Kris Hardy is passionate about making the web a better place for prospective students and their families during the college search process.

Kris currently serves as the Director of Web and Digital Marketing at Messiah College and works part-time at Ruffalo Noel-Levitz as an Associate Consultant. He specializes in user experience, information architecture, digital marketing, and web analytics.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• How Kris first got involved in higher education, and how he made the transition to web-based digital marketing early in the field’s existence
• Why analytics is a great first step to a career in digital marketing, and why a data-driven mindset helps
• How Kris developed his own marketing and digital skills despite a zero-dollar budget from his small higher ed institution early in his career.
• What advice Kris offers for e-recruiting, marketing automation, and content customization
• How Kris and his team found and implemented the right CRM solutions for Messiah College and their unique needs
• Why Kris believes the ability to think like a sixteen-year-old prospective student plays a major role in his success
• Why Kris’s “Program Listing Page” has helped supercharge the tracking results from Google Analytics through event tracking
• What distinct strategies Kris has employed to collect user information from many different types of site visitors
• How Kris and his team streamlined their internal website over the course of several years to create an efficient and useful site
• Why there’s always a risk of people looking at raw analytic data and making decisions without context, and how Kris works to better inform his departments
• What reporting tools and applications Kris uses in his work, and which best practices he recommends to protect user privacy

Additional resources:

• Twitter: @krishardy83
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/krishardy83/