Enable College
Enabling Growth with an Australian College
Marketing Award
Services Used
Project Manager
Project Location
Adelaide, Australia
Marketing Award
Services Used
Solution
Lead Generation
Project Manager
Project Location
Adelaide, Australia
Project Goals
Enable College is a Registered Training Organisation located in South Australia providing world-class Aged Care, Childcare and Business courses. They came to Neighbourhood in need of a complete overhaul of their marketing and sales strategies, with a goal to generate quality leads at the touch of a button and convert them seamlessly into students.
Their wants
01
Increased leads for the sales team to work on in preparation for the upcoming intake
02
Conversion optimisation to increase the quality of the leads coming in and shortening the time-to-close
Their needs
01
Thorough updates to old and tired processes to enable scalability and structure the entire process from lead to student
02
Full sales optimisation to ensure there is a well-oiled machine through which to nurture new leads
03
A mindful Inbound marketing strategy that would generate well-educated and sales-ready leads
Identifying the problem
Having started their companies at similar times a few years ago, former classmates Trav, Head of Growth at Neighbourhood, and Paul Denver, CEO of Enable College, caught up to discuss how their respective businesses were tracking. Airing his frustrations over a glass of wine, Paul expressed concern that a lot of their current processes were excessively manual, and still relied on paper-based transactions, disconnected apps and an old CRM that was interfering with cross-department synergy.
The lack of structure or strategy was leading to bottlenecks at every stage of the process, stifling lead generation, reducing conversions and ultimately turning students off from enrolling. Having heard this story many times before from previous clients, Trav left the meeting determined to create a plan to get Paul's marketing and sales departments back on track.
Scope of works
Marketing & Growth
Buyer persona workshop
Content generation
Branding & website design
Inbound marketing campaign management
Sales & CRM
Nurturing processes for new leads
A funnel to categorise and communicate with leads
Sales process automations
Sales pipeline and deal staging development
Set up of e-signing integration technology
The Plan
- Nine in-depth onboarding workshops
- Revamp of current the systems
- Two major objectives
- Restructure of sales pipeline
- Optimise customer experience and conversions
Nine in-depth onboarding workshops
- Enable College was looking to introduce HubSpot Marketing and Sales Pro across the company, so we began our engagement
- By supporting this roll-out with nine in-depth, purpose-built onboarding workshops, getting the entire team proficient in the nuts and bolts of the HubSpot software
Revamp of current the systems
- At the same time, we started our revamp of the current systems which included an old CRM, in-house paid advertising, manual contract-signing and an entirely separate Learning Management System - Accelerate.
- We quickly prioritised the integration of Accelerate with the HubSpot CRM, allowing the student journey to be tracked and managed from first-touch, and then did the same with Pandadoc, eliminating the need for paper contracts and their associated headaches.
Two major objectives
-
With the onboarding workshops still in progress, we moved into the second phase with two major objectives:
"Improve the efficiency and output of the sales team, and in turn, improve the buying experience for the potential student."
Restructure of sales pipeline
- With the sales team spread thinly across both lead generation and deal closure, we recognised the urgency of making their working lives easier. We started with a root-and-branch restructure of the sales pipeline, mapping out each stage of the process inside our wireframing software, Whimsical, and optimising the data flows to ensure all our leads and opportunities were exactly where they needed to be at the end of each stage.
- We then built out the new pipeline in HubSpot with a series of stage-based workflows to automate the staff's data management and communication tasks, including the development of highly tailored and personalised automated emails for use throughout the pipeline.
Optimise customer experience and conversions
- Having addressed the efficiency of the Sales team, we moved to our next objective, to improve the customer experience and encourage swifter conversion. We completely redesigned the website, simplifying the architecture by stepping out the map inside Whimsical, and crafting a seamless and mindful customer journey backed by research and CX best practice.
- Coupled with a full brand freshen up, we were confident that the new look and feel of the website would both attract and effectively lead new contacts to conversion.
The Strategy
With the optimised sales pipeline and new website set up, we finally had a well-oiled machine through which to funnel new leads.
- Full buyer persona workshop
- Crafting content for the buyer personas
- Contextual lead-nurturing sequencing
- Google and Facebook Ad juggernaut
Full buyer persona workshop
- Now ... where to find them? Our marketing effort began with a full buyer persona workshop, establishing a clear and company-wide understanding of the goals, challenges, pain points and characteristics of the different student archetypes.
- With this consensus around the messaging required to attract and engage prospects, we then developed our first Inbound Marketing Campaign to address the mass 'challenge' of students in their local area: "How to Get a Job Fast in Adelaide".
Crafting content for the buyer personas
- We followed the buying funnel process, creating blogs and articles about "how students might nab their dream job quicker" to generate SEO and organic traffic (as Top-of-the-Funnel content) and designing an array of guides, toolkits and downloadable content "to explain their options" (as Middle-of-the-Funnel content).
Contextual lead-nurturing sequencing
- Once we'd crafted our content, we created the all-important bridge to enable the prospect to move from TotF content to MotF content, setting up contextual lead-nurturing sequencing to support the prospect throughout each stage of the journey from awareness to consideration (with company articles and course information), and from consideration to decision (with case studies and student stories).
Google and Facebook Ad juggernaut
- While SEO can be an incredibly lucrative form of traffic-building, without a little nudge it might take months to see the necessary ROI. With this in mind, and as the final enhancement to the campaign, we developed a Google and Facebook Ad juggernaut to lead our targeted demographic to landing pages that utilised smart content to cater for potential students' varying stages of awareness with the College.
The Results
50%
Increase in Leads
(in the first 3 months)
35%
Increase in Student Base
(in the first 6 months)
525%+
Paid Advertising ROI
(in the first 6 months)
The introduction and integration of Hubspot as the CRM, the optimisation of the marketing and sales activities which that tool allows, and the redesign of their website, sees Enable College operating very differently these days.
In the first 3 months of the campaign, the College saw 450 leads come through the door (an increase of 50%). After 6 months the student base had grown by over 35% and the ROI from the paid advertising spend had hit 525%.
Over the course of Neighbourhood's tenure with Enable College, our website and marketing updates have achieved a 'session to contact' conversion rate of 8.66% (the industry average is 2 - 3%), and our sales pipeline optimisations and lead nurturing sequencing have delivered a 'contact to customer' conversion rate of 21.02%. As a direct result, revenue has increased by an eye-catching $1,800,000 year on year.
The Impact
"Trav and his team at Neighbourhood turned our marketing around from the point where we were sitting around waiting for the phone to ring to getting on the front foot, targeting our audience and message and using HubSpot to automate so much of the funnel process. Now we are able to turn the lead tap on and off depending on our capacity to cope with the increased inquiries. Neighbourhood know HubSpot and was able to get it all rolling for us with little to no technical input from our end. I would recommend the whole package to anyone - get Neighbourhood to manage your digital marketing and get him to set up HubSpot for you."
Conclusion
We're incredibly proud of what we've managed to achieve in our partnership with Enable College. The optimised and automated processes have clearly put valuable time back in the day of the sales team, and together with the website redesign these have paved the way for all future Inbound marketing efforts. Our goal at the outset of our partnership was to help Enable to reinvent their strategy from top to bottom ... and we're just stoked to be able to say that we did that!