Many marketers are faced with the challenge of trying to address the unique needs of a wide variety of audiences. Some deal with widely divergent demographic groups. Others must reach multiple stakeholders in an organization across departments, management levels, and job types. Different segments require diverse messages and offers – and sometimes, finding new channels to deliver your messages where your target audience is most likely to see them. But the rewards of customizing content and campaigns to your customers are immense, especially when you can automate the process.
Consider the customization demands of an educational institution, for example. The marketing team at a school must target some fairly diverse audiences. Potential students, current enrollees, teachers, guidance counsellors, alumni, administrators – they’re all looking for very different things, and manually delivering unique content would be a time-consuming process. This is a case where marketing automation really shines.
Back to School
A recent case study with Blue Mountains International Hotel Management School provides an excellent example of the power of automation for creating customized campaigns. Blue Mountain is Australia’s leading institute for hospitality education. The school provides internationally recognized advanced degrees in management and business programs, which are highly respected in the global hotel, restaurant, catering, and event management industries. With over 1,000 students from around the world enrolled in two campuses in Sydney and Leura, Blue Mountains offers degree courses in international hotel and resort management, event, restaurant, and catering management, as well as master degrees in international hotel management and global business management.
The marketers at Blue Mountains have been marketing to a variety of audiences throughout their 25-year history. In addition to connecting to potential students, they’ve also been communicating with the students’ parents or guardians, as well as educational advisors and councilors.
According to James Flannagan, digital manager for Blue Mountains, the school is basically targeting a business-to-business (B2B) audience: “We need to reach out to and appeal to the influencers, the councilors, and advisors of potential students. But we also have a business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-student (B2S) component, where we reach out to our customers, those potential students, as well as their parents, who often are highly influential in the decision making process.”
In order to reach their diverse audiences, the marketing team at Blue Mountains needed to deliver targeted campaigns to specific audience segments. They use a mix of inbound and outbound marketing to reach new students and educational influencers, including print advertising, search engine marketing, and display ads on Google and Facebook.
Finding New Students
Using automated programs, the team at Blue Mountains captures the attention of prospective students and maintains communication with them right up to the enrollment process. They use a combination of targeted emails and personalized phone calls to nurture them as they progress through every stage of consideration, decision, and registration. Using Act-On, the marketing team is able to automate these communications and to pull out behavioral data to quickly target those with the highest interest level.
Onboarding and Engagement
By taking advantage of Act-On’s easy-to-use integration with Salesforce, the Blue Mountains marketing team sets up programs that ease new students through the onboarding process. This also helps them get to know their new students better by understanding how they engage with emails they’ve received on new courses, housing, and extracurricular activities.
Automating the Process
The school is continually expanding its marketing plans and exploring new ways to use marketing automation. Currently they send about 1,000 recruiting emails a month through their automated programs. They plan to double or triple this in the month prior to student enrollment. They also plan to increase overall email volume in order to include surveys and alumni communications.
Read the case study to learn more about the ways Blue Mountains is using marketing automation to target unique audiences with relevant, timely communications.
Or if you would like to see how marketing automation can help you power up your marketing programs, take a peek at our 10 minute demo video.