Perpetual Marketing Model

SERIOUS Ideas® have developed a breakthrough digital marketing strategy, the Perpetual Marketing Model. Using online advertising and innovative social marketing, it delivered a five-fold return on marketing investment in year one and a new customer demographic to London Business School – creating a self-perpetuating marketing campaign that continues growing organically.

 

The London Business School wanted to market a new postgraduate business degree programme, Masters in Management, designed specifically to target immediate graduates with little or no experience and provide them with the business skills and acumen to broaden their career prospects and enable them to stand out in a crowded graduate job market.

In short, the challenge was to identify, persuade, pre-qualify and ultimately convert elusive 19 to 24 year old graduate students onto a new and untried business education programme worth £21,900 within 11 months.

 

 

What made the challenge more difficult was that target student audience was not currently a demographic the LBS catered for and, as such, the LBS had limited experience with, and no data on, the potential student’s lifestyle or influences.

There were risks, too. As the programme would open the LBS up to this less experienced audience, the launch announcement was met with some stakeholder opposition – primarily concerned with the degradation of the brand and resource availability. The scrutiny of its peers worldwide and the unfavourable exposure in the business community if the programme was cancelled was a serious consideration.

When it came to the students themselves, SERIOUS had to ensure that any marketing programme attracted candidates of the highest calibre. LBS entrants must have completed the Graduate Management Admission Test® (GMAT®) with a score of at least 600 and demonstrated achievement in their current studies and extra-curricular activities.

Then there was the matter of finance. The Masters in Management programme costs in excess of £20,000 for a year per student. In a beleaguered economy, cash-strapped bankers and even the most financially comfortable may think twice upon spending these sums on an unproven business programme.

Traditionally participants at the LBS have either been funded by their employer or had saved/budgeted themselves to pay their own way. As this programme was aimed at young, new graduates, these participants would generally not have the funds to pay the fees themselves. This introduced a new key secondary audience: the financial backers, namely, parents.

This was complicated further by the fact that both target audiences appeared to be poles apart in terms of demographics and areas of interest.

To make things even more interesting, the Masters in Management was not just aimed at the UK, but a targeted European audience.

All these considerations soon made it clear that a natural choice as a marketing platform had to be the internet. Evidence from the Tech Tribe report showed an average 22% increase in social networking, chat and rich content, with undergraduates spending longer on the internet.

Backed by IPA research SERIOUS took the LBS research and marketing teams through a series of lecture-style interactive workshops to establish media consumption, target segments and to discover demographic insights.

This led to the unique new strategy: If potential candidates for postgraduate education linked up with each other via the internet, contributing opinions and making recommendations, they would build a community that would attract its own searches. Once seeded, it would become a self-perpetuating entity.

“In essence, we initiated a self-perpetuating marketing campaign that continues to grow organically developing its own messaging and tone of voice,” says SERIOUS Ideas Managing Director Scott Williams.

 

 

The project was in some way a development of the Wiki – in that information was put into the open online community and allowed to grow through online contribution and debate.

“The difference was that we were ‘seeding’ this debate and directing prospects to sites where their interest could be captured and converted into sales,” explains Scott.

“To ignite interest we had to ‘seed’ information online that could root itself quickly and grow organically through debate, recommendation and word of mouth amongst interested communities,” explains Scott. “We proposed creating a net of online information ’seeds’ that all linked in and out of each other and back to an optimised landing page. Over time this would increase link popularity for the landing page and primarily increase organic search results for the established keyword list.”

These ‘seeds’ were established on low-cost social networking sites, user generated content sites, online forums and using online PR & editorial content placement.

“The seeding activity needed to be carried out prior to any paid advertising in order to provide a foundation and information network for any party stimulated into active search by the paid advertising. This was designed to dramatically increase the return on investment of the paid advertising and improve conversion rates at minimal cost,” says Scott.

“The extent of our ‘seeding’ of information needed to be large enough to give the appearance of an online buzz but small enough to manage within the budget scope. The way this was achieved was to target key search terms and particular social networks.”

