Background
What happens when you have a business that caters to university students, your business was started in the late ’90s, and you haven’t had time to update or expand your digital marketing presence since early 2000? You end up with a nice to have problem – that you’re doing so much business that you can’t keep up. Though you still need to modernize your marketing efforts as your target customers are some of the most digitally savvy people on the planet so how do you meet their current expectations with a small team, a small budget, and very little time?
This customer engaged me to take on their digital marketing department and completely overhaul it. From strategy, to website, to MarTech stack, and how they would build a team moving forward to engage their audience and deliver a consistent experience that not only draw in new leads but gives them the right reason to convert and become customers.
Challenge
The business focused on providing professional test preparation for examinations that were needed to apply and get into post-graduate programs. Tests like the GRE, LSAT, & MCAT where students not only needed to do well but absolutely excel on them with optimal scores of 95th percentile or better to be assured of placement in post-graduate programs.
Annual revenue had begun to stagnate in the last few years and new growth moving forward needed to be focused on both gathering new customers from digital channels as well as following up and engaging with these customers to have them complete course registrations. This client was already using Salesforce as the CRM but wasn’t utilizing the CRM to its fullest potential.
Solution
I devised a lead-generation strategy that functioned more similarly to the usual B2B digital marketing strategy than what would typically be considered for a B2C business. Because of the high $2000+ cost of the professional exam prep courses, consumers had a tough time visiting a new brand website and immediately registering for the course. They needed additional information about the features, how the service offerings were differentiated from competitors, and potentially a triggering mechanism to give them the 3 main components of any successful digital message (relevance, value, & call to action).
I looked at what we could be doing better to expand how we acquired leads. Leveraging event marketing, we offered sample courses, webinars, and gated content designed to offer enticing and valuable content for prospective students. Though we were able to improve lead generation it came at a high cost. To mitigate this cost I build a dynamic network of digital ads. One that used both net new traffic but also followed up on visitors who didn’t convert and draw them back to the landing pages for lead generation. I also realized that using specific form-based lead generation ads on Facebook & Google ads would make it even easier for a new lead to complete sign-up forms and would lead to further engagement with the event-based assets.
I developed an automated email drip system that followed up with new leads as well as created and maintained an email-based calendar to email leads with calendar-based promotions and messages based on monthly events and the annual academic timeline. To handle this automation and email messaging, we needed an automation platform. One that would connect to both the CRM system in place, but also pick up data from the website & business logic database. This was key as the team size would be low so we needed to offload as much as possible to our automation systems. I selected Act|On as it had a good mix of the needed features and I had experience negotiating on pricing with the Act|On team and was able to get a plan with a near 70% discount from the list pricing. Even more important was that the CRM & marketing automation systems were designed and built with CASL compliant messaging in mind, one where we could use both express opt-in contacts but also those with implied consent but was compliant with a 180-day messaging window.
To fully connect all the disparate digital marketing systems we used Google Tag Manager to handle all the website tags and triggers needed to maintain the ad systems and fully populate Google Analytics. I used Zapier as our middle integration layer to extend the functionality of our automation platform and created a customized ETL program to draw information from our business logic database and add it in real time to our automation platform to be used for notifications and marketing messages.
Results
With each initiative, we saw increases in both customer interest and engagement. With the additional ads supporting the lead generation efforts, we saw a 300% increase in new leads sign-ups per seminar event as well as a 500% increase in engaging current leads who had not attended before. By adding the automation system & the ETL process we were able to decrease customer contacts seeking registration information and free up valuable team member work time. Finally, we ended up with a 15% increase in total annual course registrations & revenue when compared to the previous year.
Learnings
Taking a less orthodox & unusual approach to B2C strategy paid off well for this client. Understanding the specifics of how the business operated and how the expected customer personas may look at the business’s services as well as addressing potential friction points gave us an edge to craft a marketing strategy. One that addressed increasing key performance points and leveraged a marketing automation platform. Managing the full data flow for multiple business systems allowed us to do the work of a much larger team and fire along more digital marketing channels than would otherwise be expected with such a small team.
If your business needs an upgraded digital marketing presence and you are looking for an expert digital marker to understand your business and build a unique tailored solution for your brand get in touch with me and let’s chat about how I can provide a solution for your business.