Reasons Why You Need to Look Beyond Lead Generation in the Education Marketing Can Brand Building and Lead Generation go Hand in Hand?

In today's competitive marketing scenario, all brand heads are always opting for more lead generation focused campaigns than brand awareness campaigns in the online marketing space and education institutes are no different to this trend. While the potential customer is looking for the best information online and wants to be assured about the brand, many times brand marketers are not focused enough on brand building online.

So can brand building and lead generation go hand in hand? While many feel it's a boxing match between the two, we have many case studies of the successful online campaign where the digital campaigns for brands investing in the overall brand building have faired well.

1. Reassuring End Customer- Good brand building for the education institute ensures that student and parents are making an informed choice about the quality of education being offered and the chances of online follow up campaigns through university newsletters, Whatsapp messages, SMS from college information desk and digital tools like Facebook campaigns and YouTube videos were all more productive. Brands that invest in integrated marketing have 3 times more chances of conversation and enrollments as compared to those, which did not.
2. Standing out through content- If your blog on the website or your social media page does not have a good amount of content and has no strategy to build traffic then a lead generation campaign linked to your brand might be counterproductive. To engage the traffic generated through the online campaign it's essential that you build good content on both social media and blog. Hence good brand building through content helps to ensure that conversions happen for the institutes.
3. Brands strategic positioning- Today the end user is habitual to engaging with online content through their mobile and desktop. On an average millennial are spending 90 per cent of time online. Marketers cannot miss out on the opportunity to create a strategic position through their digital assets. Many times students look for information on alumina, placement and college life on education institute website and if the brand building is not taken care it can create a negative impact on the potential student.

Case Study- One of the leading private university in Pune, known for its management and engineering courses, adopted a new approach towards their digital campaign. To market the next admission cycle they adopted a 360-degree campaign approach for their paid advertising on various platforms followed by the right content on blogs and social media platforms. The campaign performed 3 times better than the previous digital campaigns leading to 20,000 leads generated from the campaign through the integrated marketing approach. We used drip-marketing strategy to engage with the existing leads/students existing students who showed interest in ad campaigns.

Continuous engagement with the interested leads over various platforms and channels helped to get the conversions from nonpaid platforms too. The overall conversations rate was more than 8 per cent however if you see the break up the leads to conversion percentage was just 4 per cent but because of the right mix post lead engagement tactics, the overall percentage gone up by 100 per cent. Overall expenditure of the university in the ad campaign was half of the previous spends and it leads to a 100 per cent increase in the leads generated and also conversions.

So ultimately a good brand building strategy lead to better performance and helped to bring down the overall CPA as compared to just stand alone lead generation campaign. Ultimately brand building efforts always pay off in long run for all the advertisers.