November 18, 2024
Mackenzie Prinslow
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The SearchStax team attended, exhibited and presented at AMA 2024 – here’s what we learned from the ground floor of higher ed marketing.
The AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education 2024 wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. It was an amazing opportunity for SearchStax to connect with higher ed marketing and website professionals and learn about their needs, challenges and areas of focus heading into 2025.
Here are the biggest takeaways from our conversations and session learnings over the 4-day event.
“THAT’S what you can do with search?!” felt like a common theme as we chatted with university website professionals throughout the event. It was clear that many university teams know that their site search leaves a bit to be desired, but they don’t really know where to start. And what’s more, they didn’t know the possibilities of site search as a marketing tool.
Chief among those possibilities is personalization. Higher ed marketing teams have been trying to improve the website experience through personalization for decades now. When we chatted with higher ed marketers about how optimizing site search can be the first step toward personalization, they were both surprised and excited.
Why was that their reaction? Because the need for personalization is so dire. Just take a look at some of the things we heard in our chats on the AMA floor:
While .edu search remains a top priority for web teams, there was an overwhelming amount of enrollment-focused marketing folks at the event who don’t have control over the .edu search experience. They own the student lifecycle experience and their responsibilities are split between supporting current students at every stage as well as new student acquisition.
So how do we help them? SearchStax can:
We can make just about anything searchable; this is mission critical for marketers who need to serve a diverse array of audience personas. Most important among those are current and prospective students who need easy access to all aspects of campus life, course and faculty info, events and more.
Conversations throughout AMA revealed that the need for making everything searchable is high. Think about it; when you go to Amazon to find your next book, what do you do? When you go to Google to discover restaurants near you, what do you do? When you go to Netflix and want to watch a specific movie, what do you do? You go directly to the search bar to find what you need.
Higher ed marketers want to create a website experience that’s up-to-date and optimized for our increasingly search-first society (especially for Gen Z and younger).
One of the biggest buzzwords in the last 5 years is AI. And even among higher education marketers, who are not historically the fastest adopters of new technology, there’s a clear desire to (or almost even pressure to) implement AI for their website experience.
AI was a key topic across conversations and multiple sessions at the event. This was the perfect time to debut SearchStax’s new AI-powered feature, Smart Match Assist. The feature uses natural language processing to reduce no-results search queries and enhance the user experience. Learn more about our new site search AI feature.
Smart Match Assist was met with enthusiasm as attendees got to see it in action and learn how it alleviates the pain of dead end searches and makes it so much easier to connect website visitors with the right content.
But even more importantly, our booth visitors began to understand that the ROI of our practical AI goes well beyond connecting content to the right visitor persona at the right time. We’re now freeing up marketers’ and IT teams’ time to focus on other strategies and initiatives that are important to their institutions, while they let SearchStax work its magic in the background.
For a rundown on SearchStax’s practical AI offerings, check out our AI features page.
One of the highlights of the event for SearchStax was our session with Texas Christian University (TCU). Our Higher Education Digital Strategist, Jeff Dillon, had a discussion with Corey Reed, Director of Website Management at TCU.
The session provided an overview of the technical and functional improvements in TCU’s site search, such as faceted search, related searches and mobile optimization.
Corey also gave attendees incredible insight into what TCU was missing in terms of site search data with their previous solution and how visibility and accessibility into that data has been transformative since switching to SearchStax.
It was energizing to be around so many higher education folks who are thinking about the website experience day in, day out.
We had tons of traffic to our booth that led to great conversations, discovery about the value of search and fun moments with our raffle bag full of different dollar-value poker chips. (What’s Vegas without a little test of your luck?)
It’s clear that the appetite for AI-enhanced personalization is only going to grow in higher ed. We’re excited by this because that’s exactly what we deliver upon with our practical AI features for site search. We can’t wait to be back at AMA next year with even more AI-enhanced features to tackle issues that are on the pulse of what higher ed web teams are trying to solve.
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