The Managing Partner of a four-campus Career College in British Columbia, Canada, wanted to increase the volume and quality of leads generated through digital advertising. This Case Study shows what happened with their first agency, then looks at the results after the Enrollment Resources Conversion Team took control.
The marketing budget of a multi-campus Colorado Technical College had grown over six figures invested into both traditional media and digital marketing channels. The Managing Directors wanted to increase inquiries and lead quality generated through their website and digital advertising and decrease their reliance on pay per lead providers. This Case Study shows what happened with their first agency, then looks at the results after Enrollment Resources Paid Search Team took control.
Yesterday I got off the phone with a client. It was a good news call. We’ve cut his cost-per-lead by 43% and increased his lead flow by 106% since Enrollment Resources took over the management of his Google Ads campaign. He was very happy.
But what was interesting to me was the story he told me about how his partner had been reluctant to hire us in the first place, preferring to stay with their previous vendor. It was only after a year of lousy performance that his partner finally agreed, with the caveat that: “You’ll take the blame if this doesn’t work.”
He is looking pretty good now.
I understand that some companies over promise and under deliver to “win” business. We don’t — mostly because Gregg and I don’t like liars. We also know it’s a short-sighted business development strategy, and the truth always comes out anyway.
So, I get that people are cautious about change. I am too. But help me understand something:
One of the outcomes of mobile phone adoption is we have the ‘entire’ world available to us sitting within this little rectangle box, which in turn is constantly attached to our person. ‘Content’ is being dumped into the internet slipstream landing in the little smartphone boxes. Professional branding and PR types compete intensely for your attention. The bi-product is an incredibly pervasive stream of unfiltered media content: cute kittens followed immediately by cops killing people. We as consumers chew on what is mostly crap, each and every day, whether we like it or not.
Back in the day, PR people would get hired by companies to wine and dine assignment editors, writers and personalities to speak favourably about their clients. Media controlled the message and they shaped the content. My Dad was a photo editor at a major Daily. One of his jobs was to sort through images, match them with stories, then write captions and headlines, gluing the story and photos together. His lament was 90% of his job involved being negative, but that’s what sold papers. His thinking behind this was readers would say, ‘at least my house didn’t burn down or my car didn’t crash’. Basically, consumers gained an appreciation of their lives by comparing themselves to the misery of others being displayed in the papers or on the news. Negative news garnered readership which garnered media buy.
The dawning of 2.0 actually came pre-internet, when TV started channeling horrendous footing of war atrocities from the Vietnam War. This jarring violent footage of freaked out miserable villagers, soldiers, mutilated bodies, etc. helped to kick start the Vietnam War protests in the 70’s, catalyzing social change. The Korean War was just as hideous, but its documented footage was not pushed into the living rooms of the masses while eating their TV dinners.
Now 2.0 is firmly entrenched; with thousands of Clickbait sites feeding content to massive information addiction portals such as Facebook. We as consumers have sort of become our own photo editors plus consumers of this massive surge of content engulfs us; most of it salacious, violent or negative in nature.
We have direct daily access to massive amounts of footage that often elicits negative feelings. It is pervasive. Facebook paying over 150 Clickbait companies hundreds of millions a year to generate footage is a ‘small’ example of how big this trend has become. We are being pounded and pounded with amateur and professionally produced news footage everywhere, every day. Much of the footage has an agenda. SUGGING – ‘selling under the guise of’ – is a staple of the PR industry.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is generating a palpable angst with many folks within society, more negative crap than any average person ever needs to know. Marketers need to deal with this collective angst like never before. Salespeople now often have to unspool partially or totally false information previously gleaned online. But mostly marketing and sales types must now fold into their marketing plans the new reality of dealing with the collective and individual fear pulsing within their target market.
If you are asking me how to deal with this societal angst within the context of marketing our stuff, heck, I don’t totally know. I am thinking that perhaps the day of marketers just ‘selling stuff’ is over. Marketing now shapes opinion and self-esteem, in turn shaping our society. Is it our duty now to market in such a way that we leave society in better shape along the way?
I will say, that having awareness and an intention around this question, will in turn, allow ideas and solutions to bubble to the surface…
I’m curious about your thoughts….
Namaste, Gregg Meiklejohn
In this podcast, we explore where schools are spending their marketing dollars and which choices are going to have the best ROI through low cost, high return marketing tactics. To see how the mentioned ScoreCard works, please do give us a call and we’d be more than happy to show it to you!
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A year or so ago I was contacted by Chris, the new CMO of a three-campus school system. He was baffled as to why his lead flow had dropped by 60 leads per month for the past three or four months. Being new to his school, he didn’t really have a handle on the problem yet and wanted help with some insights.
I asked him to Google the name of his school and see what happens. My worst fears were confirmed. He didn’t show up at all. Turns out their website had been “delisted” by Google. Nuked, obliterated, vanished from the search engine. Read more
Recently a school owner approached us asking for strategic advice about Internet Marketing. I mentioned the usual key points; the Internet is not going away, your ranking on search engines is super valuable like owning real estate; never ever let third parties own ‘your’ online real estate, etc…
I asked him who owns the URLs of his websites, his Google Adwords account and his Facebook account. He didn’t know. He trusted the marketing company implicitly to look after his best interests.
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