EdwardsCo – MoreVisibility planned a paid placement campaign entirely focused on soft lead generation.

About EdwardsCo.

EdwardsCo. is a consulting company that helps colleges, universities and independent schools increase enrollment, engagement and philanthropy through the use of persuasive communications and brand strategy.  The company’s high profile clients include Yale University, M.I.T and Phillips Exeter Academy.

The Challenge

Although already well-known on the East Coast for working wonders for its clients, the company wanted to expand its own brand awareness  throughout the country. As the country’s only branding company focused exclusively on education, EdwardsCo. also wanted to position itself as the industry expert and generate qualified leads. “We wanted to achieve both branding and lead generation goals with the same marketing dollars. We believed that only online marketing provided the highly targeted, cost effective and measurable approach we needed,” says Maria LaTour Kadison, President of EdwardsCo. “The best practices and ‘algorithms’ of smart online marketing are constantly changing, and we needed a best in class partner to work on our behalf. We called MoreVisibility.”

The challenge for MoreVisibility: how best to reach a niche audience of administrators and marketing departments for colleges, universities and independent schools during the slowest time of the year – summer.

The Solution

To help EdwardsCo achieve their goal, we planned a paid placement campaign entirely focused on soft lead generation.

After helping to define a free information give away that could be used to entice prospects, we designed the campaign with the following rules:

1. All advertising traffic would be sent to a targeted landing page. Since we knew the potential audience for the campaign was small, we wanted to make sure we maximized the traffic by only sending it to a page that would be a 100% message match to the ads we were running.
2. The landing page had to showcase an offer that was frictionless, valuable and free. Because EdwardsCo’s consulting services require a large investment of time and money on the part of the client, there was very little chance a prospect would hire the company from a single campaign experience. Therefore the offer was designed primarily to demonstrate EdwardsCo’s thought leadership, with brand reinforcement only a secondary goal.  No sales information was included. Also, the form to request prospect information was limited to the bare minimum Edwardsco needed to know for further lead nurturing. By not asking too much of the prospect, we hoped to see a higher rate of conversion and a lower bounce rate from the landing page.

Longer term, the campaign aimed to keep EdwardsCo’s name top-of-mind for those seeking experts in branding and communications for the educational market.

Results

Even with a brand new campaign targeting a limited market at the slowest time of the year, we were still able to realize almost a 5% overall conversion rate. Leads generated were more than could have been anticipated at the outset.

Additionally traffic to the main website increased significantly during the months of June and July for both new and returning visitors.

“Throughout the experience MoreVisibility has shown a true alignment with our goals and has shown a real dedication to our success. We are thrilled with the results and are very likely to close a large deal because of the campaign. Plus, we now have a funnel of fresh leads that we know are more open to receiving additional information from us.”