? Why should I choose you? It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t have to have graphics that zoom in or zoom out. What it really needs to be is that someone needs to go to your website and say, “I know who you are. I know what to do; what action to take on this website.”
Stephanie Carter:
Right. And I think something that has surprised me is how often people get scared of feeling the same, like in terms of using the same language, maybe in a navigation bar, something like that. But there’s a user expectation for websites. If I walk into somebody’s house and I walk into the master bathroom, that’s confusing. And if it’s not called the master bathroom and it’s called the kitchen or the place where we get clean that it’s just a little bit odd, so I think there’s some aspect of, there’s a level of it’s okay to be like everyone else in your website.
Becky Banks:
Yes. So websites are very similar to any other… Think about if you’re using Microsoft Word. You know what icons mean. There’s this weird language that you go, “I know that floppy disk means I’m going to save my document.” Websites are actually very similar where you say, “I know the nav bar is where I’m going to choose where I want to go. I know there’s going to be a logo and I know there’s going to be a contact us button on the right.” And these are standards that people expect out of their website. And when it differs, then it makes it harder to use and therefore more likely to be like, “Well, I can’t find what I’m looking for. I’m out.”
Stephanie Carter:
Right. Because we know, all of us, right? This isn’t just a generational thing. The Internet’s been around long enough that all of us are like, “If I have to wait more than three seconds to get something, I’m out. See you.”
Becky Banks:
Mm-hmm.
David Steiner:
It must be broken.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah, yeah.
Becky Banks:
Exactly. Yeah. We have this expectation that things are fast.
Stephanie Carter:
Yes. And that we know how to get to where we need to go because the layouts and the way we use websites are similar. In 2024 we all have certain expectations of how any website across any industry is going to work.
Becky Banks:
Yes.
Stephanie Carter:
Dave, speaking of marketing in this year, Google recently announced that they are pushing back the cookies going away, and we’ve heard things, I don’t know if you all have heard this, of course, this is probably a bigger topic in the digital marketing world, but basically we know there’s an emphasis on privacy on how to ethically make sure that someone gets relevant marketing. How do you recommend our audience, beauty school owners, think about a “cookie less world”, so to say?
David Steiner:
Yeah, so I can’t take credit for this entirely. I think Patrik was maybe mentioning it to me earlier, but Google, it’s important to Google to make their system work, to give the user the information that they’re looking for. So if the cookie goes away, which if you don’t know what cookies are, it’s basically a little piece of data that follows you around and keeps track of what you do in theory to make sure that you get the most relevant stuff on Google or ads or whatever. So Google cares-
Patrik Connole:
That’s the half full glass.
David Steiner:
You’re a glass half full optimistic, but Google wants to serve you relevant information, and so if the cookie goes away, they’ll find something else to replace it. They did, just like you said, push that back. It was supposed to be happening I think this summer, and now they’ve said, “Oh, we’re not going to do it until 2025.” The reason they’re pushing it back in my opinion, is because they haven’t found a good solution yet, and so they’re going to just keep kicking that can down the road until they figure out what to do.
So if I’m being entirely honest, it’s not something that I’m worried about, especially on something like search that I do most of. The targeting is the keyword, right?
Stephanie Carter:
Mm-hmm.
David Steiner:
And that’s the biggest signal that you’re giving Google, and that’s not going to change. With or without a cookie you’re still typing in the search term and you’re still getting an ad based on what your query was, so I’m not too worried about the cookies going away. I think there will be a solution to replace it when it happens.
Stephanie Carter:
I think that that’s where we come back to maybe good marketing is good marketing. Before cookies and post cookies, there are certain fundamental marketing truths that will still be around. You got to have a good website. You need to show up on social media. You need to show up on search ads.
David Steiner:
You need to have relevant messaging.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. And you have to be out there. People have to be able to find you. Easy to find, easy to buy.
David Steiner:
Easy to buy.
Patrik Connole:
Be where your people are. As I said four times during my talk, my speech today.
Stephanie Carter:
Yep, yep. Well, Pat, were there any additional questions from the chat? I have some other ones, but we’re coming up a little bit on time.
Patrik Connole:
Morgan already took care of one of them, so we can continue on.
Stephanie Carter:
Oh. Perfect.
Parker Dickens:
We’ve got a question for Pat, if you don’t mind. Just one of the folks on there I promised behind the scenes, I don’t think, didn’t chat with everyone, but they just wanted to know, and I think Pat might be equipped to answer this, but where they can find, or Becky, but where they can find information on A, Google standards, so what is Google looking for when it comes to SEO and websites, and then B, I think compliance standards, but I believe they were implying more like ADA compliance and making sure your website was user-friendly, including for those that have disabilities, not necessarily compliance from a NACUS or a board or education standpoint.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. Because there’s a higher level of compliance that we still have to adhere to. There’s the beauty school industry compliance, and then Google has also said there are best practices. And really as people, we’ve decided, “Hey, we want things to be accessible, follow these best practices so everyone can have them.”
