Melbourne City Institute of Education
Helping an award-winning RTO in Melbourne to attract and maximise student enrolments and streamline their student acquisition journey.
*Year on Year Growth
Background
Melbourne City Institute of Education (MCIE) is a recognised Australian RTO in the education space, delivering nationally accredited qualifications across multiple industry sectors including, Early Childhood Education, Aged and Disability Care, Hospitality, Business, Leadership and Management, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
Teaching and learning at MCIE is specifically designed to ensure that both local and international students get a vibrant, innovative, and dynamic experience. MCIE is honoured to be recognised as the 2020 Winner of the International Victorian Education Awards.
Having established an industry-leading reputation of excellence for education digital marketing services, SearchMax partnered with MCIE to initiate all its digital marketing campaigns. MCIE had a clear vision from day one to attract high-quality student prospects and deliver optimal returns on investment.
The Challenge
The education market in Australia is saturated with many competitors. With Melbourne being a high-ranking education destination, MCIE wanted to stand out from the competition while generating high quality local and international student prospects.
As MCIE offers a range of courses that caters to different target markets, the approach and strategy for each course needs to be clever and innovative. Furthermore, attracting the right audience for the right course was critical. A bold enrolment driving plan is needed to achieve the desired results.
With the global pandemic and the social distancing rules, MCIE had to quickly adapt to the situation. They shifted all face-to-face learning to virtual learning, and SearchMax as their digital marketing agency had to revisit the existing strategies to deliver more effective results.
One of the more recent challenges is the Apple iOS 14 update that prevents data collection and ad personalisation. SearchMax had to configure a new plan to overcome this new emerging challenge as well as the constantly changing COVID-Safe regulations.
Our Approach
With clear student lead generation goals, SearchMax created high impact digital marketing campaigns on both Google and social media platforms. To get the best possible results via paid campaigns, post-click optimised landing pages were created for each course.
Our approach on Google search was mainly to keep our campaigns, ad groups, and keywords really tight. This means our ads were appearing on the search engines to the right audience at the right time, with a lower cost-per-click and higher relevancy. Our approach to social media ads was quite different yet powerful. The initial step was to create different audience personas for different courses. We conducted trials and tests of different types of ads to see which works best for MCIE, and over time, we observed that lead generation ads overlaid with detailed interest and ethnic targeting secure the highest quality student prospects with the lowest cost-per-lead.
With COVID changing the ways business had to be conducted, we had to rethink our approach. With no new international students entering Australia, the focus was shifted to local students and online learning. SearchMax was able to create a powerful digital marketing campaign for the local audience by converting its face-to- face classes to distant learning in order to deliver a constant source of leads throughout the pandemic. SearchMax’s strategic approach also includes re- engaging with old leads to maximise student enrolments. Effective retargeting strategies and lookalike campaigns have helped to bolster enrolments and strengthen the existing leads pipeline.
And while the Apple iOS 14 release impacted the overall results in social and
remarketing, we are testing new ways of targeting users on social platforms and segmenting users based on the OS system. While it is very new, we can already see our leads have started settling down.
Results
Since partnering with SearchMax, MCIE was able to achieve impressive results. From month one we have gone above and beyond to achieve the monthly targeted leads with a lower cost-per-lead than projected on both Google and social media ads. Their account has grown from promoting just 2 courses to expanding up to 7-8 courses.
Through proactive campaign management and effective strategies, year-on-year SearchMax was able to increase leads by 140%. Year on year, the overall conversion rate increased by 36%.
The overall digital marketing offering for MCIE has evolved far more than just generating quality student leads as data is critical to everything we do at SearchMax. From weekly updates to monthly client meetings, we are constantly in communication with the client to maintain their expectations and goals.
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