By Janus Boye
Eric Greenberg is Senior Director Marketing Operations at The Wharton School
Developing and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams is something special.
That’s what Eric Greenberg has done in Philadelphia at The Wharton School since around 2013, when he began championing the growth of inbound marketing in the MarComm office after having spent several years in the department of web development.
Today, Eric runs a team of nine people at The Wharton School that covers a wide variety of scenarios. They run the Wharton content management system which has 130 websites on it, they are responsible for marketing automation and the graduate admissions Salesforce instance, as well as a school-wide email marketing platform.
Eric believes in “servant leadership”, mentoring, sharing knowledge, and creating a healthy workplace culture and a team that respects diverse opinions and works together to achieve amazing things. Eric is also our expert of the month.
Let’s start at the beginning and hear how Eric became a marketing leader in higher education.
15 years in higher education marketing
Eric started his career in software and database application development in the eLearning space 20-something years ago. After a few years of programming, he launched his first startup; an online platform which converted PowerPoint and Word Documents into hierarchical, SCORM-compliant e-learning structures with the ability to append quizzes, courses, certifications, etc. The software was incredible - the business, not so much! They shut it down after two years when he parted ways with his business partner.
He then moved into marketing in 2007 when he was hired by the Marketing and Communications department at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania as their senior web developer. He was the only technologist on the relatively small marketing team at the time. This was his introduction to higher ed marketing and where he began thinking about applying distributed software patterns to the highly decentralised world of higher ed, ideas that found later use in creating Wharton's content management system.
In 2009 he co-founded a second startup with his brother while still at Wharton. It was an online, networked address book called “conXt.” The idea was that if you moved, you updated your contact info, and everyone connected to you would see the change in their own address book. You could use conXt to create lists of contacts or even send out customised, physical holiday cards directly from the printer to the recipients. You can lean back and watch a brief 2-minute video of how it worked.
This startup experience launched him into the world of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Technology. Because he was primarily responsible for marketing conXt, he read and watched everything he could about online marketing, starting with “Inbound Marketing” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of Hubspot. It was through these learnings, and his ability to experiment with them using conXt, that he saw the power of Search Engine Optimisation, email marketing, marketing automation, and Contact Relationship Management systems.
Through these activities, he eventually found his way to the chiefmartech blog by Scott Brinker. Scott’s insights and articulation were a breath of fresh air. Scott put to words many of the ideas Eric was struggling to communicate and work through. It was this combination of Scott’s knowledge and Eric’s experience with inbound marketing through conXt that really jump-started the creation of Wharton’s Marketing Technology team. And while conXt began to flounder, Wharton’s MarTech initiative took off and they began implementing technologies on a variety of inter-connected fronts: the web, marketing automation, CRM integration, and analytics, building their team one by one until where it stands today at nine full-time team members.
These team members run admissions-related Salesforce implementation, a large-scale web ecosystem, a school-wide email marketing platform, marketing automation for revenue sites, and the incorporation of a data warehouse that provides the data for closed-loop revenue attribution.
Creating Wharton's content management system
One of the foundational successes of the Marketing Technology team at Wharton is the Wharton CMS. WCMS is now responsible for 130+ websites, including all of Wharton’s primary revenue sites. As Eric said in our recent conversation:
"Had I originally presented the Wharton CMS as it is today, it would have never been accepted. Being so decentralised, Higher Ed is not constitutionally geared toward most school-wide efforts that require coordination across multiple departments. Instead, we built a platform that was adopted department by department based on its ability to provide business value."
The number of new sites grows every year, and the Wharton CMS is largely run by a team of four people:
A director of web operations
A senior architect
A senior developer
and what Eric would call a power user responsible for training, “customer success,” and creating incredible page layouts.
A point of pride is that the Wharton CMS model has been adopted by other Ivy League schools, such as Cornell.
At its most basic, the Wharton CMS is a Wordpress site and considering that Wordpress runs approximately 45% of the websites on the internet, Eric feels that they are in good company!
There is a single, primary, website which they call “Tabula Rasa.” Tabula Rasa is a simple Wordpress site with a responsive theme applied, branding supplied by Cascading Style Sheets, and the WP Bakery page builder plugin, as well as a few select other plugins which extend the functionality of the site. In other words, it is fully-branded, mobile-friendly, and provides users with the ability to create custom layouts with the page builder.
