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Kevin Renton:
Hi there, welcome to QuickFire from Volt. This is where we put higher education marketers on the hot seat and ask them 20 rapid questions to get an understanding of what makes them tick, what’s made them successful and what are their goals for the future. In the crossfire today, we have Jenny Petty, vice president of marketing, communications, experience and engagement at the University of Montana. Hello Jenny.
Jenny Petty:
Hi Kevin, thanks for having me.
Kevin Renton:
Not at all. So the softball question of the moment, tell us about yourself. What do you do at the University of Montana?
Jenny Petty:
Yeah, so I’ve been at the University of Montana for about three years. I worked in the private sector before coming to higher ed. I have been in higher ed for almost a decade. At Montana, I oversee your traditional marketing communications, digital strategy. But I also oversee our experience and our engagement arm. So I oversee the alumni group. And I’m doing some pretty exciting experience work across the university with different leaders too.
Kevin Renton:
Awesome, so here we go. I wanted to work in higher education because…
Jenny Petty:
I had a kind of glamorous job in the private sector before coming to higher ed. It was really fun. It involved a lot of travel. It involved an expense account. It was really kind of glamorous and fun. But at the end of the day, there wasn’t a lot of meaning behind the work that I was doing. And I thought, well, I’ve got one chance to make an impact on this world. And my husband and I happened to make our way to the University of Wyoming. And, I won’t lie to you, Kevin, the entry into higher ed from the private sector was shocking. But over time, really, just have come to love the purpose and the passion of helping people find paths through education.
Kevin Renton:
Well great, well in the shocking landing that was higher ed, I hope it got better, but the marketing tool I can’t live without is…
Jenny Petty:
I love HubSpot inbound marketing software. I’ve been a HubSpot client off and on since 2009. I’m about to be a HubSpot client again. I fell in love with the inbound marketing methodology way back when I was working on lead gen and growth marketing in the private sector. And I just find that tool to be so robust. They’re always making changes to it.
And I really think in higher ed, we need more people adopting inbound marketing.
Kevin Renton:
Do you use HubSpot at the University of Montana?
Jenny Petty:
We are about to, yeah.
Kevin Renton:
Fantastic. You know, it’s a great tool. We use it with our commercial clients a lot. And HubSpot tried to push into the market when they first built the product. But yeah, it didn’t have a big uptake. So it’ll be interesting to see how you get on using it in higher ed.
Jenny Petty:
Yeah, we used it at the University of Wyoming for a while. We had really, really great results from that. You know, higher ed’s just been slow to adopt on the marketing side, I think, understanding how we tie into revenue generation.
Kevin Renton:
Totally. In the next five years I’d like to…
Jenny Petty:
Travel more. My family and I love traveling. So personally, that’s something that I would love to do. Professionally, I don’t know if I had ever thought I would be in a CMCO role. So this has been pretty fascinating to be at this level and getting to steer the ship and having a big impact. So I can’t say professionally, there’s a whole lot more that I desire to do. I’m having kind of the time of my life right now and have really enjoyed getting more involved with some of our professional groups and I just love getting the opportunity to be creative. So anything I can do to keep those wheels turning in the next five years I will be thrilled to do.
Kevin Renton:
Fantastic. On that journey though, what was your biggest professional mistake?
Jenny Petty:
I think my biggest professional mistake was not trusting my intuition enough earlier in my career. Not following that gut instinct and not trusting myself enough when, you know, either I had a good idea that I was not confident enough to put forward or having that gut feeling that maybe something wasn’t the right decision and moving forward anyway.
Kevin Renton:
When I’m not working, I’m…
Jenny Petty:
I’ve got three kids, that range in age from 13 to seven, and a husband, and we spend most of our time carting those kids around to soccer and track and football and ice skating and you name it, we are just basically a taxi service, an Uber for our children. We live in one of the most beautiful places in the United States, so we get out and downhill ski. I love to read, I read all the time.
Gosh, and then I just think about marketing communications the rest of the time.
Kevin Renton:
Sounds good. Okay, I start my day at…
Jenny Petty:
I wish that I could tell you that I had like one of those tech bro schedules of getting up at 4 am and meditating and working out and stuff. But the truth of the matter is with three kids, I feel like I’ve been sleep deprived basically for the last 13 years. So I roll out of bed around 6:30 or 7 and then it’s off to the races getting three kids out of the house on their way to school.
Kevin Renton:
Mm-hmm. It’s all about preparation the night before.
