As the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Circa Interactive, Joseph Lapin has created a career around his core passions: storytelling, strategy, marketing, education, and consumer behavior. His journey started after he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a freelance journalist and wrote for publications like the LA Times, LA Weekly, Slate, and many more. Joseph brought those storytelling skills to Circa Interactive, where he helped build a digital marketing company focused on creating marketing strategies and brand campaigns for top-tier higher education institutions. Circa Interactive has made the Inc. 5000 list three years in a row, and Joseph is proud of how much they’ve grown in a short time. As Joseph builds his career as an advertising professional, he still works on his craft as an author and essayist.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why speaking directly to faculty is the key to better understanding your audience and developing your personas
- Why clear personas can be powerful resources to help you better focus your marketing efforts and bring your story to the right audience
- How the “hero’s journey” from literature can also apply to your higher ed institution’s marketing and storytelling efforts
- How building personas can help you speak to people on a fundamental, psychological level that connects to them emotionally and can help you develop categories of audiences
- How often your personas need to be updated and refreshed, and how to evolve your multiple personas alongside your programs, CRM and job titles
- Why Cambridge Analytica, despite their awful history and past controversies, provide a powerful example of how to use persona-based marketing
- Why accurate analytics are crucial for identifying what is and isn’t working and how you can evolve your methods and better reach your audience
- Why it is important to go beyond demographic data and identify what your target audience cares about and other psychographic information
- Why the coming shift to online-only education isn’t the major issue it may seem to be, and why the bigger hurdle is demonstrating the value of higher education going forward
- Why, in spite of all the turmoil, chaos and difficulties in our world today, it is important to maintain and share hope
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