The primary responsibility for the design and delivery of this project rested with me, which is cool as I like doing new stuff and learning new things.
Now marketing automation has become the buzzword du jour, but what is it really?
In its most basic terms it is this:
"In the ideal world you would make direct contact with your prospective customers with quality content/information/offers at precisely the right time."
Now given that prospects come into your database at all different times, wanting different info about different products, with differing levels of urgency. Doing this manually is downright impossible.
Marketing Automation at least give you a chance at doing this.
So, how did we implement it for us?
Firstly we needed to convince stakeholders to come along with us. That means explaining the concept, describing the realities that in order to grow we need to do different things and then using the powerful word 'pilot program'. Pilot programs are great, they seem less-risky even if they aren't and you are still betting the farm on them! But hey whatever helps get you over the line!
OK so we got internal stakeholder buy in, what next?
Resourcing. We didn't have the appropriate software or experienced expertise in-house nor the funding to purchase it, so we went with an external agency to consult with. In hindsight, I would definitely recommend bringing the expertise in internally if possible. Tertiary education is quite complex and you don't get that depth of content knowledge unless you live and breath it each day.
OK so we engaged an agency now what?
Audience identification. With over 200 product lines we couldn't afford to run an AM stream for each we eventually boiled it down to:
- Canberra and regional NSW school leavers - a nice broad catchment, with set deadlines to act for uni and a degree of similarity.
- People wishing to study education
- People wishing to study nursing and midwifery
- People wishing to study law and justice
- Non-school leavers
- International prospects in key territories
Having identified the targets we then mapped the various 'touchpoints' the number of times we would contact these people, where they were hard points (eg application deadlines, Open Day) or moving points (one day after signing up to our database please send them..., when they reach 100 points please do ...).
OK so onto the next step...
Lead Generation. No point having an ongoing discussion with nobody is there? We need to generate leads right?
So we developed white papers - How to Ace Your Exams for instance for school leavers, that we advertised on Google and Facebook, people clicked, went to a landing page and in exchange for their personal details where able to download.
This is the education one...
http://info.canberra.edu.au/education/
The Year 12 one worked by far the best, it was the broadest audience and the whitepaper was the one that had the most timely value. Mind you with 5 weeks to go as of late November, the campaign has already met its target overall. Non School leavers was the hardest one to develop content for as this market was the most diverse. In future I recommend good quality persona research on this audience in order to develop better content.
Alongside this was the next step - content creation. We invested heavily in this making videos about life on campus, videos about why regional students should move to Canberra, infographics about Canberra for International, writing up profiles of students doing exciting work as part of their studies etc, along with other more call to action type EDM's eg Open Day, Application deadlines etc.
I would argue we did OK with content, some if it was really high quality and engaging whereas others tended along the lines of more old school 'push marketing' just using snazzy software to deliver it.
We did learn however that much more successful was our new personalized ebrochures. http://canberra.easybrochurebuilder.com/?_ga=1.130089359.1083457024.1442287867 - we were originally going to treat this as a separate project but it was so successful that we rolled these leads into our MA project.
Moving along we also schedule telephone call outs with our customer enquiries centre for key deadline periods.
At present the results are positive but we won't know for sure until March next year.
Observations:
- You really need internal staff and software to do the best job
- You need to be well ahead of the game in terms of content preparation as if you fall behind it can be like chasing a roller coaster to catch up and quality can suffer as result.
- Keep the value exchange for lead generation broad. The more niche you go the lower the returns for effort. Year 12's, Brochure downloads etc were a lot more successful than other types. Even better would be to frame the audiences used for MA around certain broad personas or archetypes and chase after those. So utilize research first.
- Systems integration is important - we had a lot of challenges getting four separate systems to talk together. Things that can work with existing systems such as website CMS's, existing CRM"s etc are much better.
HOW IT WORKS FOR THE ARTS - Now I know many of my readers are still from the arts world - how can this work for you? Well one piece of marketing automation I always thought would work for arts ticket sales is trigger points. Imagine a ticketing system that knew your genre preferences and your buying patterns and so you could automatically trigger a direct EDM at that precise time - "Dear Ricky - we know you love Paul Kelly, just to let you know he arrives here in six weeks, we've taken the liberty of reserving a seat for you, to take advantage please click here...".
Of how about the fact that the average attendee of the performing arts only attends each 18 months, imaging sending people a free $20 gift voucher at 18 months to get them into the habit of attending again. Most vouchers never get used but those that do convert will have been saved from slipping into non-attendee land.
There's so many ways this technology can be used.
Anyway that's my bluffer';s guide to my first experience delivering an MA project. If you have worked on one I'd love to here any comments and experiences you may have.
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