Jenny Petty:
Yeah, I mean, we yeah, and we do some of that. But yeah, my mornings are a little bit chaotic. I remember being you know, a young mom, having younger kids and reading those life hacks like how to do your morning and just being like, God, these people have never had like a three-year-old yell at them about cutting their sandwich in the wrong direction or.
Kevin Renton:
The secret to a student succeeding at my school is…
Jenny Petty:
As a student at the University of Montana, I think the secret to success is getting involved in as many things as you can. We have just so much on this campus, co-curricular and extracurricular, in addition to the great learning that will happen in the classroom. This is just an amazing, like I said, place in the world that is full of so much beauty. And you can get out, five minutes from campus, you can be on a hiking trail. And so taking advantage of being in this, and then everything that this university has to offer I think is the secret to success and being open to trying new things.
Kevin Renton:
It’s awesome. I admire the marketing at…
Jenny Petty:
In the private sector, I really admire the marketing at, this is gonna be kind of an off one, but Duluth Trading Company.
Kevin Renton:
Okay?
Jenny Petty:
Which is mostly apparel for men, but I think their brand and the way they’ve built their brand
has been really genius and they’re excellent storytelling. Their copywriting is just phenomenal. Every time my husband likes to shop there, every time we go in the store, I’m always kind of blown away with the way that they merchandise in a way that tells a story. You know, in the higher ed sector, I think Drexel does a phenomenal job with their branding. I think obviously Purdue has done such a great job. Boise had some really great work that came out this last year.
There’s a lot of really good people doing really good work in higher ed marketing communications.
Kevin Renton:
The biggest challenge facing higher education marketers are…
Jenny Petty:
You know, there’s three things that are keeping me up at night right now. The first one is changing privacy laws. That’s something that I don’t think we’re talking enough about in higher ed. How much that’s going to impact our digital marketing tactics in the way that we’ve traditionally used digital in the last 20 years. The second is the search cliff. We talk a lot about the demographic cliff, which is upon us now. We are at the demographic cliff. But I don’t think we talk enough about the search cliff, which is just the availability of names of high schoolers that we’ve purchased and have really kind of fed the pipeline for our admissions departments. In the next couple of years, we’re going to see that greatly decrease. And then the third one is brand awareness. So I don’t know if you’ve seen the headlines, but I think this year we’ve had a school or college or university close once a week for this whole year. And I think as we are starting to get more competitive with one another, brand awareness and driving affinity towards your brand is going to become more expensive. And for a lot of us who don’t have huge marketing budgets, that’s going to be a big challenge.
Kevin Renton:
Totally. Without those lists we’re gonna have to do inbound, it’s gonna be a challenge. My favorite social media channel is…
Jenny Petty:
I have a love-hate relationship with social. I was a former social media manager and got pretty burnt out on it. But I would say I refuse to call it X, so it’s Twitter to me, forever in my heart. I really found the higher ed marketing community on Twitter. During COVID, that was just such a life-saving place and it bums me out that it’s changed so much, but it still is my favorite.
Kevin Renton:
Do you think it’s migrated to LinkedIn though, the higher ed community? Do you think that they are still there?
Jenny Petty:
Kind of, but I don’t know about you, but LinkedIn content freaks me out a little bit when people share weird personal things on LinkedIn. I was so used to it on Twitter that it was no big deal to have those worlds kind of merged. But LinkedIn, I’m kind of like, eww.
Kevin Renton:
I hear you. Yeah. My biggest professional achievement is…
Jenny Petty:
I think my biggest professional achievement has been trying to have as much balance as I can in being a mom of three kids and working and having a big career. Just really trying to take care of the people that I lead. That’s really important to me as a leader. And so, you know, between trying to model to them what it can look like to have a family and I was pretty young when I got this job. Now I feel haggard and old three years later, but just joking. I think I’ve really tried to model balance and I’ve tried to really take care of the people no matter what organization I’ve been at that report to me and that’s the most important thing to me.
Kevin Renton:
I totally agree with you. My mom was a professional, had a big job and I was so proud of her. And growing up, you look at her as a role model and it’s fantastic. So yeah, keep it going. Okay, so what’s working in higher ed right now and then what’s not working in higher ed right now?
