Tecmilenio, a pioneer in positive education
With an educational model based on the science of positive psychology and backed by the flexibility of their programs and academic offering, Tecmilenio has positioned itself as one of the most relevant institutions in educating positive leaders in Mexico.
The institution has 29 traditional campuses, 11 Connect Spaces, and one online campus, located in 27 cities across the country, as well as a community of over 60,000 students, 4,500 faculty, 1,700 staff, and over 100,000 EXATECMI alumni.
Digital solutions at Tecmilenio
With the aim to attract their target audience through different channels and strategies, such as social media, advertising, and website, Tecmilenio required robust technological solutions that would allow them to improve communication, automate processes, and address the specific needs of students, alumni, and parents, all in one place.
One of the institution’s main goals was to increase the number of enrollees through digital channels, which brought to light the importance of understanding how each potential enrollee interacts on social media and other digital platforms.
However, the lack of integration and limited visibility of the lead generation process prevented the organization from conducting a proper analysis of the effectiveness of their efforts. Tecmilenio’s team manually reviewed each platform they used to execute their marketing strategy, but lacked a way to identify the origin of prospects or the nature of their interactions, which made it challenging to measure results accurately.
While it did have forms to collect information about prospects, the manual migration process posed a risk of losing the new contact, or of the contact not being properly updated.
In terms of data, the institution only had those provided by Google Analytics, which meant that if a contact didn't provide their information, there was no way to track that lead. They also lacked precise data about their audience, given that each campus had its own social media strategy with no standardization, which also created a challenge when managing community conversations on those sites.
The lack of visibility and automation represented an area of opportunity in the institution’s marketing and sales efforts. Given that their strategy incorporated different solutions but lacked a centralized tool, Tecmilenio needed a technological solution that would streamline their activities.
One-stop shopping with HubSpot
Tecmilenio was in search of a tool that would allow them to automate communication with their audience while gaining insights into their behaviors and preferences, such as websites visited, forms completed, social media interactions, and email engagements. To achieve this, they needed a comprehensive solution that would combine the sales and marketing functions, allowing them to develop diverse strategies with increased efficiency, management, and automation.
The institution’s interest in inbound marketing led them to discover HubSpot as the solution they needed to monitor their audience’s behavior and develop effective strategies to optimize costs and budgets.
“We analyzed the convenience of Marketo Engage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and integration with Oracle Eloqua, and then we discovered that we could integrate everything in HubSpot with a better cost-benefit ratio,” explains Carlos Franco, Growth Systems Manager at Tecmilenio.
The institution’s decision recognized that tool integration, process automation, and the ability to measure their actions are decisive factors.
“With HubSpot, you can manage chats, social media, follow-ups, forms, landing pages, WhatsApp, and bots, and automate everything,” said Franco.
Tecmilenio onboarded with HubSpot in 2017 and, following an evaluation of its benefits, decided to expand investment in the tool. Once they saw how the CRM platform enabled them to integrate and scale their processes in a single source, they upgraded to a more advanced version. Since 2019, they have subscribed to the Enterprise CRM Suite, which includes marketing, sales, customer service, and operations functionalities.
“We began to scale the use of HubSpot and communicate the results. We saw an increased need for use and so bought the Starter license. In 2018, our results were even better and there was more and more interest in the platform,” adds Franco.
Fast implementation, intuitive set-up, ease of use
The team found HubSpot to be a practical and intuitive solution for their needs. The platform provides extensive documentation for quick, easy implementation as well as certifications to help users become masters.
Carlos Franco emphasizes the user-friendly nature of HubSpot, explaining that he was able to create a full landing page in less than a day after taking a 15-minute training. Additionally, with native Salesforce integration, Tecmilenio was able to exercise detailed control over the journey from prospect to enrollee.
Building solid digital content marketing strategies
Tecmilenio has developed solid digital content marketing strategies that have allowed them to gain visibility of and better track leads. By integrating their operations in HubSpot and automating their processes, the institution has successfully structured its digital efforts and is able to measure the results of each action.
The institution’s strategies to attract leads and interact with their audience are based on content marketing. In terms of social media, over 30 accounts belonging to the different campuses have been integrated into the Social Media Manager to help manage posts from one place.
“We integrated everything in HubSpot to post from there so that national content would be available across accounts. That way we could standardize our messages and processes,” comments Tania de la Garza, Social Media Leader at Tecmilenio.
Moreover, they segmented their messaging to optimize flows and standardize the brand’s efforts, which allowed them to measure the strategy’s performance and analyze their audience’s behavior across digital channels. Additionally, they utilize the inbox of the different social media accounts to reduce response times from 29 hours to a mere 15 minutes.
Another key piece in creating valuable content is the institution’s blog, which has helped to increase traffic to their website and position the brand in search engines. For this, they rely on the SEO functionality, which suggests improvements and scans the pages to detect areas of opportunity at a technical level.
“With HubSpot, it is very easy to rank high on Google. The tool allows us to visualize blog traffic parameters and provides a level of queries for each post to better understand why a reader arrives, through which keywords, and the average position of keywords”, explains Carlos Ortega, Digital Content Leader.
Since December 2021, they have posted over 200 blog articles, a metric they believe is key to sustainable growth, having increased their number of views to more than 50,000 in a single month.
Another important tool for Tecmilenio is email marketing, which allows for continuous communication with their audience by providing segmented information about the institution’s academic plans and other services.
Ad campaigns are one of the most important channels for lead attraction. Jonathan López, Digital Campaigns Director, explains that “paid advertising is an important part of the institution’s growth.” To that end, they have native integration with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Ads. Since implementation, the institution has seen exceptional results in terms of traffic and lead generation.
Sales Hub has also helped the institution to meet their objectives. Its most useful functionalities include call management and automatic record assignment workflows.
“With HubSpot we can easily organize our work teams by creating profiles and views, and granting permissions to manage processes within the same platform and without interfering with the workflows of other users,” comments Anakaren González, Digital Intelligence Leader at Tecmilenio and HubSpot account administrator.
She emphasizes that work profile customization has contributed greatly to achieving each team’s goals as they are able to serve various communication channels, such as chats, inbox, emails, phone calls, and WhatsApp for several business lines, all in one place.
A centralized digital ecosystem
The ability to incorporate several subdomains and digital assets in the same platform has been hugely beneficial for the institution’s strategies, as they are now able to connect all of their tools and better track the behavior of their prospects, both organic and across paid advertising campaigns, thereby gaining visibility of their journey and measuring each effort.
This has helped the institution to better understand their audience and to complement their objectives by being able to integrate all actions in one platform. For Tecmilenio, this is a true end-to-end solution that gives them the security of having all their assets in one centralized digital ecosystem.