I recently had the opportunity to attend a series of insightful sessions at the Denver Digital Summit, and presenting at the Digital Collegium. From general marketing advice to tactical SEO advice and social trends , here are some of the most impactful takeaways for higher ed marketers and beyond.

The A B C Cs of marketing

Jenny Haggard from Spotify presented a thought-provoking keynote. She shared the A B C Cs of marketing which stands for:

Audience: Knowing your audience is great, but do you know what’s unique, interesting or strange about your audience?

Brand: Identify what truly sets your brand apart.

Culture: Externally, listening and staying in sync with the societal and cultural shifts, and internally, looking for diverse perspectives. Also, understanding where a brand has the right-to-play without being seen as inauthentic or worse, cringe-worthy.

Creativity: As marketers, creativity should fuel our day-to-day. Teams should encourage innovation and curiosity with creativity breaks, group activities, retreats-things done outside of the regular work.

Jenny also shared insights from Spotify’s GenZ Culture Next report. Since Gen Z is still a prospective student/young alumni audience base for higher ed marketers, I would highly recommend scanning through the report.

Trends shaping the future of social media

Aaron Komo and Anastacia Mullins from The Social Lights shared trends that are reshaping the social media landscape. They discussed how social media has evolved from its experimental beginnings to a more sophisticated, strategic channel.  Social media is expected to surpass traditional search as the primary way people discover brands, make purchase decisions, and engage with content in 2025. Today’s challenge is all about “stopping the scroll” and navigating the rise of being “chronically online.” They urged marketers to think if their brands would make it to the “Favorites” feed. Would your brand survive digital detox?

Brands should be thoughtful about how frequently they post and how quickly they jump on trends. According to some surveys, users find trends that appear two weeks late to be cringey. I took away that a majority of the younger audience dislike when companies use trends that don’t relate to their brand identity.

The changing Search landscape

There were a few presentations about the changing search landscape. Alli Berry from Fractional SEO presented a timeline of events over the last couple of leading up to the introduction of AI Mode on Google Search. These included the increased visibility of Reddit on SERP and the drop in link click through.

Google and Reddit’s $60M deal has led to an increase in Reddit mentions on search results. Alli’s recommendation was to consider having a solid Reddit presence and engaging with relevant Sub-Reddits. The key here, according to her, was for brands to use personal accounts, identify your affiliation upfront, and be genuinely helpful, not try to sell products or services.

AI Overviews eating into the number of clicks was another hot topic. AI Overviews in Google search are AI-generated answers that compile responses to user queries from multiple search listings. According to the data presented, AI Overviews appear at least 71% of the queries in the “Education” vertical. Also, informational queries are highly likely to generate AI Overviews.

AI’s impact on Search was mentioned in at least 3 presentations. Their recommendation to be featured in AI Overviews was:

• Make content more readable and accessible.
• Use smaller paragraphs, sub-heads, and bullet lists wherever possible.
• Highlight your brand’s expertise. Create original content that provides value to your users.
• Use structured data or schema markup (more on that in a future blog post).

One interesting recommendation shared to feature in AI Overviews was to answer the query quickly in simple language, and possibly in the lede.

Another key shift, one that we’ve already incorporated in our strategy, is to capture multi-channel search intent. Optimizing social posts to include search-friendly captions, using alt-texts on all image posts, and captions on all video posts are some of the things that help in that direction.

Community building and brand advocacy

Allyson Forstrom from Life is Good highlighted the long-term value of community engagement. One compelling concept they mentioned was that of “borrowing” community. This is about partnering with micro-influencers who have some overlap with the brand’s audience. If done correctly, this strategy has the potential to reach newer audiences. Life is Good’s brand ambassador program features 800 members across 50 states, which I thought was super cool. These brand ambassadors are repeat buyers or loyal users who are provided with new merchandise. They are roped into new design launches, then create content around the brand, tag the social accounts and keep the chatter going. But, the key, they said, is to nurture and maintain a long-term relationship with these influencers to turn them into brand advocates.

Using AI in social media

The CSU Social team had the opportunity to present at the Digital Collegium conference, where Kayla Coolbear, Hannah Tran, and I shared how we’re integrating AI across our social strategy, from building strategy to performance evaluation. Hannah also breaks down how AI and visual storytelling intersect in her blog post.

Here are a few key takeaways from our presentation:

• AI needs human oversight. While AI can be a powerful tool, it’s not perfect. Critical thinking, fact-checking, and creativity still require a human touch. AI should not support human reasoning.
• There are ethical and environmental considerations of using AI: Training large AI models can produce as much carbon emissions as 300 round-trip flights. Data centers also consume vast amounts of water to stay cool. It’s a good reminder that AI should be reserved for repetitive, low-value tasks, while humans tackle high-level thinking.
• Custom GPTs are a game changer. These tailored versions of ChatGPT can streamline workflows by combining multiple prompts into one personalized assistant. They’re especially useful when your tasks require complex, nuanced instructions.
• Bias is baked into the data. Because AI is trained on human-generated content, it can unintentionally reinforce societal biases. When prompting AI, we recommend asking it to include diverse perspectives, especially from underserved communities, and to approach sensitive topics with cultural awareness.
• Use AI to improve your prompts. We’ve found one of our most effective techniques has been asking ChatGPT to “improve this prompt to meet [a specific objective]”, resulting in better quality responses from the Chat

The goal with such prompts is to build a prompt library that supports reliable and consistent use for multiple tasks.