A Lesson in Nurturing Leads

Once upon a time, our advertising company was driving a lot of leads for a regional college client. With the school’s advertising investment, we were hitting lead goals regularly. Lead gen life was good. The school seemed happy and things were great. 

Then one day…we got the “we want to move on” email. We were horrified. Why would the school want to move on when we were hitting cost-per-lead goals each month? The school’s answer was pretty straight forward - not enough leads were converting to enrollments. It turns out schools care a lot about lead-to-enrollment conversions. Maybe even more than straight lead gen.

So, what’s an agency to do? We asked the college if we could review its current lead contact strategy. Our review revealed the school’s admission team was calling prospective students only once or twice and then only sending a single follow up e-mail.

The contact strategy seemed random and too short to get meaningful conversions. We thought we could improve the process. We started an email campaign based on a lead’s online behavior and sent text messages according to where a prospective student was in the conversion process. The needle started to move. Then we used a tactic that changed everything. 

We started creating custom audiences. The thousands of leads we had generated were put into custom audiences in Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and display. Leads started seeing customized ads and in some cases even the same commercials the school was running on television.  Enrollment rates increased. The increase was enough for our relationship to continue. 

Our belief that custom audience retargeting works was confirmed a few months later. During a quarterly marketing review session, active students and recent graduates were asked questions about the school’s advertising efforts.

I’ll never forget the question asked to one student, “What made you decide to enroll in our school?” The student answered, “I’d see your video ads that kept reminding me this was the place to go.” A traditional media buyer perked up and asked, “What TV stations did you see the ads on?” The student replied, “TV? I don’t have a TV. I see the videos on my phone all the time.” 

A review of the video lead nurturing investment revealed that only a few hundred dollars per month were spent on the highly targeted leads we had generated. Retargeted leads produced a lower cost-per-enrollment. And schools like lower cost-per-enrollment. A lot.

We discovered lead nurturing is not in a separate funnel, rather it’s an extension of the traditional lead funnel concept. Take the traditional lead funnel and extend the other side out to make two equal parts. This is where lead nurturing really lives.

In our experience, a company often pushes out its best messages to those who have never expressed interest in the brand before. Lead nurturing is simply getting the highest impact ads in front of those that have expressed interest and are therefore more likely to convert.

Colling Media is a multi-award winning full-service Phoenix based Advertising Agency providing Traditional, Digital and Content Marketing services to a diversified customer base.