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Making the Search for Quality Education Less Daunting
Choosing an educational program can be an overwhelming process. It not only involves selecting a course of study, but also comparing schools and their costs. The educational consultants at Australian Training Colleges (ATC) work with prospective students to help them choose the best program that meets their interests and career aspirations.
ATC’s consultants are skilled educational experts because they must know about the minute details of each school’s courses, application requirements, costs and potential career implications. To best help students make the right course selections, ATC’s recruitment team needed an efficient way to record prospective students’ personal interests and career goals. In addition, the marketing team had ambitions to generate between 500-600 direct inquiries per week in order for the sales organization to hit their recruitment and company growth targets.
Reducing Inefficiency of Multiple Systems
When ATC hired Tennille Wosik as Marketing Director, her first responsibility was solving the issue of multiple technology inefficiencies throughout the organization. The sales and marketing teams were using a variety of outdated and point solutions to run their sales recruitment efforts. Having multiple disparate tools caused major inefficiencies that often led to inaccurate reporting on lead flow, sales forecasting and revenue projections. The crux of this problem was due to the fact that ATC's reporting was done manually by using Excel spreadsheets to show marketing and sales data. Another major instigator for Tenille was when she also discovered that ATC’s courses and online products were not being showcased properly, nor creatively, on the website.
At first attempt, Tennille sought after two different technology solutions to solve the issues faced by both the sales and marketing teams. However, after thorough research on tools available in the marketplace, she found HubSpot. The biggest selling point, she quickly realized, was that by using HubSpot, ATC would benefit from a singular, fully integrated system that could impact their entire business.
Attracting Students through Inbound
As ATC recruits to several different types of student learners, developing buyer personas was one of the first critical steps in creating their inbound marketing strategy. By understanding where their target student groups are, what courses their interested in and career goals they seek, it allowed the marketing team to develop highly specialized content and messaging.
ATC created student personas, such as 'Business Bob", based on specific pages viewed on their website and content downloaded. Unique and compelling actions a lead takes then trigger customized marketing workflows to progress through their lead funnel. This allows the marketing team to automatically nurture and educate prospective students with highly relevant information and guide them towards a proper course selection.
In addition to improving marketing messaging to its prospective students, ATC uses HubSpot to create marketing assets, such as educational blog posts, landing pages, and content, in far less time than it took them previously. Prior to HubSpot, they hired offshore developers to create custom landing pages and email campaigns, which not only took additional time but also costs additional marketing spend. It would take several weeks and often thousands of dollars to execute, recalls Tennille, “now that we have HubSpot, we’re able to create all of our own marketing assets, internally, in a matter of hours. We’ve eliminated the cost of freelancers altogether.”
Improving Sales Efficiency and Productivity
One of the main product differentiators Tennille saw with HubSpot was the fact that it encompassed both marketing and sales software. She was able to quickly setup the sales organization with the HubSpot CRM and has streamlined the sales processes with automation, and by using HubSpot Sales email templates.
The marketing team created over 400 email templates for the sales team to use for each buyer persona and recruitment scenario. More than half of these sales email series are automatically triggered when a prospective student visits their website. For example, if a stay-at-home mum has visited their page about graphic design diplomas to help her return to the workforce, she’ll be automatically enrolled in a workflow to receive a series of emails that match her specific career advancement interests and her early stage in the research process.
Implementing these templates has allowed the sales team to spend their days engaging in more productive conversations with prospective students on the phone, instead of spending tedious amounts of time with admin work of copy and pasting emails and data entry into a clunky CRM.
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