Jenny Petty:
What’s working really well is we’re having to kind of be confronted with what our limitations were and we’re being confronted in a really kind of ugly way through this national public perception around higher ed. And we are having to kind of come to Jesus a little bit with the reality of the way that we are perceived and the lack of value that people are seeing. And so while that is really negative,
I think it is going to force us to kind of adapt and change and merge or emerge into the next generation of what higher education can be. And so I think it’s going to be painful, but I know the conversations that we’re having on our campus are different than I was having five years ago. And I’m really encouraged by people being open, open to that feedback and taking it seriously.
What’s not working? I’ve heard this over and over again, and it’s kind of tied to the first one. I don’t want us to use the national narrative about higher ed as a crutch or an excuse to not change. And I hear it kind of echoed over and over again. You see it a lot in the trade pubs right now with people just talking about how bad it is to be in higher ed. And I think we’ve got to stop that. Like if we’re going to change and we’re going to drive, like we’ve got to be glass half full and we’ve got to… We’ve got to think about, yes, these institutions are huge and can be really hard to change, but gosh, are they important to this country and the world. And we’ve got to focus on that.
Kevin Renton:
I totally agree with you and even the positive energy you get from the student body, you just have to meet them where they are. They might not be in the institutions where we thought they were, but if you can meet them, they just have this great energy and it is so important. So what do you think the future of higher education will be then?
Jenny Petty:
I think of a future of higher ed like we’re seeing across consumer grade experiences is they’re going to be looking at highly personalized experience when it comes to higher ed. I don’t know if in, you know, 50 years we will still see the traditional model where you get your bachelor’s from one school where you’re in-resident at that school. I think what we saw during COVID and the opening up of digital experience and digital pedagogy is that things are changing. And I think students are expecting that. And I think they wanna tailor their education to what interests them and what will guarantee them an outcome on the other side.
Kevin Renton:
A key to my success has been…
Jenny Petty:
Trying to keep a really good sense of humor. You know, I think sometimes, especially on college campuses, some things that happen are just kind of absurd. And you know, it’s just part of being part of like this organization or these institutions is they’re so different. And the diversity of the people and the personalities that are on a site or on a campus, you kind of can’t beat it. But sometimes it is just funny and absurd and you’ve just got to laugh at some of the situations that you find yourself in. I think, you know, my team, we got together a couple of years ago and we created a list of our values and one of our values is “it’s marketing, no one is going to die.” And so I think also keeping perspective of the work that we do and we’re not trauma surgeons and just making sure that you kind of can keep some levity and lightheartedness to the work.
Kevin Renton:
I agree, you’re living through your own sitcom. One thing I’ve learned about managing teams is…
Jenny Petty:
That it’s a lot like parenting. It takes a lot of energy if you’re going to do it well. It takes a lot of being present and listening and being open to feedback and recognizing when something isn’t working and taking responsibility for that. I think it always comes back to people and people can be messy, but if you’re going to lead people, there’s got to be a certain part of you that is a little bit in love with the messiness. So…
Kevin Renton:
Yes.
Jenny Petty:
Yeah, I think it’s about showing up for people.
Kevin Renton:
Cool. The hardest part of my job is…
Jenny Petty:
My boss has this saying, he says, the price of leadership is criticism. And I think that’s so true because in these positions, really in any sort of management or leadership position, you have to make decisions based on the information that you have. And sometimes you have more information than other people have. Sometimes you have instincts that have been cultivated over a career of doing this kind of work.
And you have to make choices that some people might not agree with or understand. And so, I think that’s, that’s a tough part. And then I think also it’s cliche, but, you know, they say it’s lonely at the top and it’s true, like in these roles, like you’re often, especially in your organization, nobody else is a CMO, nobody else is a CCO. So it’s a little bit tough for people to truly understand what’s going on in your world.
There’s a group of us that came kind of up to our first CMO roles at the same time and we have a text string that’s called CMO Hotline and that has been my kind of respite from the world is this place where there’s these people who truly understand what these roles are like.
Kevin Renton:
It is lonely at the top. I love my job because…
Jenny Petty:
I love my job because of the variety. I think it’s kind of ideal for me because we know one second I might be working on a trademark and licensing thing, the next second I might be writing an executive communication. I really do love kind of bouncing around and using different skills and trying different things. I definitely enjoy every day being different.
Kevin Renton:
That’s awesome. Jenny Petty, thank you for being on QuickFire with Volt. We look forward to your conference presentation on HubSpot in two years time. Said conference will be there, but thanks for taking time to share your details.
Jenny Petty:
Yeah, thanks, Kevin.
