This article was originally published as a case study in the Fall 2020 issue of Perspectives, NAGAP’s newsmagazine. DD Agency and Kent State University have worked closely together over the past several years to increase interest and enrollment for the Division of Graduate Studies. Read more to learn about the challenges we overcame, the strategy we built and executed, and the amazing results we’ve seen.
In 2017, Kent State University’s Division of Graduate Studies realized that it needed to get (even more) serious about recruitment and enrollment. They were seeing a significant decrease in applications over the prior year, with only 2 out of 3 applicants completing their files once the application was submitted. Even more concerning was that inquiries were trickling in at an extremely low volume of roughly 600 per year.
On top of that, their marketing efforts relied heavily on GRE names that were sent a basic email drip sequence, which produced very few conversions. Their website was generating under 10,000 visits per month, with a very low new contact conversion rate of 0.5%.
In order to turn things around, they didn’t want to just add in some more tactics here and there, incrementally, and cross their fingers to see if they worked. Instead, they wanted to build a comprehensive program that generated an ongoing stream of conversions at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
That’s where DD Agency came in to build a full-scale inbound enrollment plan that included strategies for SEO, digital ads, social media, content publishing, lead conversion, and advanced marketing automation.
In order to build an inbound marketing program that generates ongoing lead conversions, you need to have the following basic components in place:
After 12 months of ongoing content creation, publishing, remarketing, and a lot of technical improvements through better marketing automation, we were able to look closely at the data and dive into the performance metrics of each tactic. Here’s what we achieved in our first year:
(Pssst…. Want to see results like this? Grab our newest guide, DD’s Deep Dive: Enrollment Marketing Benchmarks Report).
The best part about inbound marketing is the compounding value of evergreen content that keeps working for us year over year. Yes, we do have to augment and republish certain articles and long-form resources here and there, but that’s all part of SEO best practices that ultimately help increase our organic search rankings for dozens of keywords we want to be winning on.
To give you a real sense of SEO growth in terms of keyword rankings, back in June of 2017, Kent State’s graduate studies website only ranked for a total of 53 keywords in the top 10 positions on Google. Now, three years later, their site ranks for 213 keywords in the top 10 positions — that’s a 400% increase!
Benchmarks from the last 12 months continue to climb:
Each year we add more advanced tactics and content offers (chatbots, smart content, progressive forms, etc.), and they aren’t all home runs. But the difference today is that we are able to make extremely quick adjustments at the tactical level — such as changing our digital ad strategy in light of COVID-19 — which prevents us from wasting time and money in areas that aren’t producing worthwhile results.
We’ve found this especially necessary during the pandemic as Kent State, like every graduate school, has had to adjust their enrollment marketing strategy to favor more virtual events, more digital content offerings, and fewer traditional in-person events.
Enrollment marketing has changed forever in the past 12 months. If you’re still using tactics from 2+ years ago, you’re not going to see the results you want. Download our free guide, DD’s Deep Dive: Enrollment Marketing Benchmarks Report to learn:
Read the full case study with Kent State University in this edition of NAGAP Perspectives.