Case Study: CAHE
Lead Gen for Higher Education
A Multi-Channel Approach Generating 10,000 Leads a Year
Center for Allied Health Education (CAHE) is an accredited healthcare education institute offering a range of programs including Radiography, Sonography, EMT training, and more. Located in Brooklyn, CAHE is one of New York’s most respected healthcare schools. Like most higher education providers, generating quality inquiries from prospective students is key to the school’s growth and success.
Bottom-line results
500+
Keywords ranking on page 1 of Google
2000+
Leads generated by AdWords within cost parameters
200%
YoY increase in Facebook traffic and leads
20+
YoY increase in organic traffic – 2 years consecutive
10K+
Leads generated during the year overall
The Challenge
The higher education market is one of the most active and competitive areas for lead generation. Education marketers face many challenges including aggressive CPCs, long and complex customer journeys, heavy seasonality, and more. To put it simply, higher education leads are expensive to generate and take a long time to nurture into paying students.
These were some of challenges that CAHE presented to OpenMoves more than 2 years ago. In response, OpenMoves (OM) worked to create a comprehensive digital strategy including Facebook, AdWords, SEO, Marketing Automation and more, that ultimately generated over 10,000 leads for CAHE in 2017.
“Working with OpenMoves has been a major driver of growth and success for our online applications. The program developed by OM has consistently generated quality leads at affordable rates and across multiple channels like Facebook and Google. They’ve been a great reliable partner for more than 2 years and really have helped my team grow the business online.”
-Elna Beyn – Marketing Mgr.
Generating Leads Across Multiple Channels
The education market in New York is very competitive. Succeeding in this space required strong coordination across SEO, paid search and paid social to allocate time and budget to the best channels at the right times and across the right programs.
- Finding Audiences on Facebook. There was no doubt that CAHE’s audience existed on Facebook – it was just a question of finding them. Through a range of structured audience tests OM considered lookalikes, geotargeting, age and gender targeting, interest targeting, and more. Audience learnings from Facebook could then easily be applied as AdWords demographics targets.
- Vetting Lead Quality. It’s not enough to just get a form filled – the applicant needs to be local, interested, and informed. OM found that some campaigns that looked effective “on paper” such as those using Facebook’s Lead Ads creative format actually did not generate leads that converted into students. It was important to measure not just CPA (cost per acquisition) across channels but also channel-specific lead quality to allocate budget correctly.
- Lead Nurturing. Staying top of mind with interested visitors is key to maximizing conversions. OM maintained an effective remarketing and retargeting campaigns on AdWords, Facebook and Instagram to stay top of mind to prospective visitors with relevant banners. Additionally, OM deployed marketing automation to send automated email drips to prospective students that started filling an application form but did not complete the form; these automated drips helped increase student applications.
- Seasons and Programs. Like most education marketers, CAHE had seasonal needs for budget allocation and lead targets. CAHE also had goals specific to each course in terms of target volume and start date. For an agency like OM, it is a challenge to keep core programs stable while also being nimble. Leveraging slow-and-steady channels like SEO allowed CAHE to keep leads flowing in all year, while burst channels like Facebook and AdWords Display allowed fast focus on specific programs and seasons.
- Steady Incremental Improvements. CAHE and OM have been working together for more than 2 years. During this time, the team, goals, and core strategies have remained consistent. Steady focused effort over time has allowed OM to refine the details of the programs, including solid technical SEO, aggressive use of AdWords features, proven Facebook creative themes, and more.
- A Team Effort.Like most successful marketing programs, the CAHE effort was supported by a strong team.
OM was fortunate to partner with Duvys Media, which created the web site and was responsible for the technical and programming aspects of the project–especially in SEO–allowing OM to make fast and effective technical improvements to the website. CAHE management provided overall direction relating to goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) as well as ongoing useful insights into the business, and a strong underlying model that excited students and generated successful outcomes.
Conclusions
Demand for higher education in the US continues to grow as the industry transitions over to diverse, tech-savvy individuals. Education marketers continue to push budgets into digital as other marketing channels lag and attention shifts. The landscape of digital marketing for education is poised to be huge, lucrative, and competitive.
OM and CAHE are proud to have achieved lasting success over the last 2 years and look forward to continuing to help CAHE reach more students with more quality programs.
A steady effort that leveraged the strengths of multiple channels together combined with a strong team allowed this school to generate more than 10,000 leads online in just one year. To learn more about OpenMoves and our unique strategies for education digital marketing, get in touch to get a free SEO and PPC audit and recommendation.
Elina Beyn, CAHE Marketing Manager, together with Alex and Greg from the Open Moves PPC team