From the analysis of the research it was clear that a good majority (89%) of the target student audience actively engaged in social networking (64% Facebook, 20% MySpace, 8% Bebo and 8% others). As the majority of the content on social network sites relates to personal activities, interests and opinions, it was important to provide ‘link-baiting’ content on these sites to encourage viewers to pass it on to their friends. To kick-start the traffic into these group areas a short-term display advertising campaign was initiated on Facebook and other popular post graduate sites.

SERIOUS backed up the social networking content with a blogging campaign. Members of the team registered on postgraduate information forums/blogs to seek out questions that genuinely needed a response regarding the Masters in Management programme.

The tone and content of each post was kept at an advisory level and each post was a direct response to a question in which the Masters in Management programme actually suited the enquirer.

They reinforced the campaign with online PR posts to syndicate key press releases to targeted audiences. These were aimed more at those supporting potential students, decision makers such as parents and educational mentors.

The press releases had an editorial style and provided factual data that would aid the decision maker in their assessment of the programme value.

The site link was also added to various user-generated content sites (like Wikipedia) and was distributed to a host of free-to-list directory sites.

In addition, SERIOUS used targeted email marketing in affiliation with identified high-value universities. Emails were collated and sent out to university student unions who could then distribute them to targeted groups on their database.

The agency also adopted paid search engine advertising (Pay per click), and targeted online display advertising was used throughout the campaign to raise initial awareness and interest.

SERIOUS then filtered the online traffic to reduce vetting responses and dealing with enquiries. The filtering was a three-stage process:

 

Stage one – awareness/natural interest filtering

SERIOUS placed awareness and response advertising in targeted areas to stimulate click through or specific active search. This stage was where the majority of the paid advertising was used and various messages helped filter the right leads. A click through or product specific active search allowed the candidate to cross the first filter that is “natural interest level”.

 

Stage two – self-selection

Once the candidate entered into active search or clicked through into stage two, they found themselves within a pre-made hotspot of information. Each site specifically linked to other sites that contained relevant information. This stage made use of free and low-cost online PR, social network sites, user-generated content, blogs, forums and Wikis etc.

The success of this stage relied on the targeting of content as well as the amount available and how it was linked together. Stage two provided enough information to filter the candidate further by both mental ability and financial status. If the candidate had undertaken the GMAT® test (or is prepared to) then they passed the “mental ability filter”. If the candidate could afford the cost of the programme then they passed the “financial filter”. If both filters were passed then the candidate would generally click through into the landing page.

 

Stage three – the landing page

This third stage is referred to as the conversion generator. The vast majority of visitors will have navigated through enough information to ascertain their suitability. Thus the landing page was optimised maximising the chances of keeping the visitor’s interests high enough to make a purchase.

 

More than 100 back links were created through to the main Masters in Management page and from seeding initial interest over 40 sites were reported to contain blogging conversations. This was in addition to the dedicated Facebook group.

 

The SERIOUS campaign also brought increased online brand awareness for the LBS course by creating the number one organic Google search for “Masters in Management”, the number eight search for the general word ‘Masters’ and the number one search for the string "management" & "masters"

 

 

With no previous activity and bringing a new product to market without any other form of marketing, it was clear that the return of marketing investment could be directly attributed to the activities carried out in SERIOUS’s campaign.

Results showed a 135% over response targets.

On the incremental revenue and net contribution front, by the third week in April SERIOUS were 125% over their conversion target to deliver 100 students to the programme for September 2009, producing a revenue stream of £2,190,000. This will deliver an incremental revenue of 87.5% against agency spend and an 80% incremental revenue earning against overall investment allocation for the first year.

Meanwhile, LBS is inline with achieving its net contribution taking into account incremental costs and the overall operating costs of running the programme.

“To a degree, this campaign was all about anti-marketing, not overtly directing the prospect to take out a single key message through advertising,” says Scott Williams. “The messaging and creative in paid-for advertising played an integral part in the campaign