A new digital channel capable of multiplying a university's uptake

The challenge 

Our client, a prestigious private university, contacts us to orchestrate its digital growth with a clear objective: to boost its online training offer. 

In view of this need, we asked ourselves key questions to face the challenge and find optimal solutions: How to capture the business opportunity in the short term, increasing the attraction for the next course? What technological stack is necessary to grow and ensure efficiency? How to predict the demand for new academic products to make the investment more efficient? 
 

The Project 

Within 21 days we diagnose all digital assets and execute the first quick wins. All this is based on the understanding of the digital ecosystem and the actors involved throughout the student recruitment funnel, both national and international. 

We identified a total of 16 lines of improvement, all focused on generating immediate impact while building the positioning of the digital university in a medium-term horizon. To achieve the objectives set, we divided the initiatives into three major areas under a data-driven methodology to identify points of continuous improvement: 

· Data: optimisation, launch and management of performance campaigns, marketing automation and SEO with a clear focus on capitalising on online demand and reducing the number of leads from paid channels. Reducing, to date, 40% of the leads coming from paid channels. 
· Product: construction from scratch of a new site for online training for the first time in the cloud, eliminating dependencies on university systems. We selected a CMS that would provide flexibility that would allow a quick turnaround for new business needs. We were able to launch the site in 2 months, improving the recruitment results by +65% compared to the previous website. 

After this success, we replicated the process for the rest of the university's assets, the domain focused on face-to-face training, as well as the rest of the microsites and associated platforms, achieving improvements in traffic and performance along the same lines. 

· Business: development of an intelligent device to identify the market fit of new products, identifying the potential success of new programs before their development with the aim of guiding business decisions to invest more intelligently in new training programs. 

In a total of 6 months we completely redefined the university and its digital ecosystem, renewing all its channels and positioning it as a reference for both national and international students. And we continue working to ensure that by 2021 online will account for +35% of the university's students. 

Results 

On a global level: 

· More than 250% increase in traffic, improving the positioning for keywords in demand and activating appropriate performance campaigns 
· More than 65% conversion growth, multiplying by 4 the results of the online training site with respect to the corporate website, thanks to its focus on attracting leads. 
· Nomination for the eZ 2020 award as the best open source site of the year. 

In digital campaigns:

 
· More than 103% in online campaign registrations, multiplying by 2 the results of the previous campaign 
· More than 78% increase in CTR in Search campaigns by designing more relevant campaigns for the user 
· 33% CPA reduction for online vs. face-to-face programs