Test, Then Invest: When and How to Improve Your Education Digital Marketing Tactics
One of the most challenging aspects of marketing in today’s fast-paced higher ed landscape is knowing when to make tactical adjustments to the strategy you have put in place. Student desires, communication channels, and institutional policies can change at any minute and your marketing approach may have to adapt accordingly.
Today, we are going to outline a real-world example of how we analyzed and adjusted our strategies to better achieve our partner’s goals.
The Situation
We were getting fairly good results on many of the tactics we had running for one of our higher ed partners. However, we were starting to fall behind the monthly lead and application goals, and the next start was approaching quickly. Our team sat down and examined each digital marketing channel and tactic to see what was working and what could be improved.
Analyze: What is Working?
When you feel pressure to hit marketing or enrollment goals, it’s a natural response to panic, focus on the negative, and start scrapping everything you’ve been doing. In this case, our original strategy was still sound, so we just needed to make some adjustments in each tactical area to make sure it was performing as effectively as possible
Search Engine Optimization
Our main focus was increasing organic traffic, which we know converts better than any other source. Since starting with this client, we increased organic traffic by 207% in less than a year. That bodes very well for the future of the school, but I know from experience that it takes time for higher ed institutions to see the positive impact of SEO on their enrollment, and this partner was in a rather urgent situation with enrollment goals for the fall.
Google Ads - Search and Remarketing
Our Google search and remarketing campaigns were the two top sources of leads, both quantity and quality. In today’s higher ed environment, we were very happy with our cost-per-lead (CPL). Using historic conversion rates for search leads, the student acquisition cost through this channel would be $2,575, putting our hard marketing cost for these students at less than 10% of the degree tuition revenue.
Analyze: What’s Not Working Well Enough?
While the results of a new strategy sometimes take time to be proven successful, a strategy that needs improvement can sometimes be apparent right away. Over the first six months of our relationship with this institution, some channels were still underperforming:
Google - Display
Display was generating the most traffic of any source.
However: bots.
Google still has not solved their bot issue and it seems to impact display (and to a degree, remarketing) campaigns the most. In this school’s case, the majority of the leads that come from display were suspicious, which made me question how reliable any of our display traffic analytics were.
Our main goal with this partner was driving leads and applications for graduate programs. Facebook is no longer an ideal platform for graduate programs and the data backed that up, both on the marketing (click through rates under .3) and enrollment sides (conversions of legitimate leads, applications).
We established a fairly complex LinkedIn strategy, and our LinkedIn audience was responding to our ads (CTR around .75%, over double that of Facebook), indicating that our targeting and messaging are effective. But the resulting traffic was not converting, resulting in a $750 cost per lead this period.
Making Tactical Adjustments to Digital Campaigns
After our initial analysis, we developed tactical and strategic improvements for each channel:
Google Search:
Expand targeting for entire Midwest and Northeast
Increase spend
Bid on program terms for the top 2 or 3 schools in the country for the program
Google Remarketing
Edit our remarketing list to only include people who stayed on the site over 5 seconds. This will hopefully help with some of the bot traffic. This will also decrease the amount we are spending on remarketing because the list will be smaller.
Google Display
Reduce spend slightly
Add the top 2 or 3 schools in our display targeting to target people who have recently searched for those schools
Alternative search engines
Upload our Google search campaign into Bing to get more search traffic to the site. We can get a majority of impression share in Bing while only allocating a small fraction of the search budget
Duck Duck Go partners with Bing, so we can add our campaigns there with little set up and get some additional exposure with very little competition
Pause lead generation (prospecting) campaigns. We can reallocate what we were spending to expanded Google/Bing search.
Use Facebook for retargeting only. Our retargeting campaigns actually perform very well (CTR .93%), and we are driving users back to the school site for $0.64 per visitor.
Switch to In-Mail ads. Based on our experience and our historic open and click rates for similar schools, we project that we can hit the entire graduate audience and generate leads at a greatly diminished cost.
Website
Switch the request for information form from the general “Are you interested in _____?” to instead offer a program brochure or school viewbook as an incentive.
Summary
So, did our tactical tweaks prove successful? After implementing the changes suggested above, our client met their enrollment goal for the fall start. However, this wouldn’t have been possible if we weren’t willing to analyze our initial choices and adjust based on what the data was saying.
When you’re evaluating your tactics, use this mindset: test, then invest. Take the time to experiment with your strategy and use the data collected to determine where to best invest your resources. Try new channels to see what works. Use A/B testing to trial different messaging and imagery. If you see results, great! Keep that in your strategy. However, don’t be afraid to walk away if the numbers aren’t where they need to be.
Lastly, be patient. It’s tempting to have a strong reaction to the initial results of a new campaign, either positive or negative. But, it’s best to wait until you have a few weeks of data to begin making tweaks to improve performance.
If you’re interested in reviewing your current strategy, Little Foxes Marketing would be happy to help. Reach out today and we can offer more information on how Little Foxes Marketing can improve your results.