As part of Laureate International Universities (LIU), THINK Education Group is a leading Australian private education provider of higher education and VET courses (serving qualifications to more than 10,000 students in-person and online). THINK Education comprises six different colleges in NSW, QLD and VIC, providing short vocational courses all the way through Masters degree-level courses across Business, Health, Hospitality and Design faculties.
THINK Education places equal emphasis on theory and practice. Each THINK college has four core values; everyone chooses how and where they learn, everyone has a job, everyone has an edge and everyone can change the world. THINK Education ensures students are equipped with the requisite skills and knowledge to lead successful careers, tackle real-world challenges and shape the future.
Problem
In 2014, the marketing team at THINK that was focused on the school-leaver channel needed to generate sufficient leads to reach an aggressive enrollment quota for February 2015 of approx 120% increase YOY.
Their existing marketing strategy relied heavily on events like college Open Days to generate leads, which were resource intensive. Plus they also had an issue with lead conversion and nurturing of their target market of high-schoolers. They were capturing leads at events of students that were still two or three years away from making a college decision and yet there was very little ongoing lead nurturing in place to continue to communicate to these students over the longer decision making cycle.
As Rachel Delaney, THINK Marketing Manager for the schools channel says
“we were wasting a lot of our energy collecting these and not being able to convert them because we weren’t following up and engaging with them correctly.”
Solution
THINK Education engaged BRIGHT Inbound to create a content strategy that would engage the 15-18 year olds over a three year period and provide inbound marketing execution services as THINK did not have the resources to do it in house. BRIGHT also recommended that THINK implement Hubspot to enable the marketing team to manage the content production and execution process without having initiate a bigger IT development process.
The BeYOU blog was launched in mid-2014 in order to communicate more effectively to the high school channel over the length of their higher education consideration cycle which starts in Year 10.
According to Delaney
“BRIGHT helped us to figure out two things. Firstly how to generate new leads through content marketing, something our organisation had never done before, and helped us realise what content was appropriate and to whom and at what time as well and secondly, the importance of a nurturing strategy for different types of leads. So instead of a blanket approach that we had previously used, we now have a targeted approach”.
Results
The content strategy was really successful. Visit to lead conversion rates for the most popular content asset the “Surviving Year 12” eBook sits around 39.4%. Plus this “evergreen” content continues to generate leads to this date.
“Content that we've created a year ago still provides us with new leads everyday with no promotion behind it, so it just lives on the blog and is acquiring leads through SEO, which is pretty amazing” said Rachel.
Conclusion
As the marketing team at THINK were quite time poor, working with BRIGHT has been really beneficial.“You were able to manage and coordinate lots of the workloads and continue to push through timelines and projects, too. So although you're an agency, you've become an extended part of our marketing team” said Rachel.
Plus THINK found it beneficial to get an external perspective on your audience.
“When you’re working inside an organisation you think you know your audience, but it's really nice to get that fresh perspective as well. BRIGHT really understood our target audience and have taken a tailored approach in solutions such as what kind of material we should be writing and at what times of the year” continued Rachel.
According to Rachel,
“You’re truly passionate about inbound marketing and have full confidence in the result it's going to help you achieve, which I think is really important especially if it's a company that's taking on an inbound strategy for the first time. It can be a little bit nerve-wracking. Plus Sarah was really keen to understand the wider business issues and figure out solutions, for example, how we could use HubSpot technology to reduce manual work not just for myself but for the sales team and so on."