Parker Dickens:
So, Pat, where would a beauty school owner, where would they find this information so they can hold their dev team, marketing team accountable?
Patrik Connole:
Yeah, so there’s two places. So one is Google themselves. So developers.google.com has their own kind of set of compliance standards. They also release updates for SEO updates-
Parker Dickens:
Algorithm.
Patrik Connole:
From the algorithm and from just kind of general post announcements and things like that. Sometimes Google is slower to announce things than SEO experts who will catch them that are following it minutely, and so I tend to follow places like Search Engine Land, and mos.com. Those tend to be my two places that I go to. And then for compliance stuff for ADA, ada.gov is your best friend there. They’ve got a lot of guidance on there and when it’s updated, and so that is one of the best… Those are the two best places-
Stephanie Carter:
Available resources to everyone.
Patrik Connole:
And I just put it in the chat so you can find those two links in there.
Becky Banks:
I would say ADA-wise, I would say the biggest things that I always think about are color blindness, where it’s like you don’t want the button on your form to be close to the same color of your form because then it’ll blend in. The other thing of course is that we had alt text images. Those are for screen readers, but it’s also good for SEO. So it’s like-
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. A win?
Becky Banks:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Double win there.
Becky Banks:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Okay. We’re coming up on time, but I want to end with a question. I’m going to start with you, Parker, and then I think we can kind of touch around on everyone.
Parker, what trends are you seeing in the industry for this year around marketing performance? Again, we’ve had people talk about things like, “Man, it feels like the seasonality this year hit a bit harder than other years.” I know you’ve been paying attention to overall trends pre- and post-pandemic. Maybe you can speak a little bit of your read on the situation and then I would like everyone to share maybe one thing that you see either coming up, a marketing prediction or something that’s happening in your channel that you think could be important for folks to know.
Parker Dickens:
Yeah, this is a great question. And I do, I spend a lot of my time pulling data lead to enrollment reports, things like that, looking at leads across all of our clients. This is several hundred, over a hundred locations, campuses, things like that, all the reports from my team that we’re pulling for current clients and then even what I’m hearing schools say that are working with our business development team and sharing with them, we’ve got reports that we’re looking at from other agencies.
So I feel fairly confident saying that generally, on average, a lot of the trends we’re seeing for this year are down compared to last year. I think there’s a little bit of a difference in consumer spending habits. Again, we were riding the high of the stimulus money, and then in our industry, the beauty industry, it was very hands-on, and so it was hit very hard during a lot of the closure states were doing, and there was a lot of pent-up demand.
So as those closures started loosening and restrictions started loosening, you had the people that were going to enroll in that year anyways applying to enroll, and then you had the people that put off their education and their move into the beauty space for a year or two years that came. So, what we see is this really big spike in demand from that. And then I think last year in particular, 2023 was a good year riding off that people were generally optimistic, but as interest rates have come up and people are financing their education, tightened up their discretionary spending because of inflation and spending habits around groceries and just living, being alive, I think a lot of industries are feeling that this year. I think it’s really good to compare your data year over year, but I’d also look at a normal year like 2019 that was really good.
We’d had years of a great economy for a long time leading up to that. Twenty-nineteen was definitely a high point for a lot of the schools that we’ve worked with and 2023 in most cases beat that by a long shot. And I think a lot of people are feeling like, “Oh, we have to have this forever perpetual growth, and 2024 isn’t that compared to 2023. But I would say overall 2024 is not a bad year, it’s just not as good as last year.
So again, like I said, we’ve had some long-term clients re-evaluating their strategies. We’ve had even newer clients to the scene really investing for the first time, which is great. We’ve had a wave of people doing new websites and things like that from schools that I would normally say fall in a category that might not normally afford it or think they can afford it because they’re realizing, “Hey, if I’m not investing, not only am I losing out to inflation and everything like that, I’m just losing out to my own lack of effort a little bit, my own lack of investment rather.” And so yeah, I think a lot of people are feeling that it’s just you got to work a little bit harder to get the same results and you got to work a lot bit harder to get better results, and-
Stephanie Carter:
But staying maybe, again, I like that, yes, it’s important to look year over year, but it’s also, and we’ve been doing this at Oozle, because it has been interesting. I mean, during the pandemic, even before the pandemic, we had these years of data, and so it’s been interesting to look at the past five years, the past six years and really see the bigger picture of what that’s looking like as far as trends for school, leads, enrollments, and marketing spend.
