Using a Comprehensive Marketing Plan to Increase Leads
Case Study
A comprehensive marketing plan is the key to driving leads.
It’s imperative that all aspects of marketing, including your creative, your messaging and your strategy, work together seamlessly to support your brand goals. By prioritizing this tactic, we were able to increase the leads for our client, Cumberland University, by over 300% year over year.
How to Create a Comprehensive Marketing Plan
The first step to create a comprehensive marketing plan is to define the pain points you’re trying to address. For Cumberland University, we determined which areas needed the most attention. Then, we began focusing on the rest of our strategy. Next, we determined who CU’s target audience was so we could begin crafting our content and messaging to resonate with them. If you’re looking for information about defining your audience, download our handy white paper that breaks down how to audit your own social content!
When we first started working with Cumberland University, they had very few creative assets to work with and had been doing minimal digital advertising. After some brainstorming, we implemented a plan to create a steady stream of content with curated messaging that could be repurposed for multiple platforms. These included video and photo assets for social media and Google Display ads, as well as messaging that addressed the university’s various pain points. It’s important for your creative components to all look cohesive. This will allow for better brand recognition as people begin seeing your ads across multiple platforms.
Implementing your Strategy
Once you have your creative and messaging finalized, and you have defined your target audience, it’s time to implement your ads. When planning your ad strategy, you want to make sure your plan works cohesively. This is the final puzzle piece to creating a comprehensive advertising plan. For Cumberland University, we used a combination of Social Media, Google Search and Display ads to reach users at various touchpoints.
Brand Awareness was a big pain point for the university so we used general interest and location targeting to get in front of new audiences. Once we laid the groundwork, we used retargeting to get in front of the same users with more information and drive users to the website, which is where leads began to happen.
Simultaneously, we ran Google Search ads with the same location targeting with keywords our audience was likely to use. We also used Google Display ads to retarget website visitors. All of these strategies worked together to keep Cumberland University in front of users, stay top of mind and strengthen brand familiarity.
When a potential student was ready to research colleges, they would have already seen multiple ads for Cumberland University. This could inspire them to research the school or increase the likelihood of clicking on a Google Search ad since they’ve already heard of Cumberland.
What’s Next
With a comprehensive marketing plan, it’s easy to finetune your strategy once you’ve collected initial data. For Cumberland University, we were able to improve our creative, messaging and targeting to continue to increase leads. We currently average 300 leads per quarter for Cumberland University, with bigger spikes during their key recruitment periods. In 2019-2020, Cumberland University had its biggest recruitment year ever, despite a global pandemic.
