One school’s marketing strategy
A video case study

We Asked:
To gauge the returns from their marketing initiatives—and perhaps to understand, more generally, how families choose schools—many schools ask families: “Where did you hear about us?”

But if what you say is true—if the way families choose schools includes an extended period of researching and evaluating options—how much weight do you, as a marketer, give the responses to this question?

• “That information is important to us [marketers], and it's very important to admissions. But it’s not the be-all and end-all of how this person found and chose the Lycée—or chose to attend the open house.

  Yes, [families] might tell us they saw an overpass banner [promoting the school], but that's not why they opted to complete that step of filling out a form to attend an admissions event. That overpass banner—that might have been the last thing they saw, or it might have been the first thing they saw. But they [at least] went on our website and saw something that, you know, made them say, ‘yes, this is great.’

  That information collected at the time of the form is valuable, but it's not the whole picture. It's a very small piece of the puzzle. You really need to look at it from quite a few steps back to see, okay, yes, they selected ‘overpass banners’ [on the question-form], but they interacted with our brand more than just this one time they drove down the road and saw the banner. They interacted with us multiple times, but [the overpass banner] just happened to stand out to them.

  So it's important, but you can't really make bold decisions based on that information you're collecting through these forms.”

We Asked:
We know the marketing funnel has multiple stages—and that the process of choosing schools is longer than most consumer purchase decisions.

How, then, do you manage the different stages of your marketing funnel—from awareness to research to conversion?

• “Our goal is to hit all of these. And of course, with all of these, the cost is going to be a little bit higher depending on where [families] are on the funnel: if they’re at the top of the funnel, you’re taking them on that entire journey—from awareness to consideration to converting them.

  We like taking a three-pronged approach, where we use certain channels for hitting the top and middle of the funnel, where [families] may or may not know who we are. We want to make sure that by the end of their journey [through these two stages of the marketing funnel] they definitely know who we are—that they recognize our colours, that they recognize our tone, our brand, the Lycée community, and our values. Then, of course, by the time they make it to the bottom of the funnel, we want to make sure we have ultimately convinced them that we are the right choice for them.”

We Asked:
How does Our Kids factor into the awareness, research, and conversion stages of your marketing and enrolment funnel?

• “One thing that we noticed with Our Kids—we actually did this exact exercise a couple of weeks ago, looking at which channel fits for us in each stage of the marketing funnel—we found that Our Kids fit in all three stages.

  “The first stage is ‘Awareness.’ Our Kids consistently comes up at the top of SERPs [search engine results pages] when you do a Google search. Our Kids—our city profile page—almost always comes up in the top results.

  So that's great for multiple reasons. One, if you're Googling ‘Lycée international de Calgary,’ we come up, but then Our Kids comes up right underneath—or vice versa. So that's multiple ways that somebody who doesn't know about us can find us. If they go directly to our website, that's excellent. If they go on Our Kids, they can easily compare the different schools. But again, it's that one other channel through which they can directly go to our website.

  And so, again, top of funnel: [families] can compare, they can see everything in one place. It's very easy to find information [on OurKids.net]. And again, they don't have to go from website to website to website, which may organize their information differently and can be a little confusing.

  For middle of the funnel: again, that comparison stage [on OurKids.net] is key because they get all that information at the tips of their fingers. They can contact admissions right from that page. And that pop-up that comes up—asking ‘Do you want to visit the Lycée international de Calgary website?’, after 20 seconds on the Our Kids website—is again pushing those interested parents—that high-quality traffic—directly to our website.

  And then the bottom of the funnel: [families have] probably already completed the aggressively-researching stage by the time they're at the bottom of the funnel. But having Lycée [on the Our Kids website] shows that we are a leader in education, that we are credible as an institution, and that we're a good choice for parents.”

We Asked:
Do you evaluate all your channels in the same way? Are there differences worth highlighting?

• The biggest thing that I would say [about Our Kids] is it's not an advertising platform. It's not like when you advertise with the newspaper or whatever. It's a research platform. And that sounds a little silly. But when you think about it, there aren't very many research platforms that you advertise on. So it's a very unique product.

  With advertising platforms, their goal is for users to click on your ads. So, for example, if we do a Lycée ad on a magazine site, our goal is for the person on the magazine website to click and go directly to [the Lycée website]. With Our Kids, they're keeping people on their platform so that they can research your school. [Our Kids] makes sure that the people on the Our Kids platform are quality people that are genuinely interested in your school.

  So to me, as a marketing person, that's the biggest difference between the two: [I’m] okay with parents spending time on the Our Kids platform, because by the time they make that decision to click to our website, they're hot leads.

We Asked:
You’ve said that families are spending time on Our Kids researching you—during this key “evaluation phase” of their decision-making process—and a portion of those families are making their way to your website directly from OurKids.net.

How do you know that these families are any more engaged in researching your school than families referred through other promotional channels?

• “So when we look at each of our referral sites, we look at what their bounce rate is. Bounce rate measures [whether families are] clicking on our page, getting there and being like, ‘This is not for me,’ or whether our page that they're landing on—is it piquing their interest?

  And for each referral site, we have our own internal benchmarks of what we want to hit [in terms of bounce rate]. Some of our sites are a little bit higher due to the nature of the ad. For example, our social media ads: that's a lot more interactive marketing where when you [as a parent] are scrolling on your phone on Facebook, you're not necessarily looking at making that decision now. But it's still important for schools to advertise there—again, going back to that brand awareness [stage of the enrolment funnel].

  With Our Kids, we can see with their bounce rate that parents are staying: they're clicking the link and they're staying on our website. They're looking at multiple pages, which shows that they're interested in what they're reading. They're reading content on our page and they're looking for more. They're actively engaging with our website and they're spending double the amount of time [compared to other referral sources]. So they're not just saying, ‘ah, this isn't for me.’ They want to know more.”

We Asked:
How can admissions teams make better use of Google Analytics to gauge the quality—and not just the quantity—of referrals from their promotional channels?

• “I mean, I think analytics is overwhelming for anybody. And, for admissions, [quantity-focused data] is the easiest data that they collect. So it's easy for them to make these assumptions [about the performance of different promotional channels) on stats that they see because that's what they're getting directly.

  Google Analytics, as a platform, can be very overwhelming, and very easy to get lost in. And if you don't know what you're looking for, it's very easy to make that assumption—whether you're admissions or marketing—if you don't have that digital background knowledge of, ‘what exactly can I find in Google Analytics?’

  I think more people need to look at that because it does provide a much clearer and accurate picture of where your traffic—and the people who are filling out your forms [and engaging deeply with your website]—where they're actually coming from.

We Asked:
If the school-choice process is so protracted, and involves so many possible touch points between the brand and the family, how do you, as a school marketer, grapple with the need to evaluate the return on marketing investment for all your initiatives?

• “I mean, that's the question, right? How do you measure brand awareness? How do you measure whether or not your campaign is successful when there's 12 different steps [that a family might take to choose your school]?

  I think it's hard to say exactly [what influenced each enrolment or lead], but [it does say something that] I can see my referrals—and I only went back four years on Google Analytics—I can see that Our Kids was in our top three referral sites for the last three years. And it’s high-quality traffic. It's people coming to the website with an extremely low bounce rate. They're spending almost double the amount of time [on the Lycée website] compared to referrals from other sources. So the users that are coming from Our Kids are spending substantially more time looking at things. And they're going to more than one page. They're, again, not quite double, but almost double the amount of pages that they're viewing compared to some of our other referral sources.

  [Influence on enrolment] is one of those things that's really hard to quantifiably measure to that point, but we can see that it's quality traffic that we’re getting from Our Kids.”