Awesome. Well, we are going to wrap up, but we’re going to go real quick. Again, this is going to be rapid fire for Pat, David, Chelsea, Becky, one thing that you think is going to be big this year in marketing or that schools should pay attention to.
Patrik Connole:
AI and content in particular is going to be the big thing and it will continue to be a thing. Like Parker said, AI is the worst that it’s been and it will get better.
Stephanie Carter:
And Google just did their big-
Patrik Connole:
And Google and they-
Stephanie Carter:
… algorithms tweak-
Patrik Connole:
… continue to do algorithms-
Stephanie Carter:
… to get rid of people.
Patrik Connole:
… updates based around AI and integrating that. And so the advice there is if what you can make, AI can make just as well or better, don’t make it. Make it Better than AI. You’re a human, you can do it.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. So maybe it’s yes, go to AI, get an 80% lift, but that other 20% that’s being touched by a human, make it good.
Patrik Connole:
Yep. Make it the best it can be. Be personable. Make it to who you are and what your brand stands for. Take a stance on something, be personable.
Parker Dickens:
Don’t be lazy.
Patrik Connole:
Don’t be lazy about it. Work harder. Work a little harder because everything-
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. AI doesn’t mean you get to check out.
Patrik Connole:
Yeah, everything is easier. Don’t use it as a crutch.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. Okay, David?
David Steiner:
Yeah, I think sort of what was alluded to already on Google Ads anyway, things are just getting more competitive and that’s going to happen and like everything, Google Ads is not immune to inflation, and you’re going to have to spend a little bit more each year to get the same results. There are people out there who are spending the same amount on Google Ads every month that they’ve been spending for the last three years, and they shouldn’t expect to see the same results year over year over year. They’re going to have to increase their spend to match what they were doing before. That’s just the name of the game.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah. There’s a Google angel sitting on my shoulder saying amen to that.
David Steiner:
Yeah.
Stephanie Carter:
Chelsea?
Chelsea Owens:
Yep. Well, I ditto everything that was said, but I’ll tack on video advertising. I think video advertising has been something that we’ve been pegged with for years, but more than ever, especially with TikTok and Instagram Reels, it’s more prominent than ever and we can-
Patrik Connole:
And accessible.
Chelsea Owens:
Yes. Yes. And even if you don’t have B-roll, video B-roll, you can make slideshows that are just another moving picture on your screen, and I think that’s something that people should really take advantage of at this point and then repurposing it on the different platforms.
Stephanie Carter:
Yeah, I think Oozle for years now, I think that this really became a turning point for us where we really actively started telling schools you can try and outsource all of your social media to us. Really, where an agency is going to be best is helping you run the ads, helping you manage your budget, helping you make sure your targeting is right. But if you can create really good video content to then give to that agency to run with, that’s a sweet spot.
Chelsea Owens:
Absolutely.
Stephanie Carter:
Becky?
Becky Banks:
Yeah, I was going to say, kind of going off yours, I think it’s authenticity and community. I really think people are looking to get a real look inside businesses and schools and see what they’re really like because I talk about, “Oh, your website needs to work.” Realistically, I looked through and saw some really ugly websites that still ranked number one in the local pack because I really think it’s getting people to talk about you and getting your brand known is what’s going to have the biggest impacts. And then the website’s just there to make sure that they can do something after they found you.
Stephanie Carter:
A doorway to walk through.
Becky Banks:
Yes.
Stephanie Carter:
Well, everyone, thank you so much for being with us today. It has been a privilege and honor to do another year of the Beauty Summit for you all. Record year for registration. I think I put that in the chat, but I just want to celebrate that again. Yay! We’re all very excited. Over 900 registrants. We are going to have some follow-up emails if you registered. I know a lot of people have also been chatting about how can I get recordings, how can I get slides? We will be working on an on-demand library, and you all will be the first to know.
Becky Banks:
It always takes a little bit. It’s a lot of work. I promise.
Stephanie Carter:
Even with AI, it’s still a lot of work, guys. Chris, back to you.
Parker Dickens:
Coming in there with you, everybody. I’m doing the run. I’m doing the run.
Chris Linford:
Yeah, so thank you so much, expert panel Oozle Media coming to the table, trying to share as much good information as we can to be helpful to the industry. So a lot of good topics, good answers. Thank you so much you guys, Oozle Media, and it’s not over, we’re still doing some giveaways here, but before we do that, again, thank you to all of our sponsors. Borboleta, Lashes, Prestige, SIS, Pivot Point, LeadSquared, Light Heart Sanders, Beauty as a Business, of course, Oozle Media. And then before we do these giveaways, want to personally think the Oozlers who’ve been involved in making the beauty school summit happen this year!