Whenever a new site is requested, they spin up a copy of Tabula Rasa. This new site is equivalent to Tabula Rasa in every way. The only thing it lacks is content. At this point, the editors and designers associated with the new site get involved to create the information architecture, content, and any design assets needed to individualise the new site to meet the department’s requirements. It is important to note that no one outside of the MarTech team has administrative rights. This ensures that changes that could undermine the integrity of the Wharton CMS, such as a new theme being applied, or plugins added, can’t happen.
For more on Eric’s take on selecting the right CMS for higher education, read this post which he shared a few months ago: Higher Ed usually does not need proprietary website platforms (February, 2023)
All of the sites run on the same hosting provider. This ensures that both the code of the sites themselves and their hosting environment are identical. Whenever changes are needed, or updates or patches need to be applied, they test them first against a development instance of Tabula Rasa. Once those tests are passed, they know that they can safely roll them out to all 130 sites.
The reason that Eric refers to the Wharton CMS as a “foundational success” is that it is one of the first technology platforms outside of an email platform, like Outlook, to be in use across ~98% of Wharton’s digital ecosystem. This ubiquity, in turn, allows them to track users across a multitude of Wharton subdomains, providing the analytics that help power their marketing automation platform, which in turn populates their CRM.
Let’s zoom a bit out once again and look at Marketing Operations at Wharton.
Leading Marketing Operations
Today, Marketing Operations is becoming more common in the US and as mentioned earlier, Scott Brinker really provided the missing corporate vocabulary with MarTech. In short, Eric sees Marketing Operations as an umbrella term covering a large variety of topics in the Marketing realm.
In our conversation, Eric pointed to this recent 2022 post by Chris Elwell on the MarTech site: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals? The post does a great job of covering what Marketing Operations handles. The page also has a helpful table with usual tasks. To quote:
“Marketing technology and operations personnel were responsible for the following at least 70% of the time:
- Designing, running and implementing marketing campaigns
- Training and supporting marketing staff on using marketing software
- Operating marketing software as an administrator
- Researching and recommending marketing software
- Designing and managing internal workflows and processes”
You can clearly see many MarTech items on the list, but as Eric points out, it is not limited to technology. While MarTech may be more technology-focused, Marketing Operations is more “People, Process, and Technology” focused.
Eric would add ‘Marketing Strategy’ to the list and he also stresses the importance of having both micro and macro views into marketing analytics and trends, which provides Marketing Operations folks with excellent insights into what works and what doesn’t.
Level up in higher education
Finally, let’s look a bit ahead, but start with a quote from a few years ago. At a panel discussion on digital's new role in education marketing and outreach as part of Philly Tech Week 2017, Eric notably said
“We are now in a time when brand is not so much what we tell people it is, but what they’re telling each other it is.”
Today, Eric sees organisations spending an enormous amount of money on platforms, but still with plenty of work to be done on moving to a more modern paradigm of marketing, including better listening and being an active part of the conversation where the audience is.
In his view, an increased focus on analytics could reap huge rewards. It’s not easy, but you can create a closed-loop revenue attribution model for higher education, such that it’s possible to see the effect of ads that generate leads and answer whether the students go on to apply and enrol.
There’s also some unique higher education challenges that are making things tricky. Senior leadership tends to want results that stem from enterprise coordination, but that’s not how higher education is. The administrative structures tend to be decentralised, rather than centralised.
In his popular post from March (2023), Higher Education digital needs to move to the next level, Eric listed a high-level action plan for schools that are figuring out how to level-up. The action plan included these steps:
Triple your marketing budget - you can't expect different results by doing and spending the same way you always have
Invest in staff training and hiring and understand that experienced digital marketing staff will be relatively expensive to recruit and retain.
Develop a holistic strategy that considers SEO, email/sms nurture campaigns, general awareness ad-spend, retargeting ad-spend, and at least baseline personalisation.
His closing prediction: Schools that use the next five years to invest meaningfully in SEO and digital marketing to command mindspace will survive the next ten years and beyond. Schools that don't will wind up closing or merging in the next ten years.
Learn more about Eric Greenberg
You can meet Eric in Liverpool at the HE Connect 23 conference which is held in late September.
Feel free to also reach out to Eric on LinkedIn and reference JBOYE.
Eric was also a popular speaker at our Boye Philadelphia 14 conference on Using WordPress as a Distributed, Enterprise-level CMS (link to PPT download).