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Today, we are sharing our experience in building a marketing department for an educational agency that helps with university admission abroad. And, of course, we’ll show you the results we’ve achieved.
Case navigation:
- Our customer
- Our team
- Stage one. Identification of needs
- Stage two. Research
- How we achieved our goals
- Results
- Customer feedback
Our customer
Masterstudy is an agency that helps students enter foreign universities. In preparation for admission, the team:
- helps in choosing a profession using the Harrison Assessments* method;
- selects an educational institution, taking into account the student’s preferences and the family’s financial capabilities;
- accompanies the applicant from the moment of submitting documents to the university to obtaining a visa.
The main advantages of the agency:
- over 15 years of experience;
- guarantee of admission to a university;
- customer support for 18-20 months.
Our team
To work with the educational agency Masterstudy, we have formed a team of the following specialists:
The CMO of the project is Serhii Soloviov.
Stage one. Identification of needs
During the consultation, we identified the following project features:
- the priority countries for education are Canada and the Czech Republic;
- the services have several target audience groups.
We also noticed that we would need to customize advertising for a specific geolocation. The agency’s office was located in Odesa, and the customer preferred offline meetings. That’s why we decided to set up ads in Odesa and Chornomorsk.
In addition, we identified the main problems and needs of the project:
- Businesses lack targeted appeals.
It is necessary to increase the number of applications to keep up with the planned level of sales.
- There is no systematic marketing.
The brand book and website needed to be updated, and the advertising tools were not working.
After discussing the problems, we suggested:
- research the project and identify the main areas of work;
- create a work plan that will help to achieve changes in problematic areas quickly;
- update the project’s brand book to use the updated logo and colors in advertising campaigns;
- take responsibility for lead generation and project analytics;
- in the long run, build a full-fledged marketing department that covers all the project’s needs: from content production to promotion and analytics.
Below, we will describe in more detail how we solved the project’s problems and achieved our goals.
Stage two. Research and strategy development
At the beginning of our work, we always conduct research to help us find answers to the following questions:
Thanks to the research, we learned:
- How the customer’s business works. What exactly do we sell and why it is important for the audience;
- Who are the strongest competitors and what do we need to do to differentiate ourselves from them;
- what needs to be done to increase the effectiveness of advertising.
During the research, we noticed a very interesting aspect of this agency — the target audience. And we will, of course, share it with you.
Target audience
The issue of the target audience has become one of the most interesting in this project. First of all, the audience could be divided into two large groups:
- parents who want their children to study abroad;
- children (schoolchildren) who want to study at a foreign university.
But we found one more group, namely: - teachers, who can be informed about the possibility of studying in other countries and motivated to pass on this information to children and their parents.
To gain an in-depth understanding of the audience, we conducted interviews with the project team and compiled a detailed portrait of each of the three groups. We determined what was not recommended to be used in communication with each of the groups in order not to cause an ambiguous reaction.
In addition, the customer used Harrison Assessments*, which allowed us to identify another segment of the target audience:
- an older audience that is not related to studying abroad, but is interested in changing their career. These are people who want to know which professional direction to move in or what can be improved now.
*Harrison Assessments is a test of interests, aptitudes, and preferences that helps to predict human behavior and identify talents.
Conducting detailed research, studying the target audience, and understanding all the features of the agency helped us to formulate our service — a comprehensive lead generation setup. It included:
- updating the brand book;
- creation of a new version of landing pages;
- creation and design of lead magnets;
- setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook & Google ADS.
How did we achieve our goals?
1. Updating the project’s brand book
Visual elements of a brand, such as a logo and corporate colors, are an important part of marketing. Therefore, when we see that the corporate identity has not changed for a long time, we suggest updating it.
The work on updating the brand book begins with filling out a brief, in which the customer indicates all their preferences and lets the designer know in which direction they should move.
We offered the customer about 10 variants of the new logo.
The main task was to design the logo so that it was simple and serious, and also associated with educational institutions.
The old logo:
Options that were considered:
The option is chosen by the customer:
The planet symbolizes international education. However, the central element is the name of the agency MASTER, and AGENCY can be easily replaced for other products: career guidance — TALENT, education abroad — STUDY.
We used the updated brand book, colors, and new logo for all promotional materials. In addition, we developed a visual template for our lead magnets. These were checklists that we advertised on Facebook.
An example of checklist design:
2. Prepare lead magnets
A lead magnet is an offer to get something valuable for a potential customer in exchange for their contact information.
The lead magnets were 6 checklists that were sent to users in exchange for a phone number. We developed these checklists together with the customer. They contained answers to frequently asked questions from applicants and parents.
Two checklists were dedicated to education in Europe. This way, users could find out what is needed to get an opportunity to study at a European university for 1500 euros per year:
- сhecklist: “How to get into a government-funded international educational program (Austria, Germany)”;
- checklist: “How to get an education in the Czech Republic for €1500 per year”.
The checklists contain mandatory aspects that will help an applicant obtain a grant to study at European universities.
As for Canada and the United States, it is very important to prepare properly for obtaining a visa. The most common reason for rejection is a lack of evidence of financial security.
Therefore, a checklist “On Preparing a Family Financial History for a Student Visa” was created.
Many applicants consider studying abroad as a chance to stay in another country. Therefore, we have prepared checklists on how to legally stay in the country of study after graduation:
- checklist “How to get a work permit in Canada after graduation”
- checklist “How to get a work permit in the USA after graduation”.
For this purpose, there are special programs that allow you to stay in the country and obtain a work visa. In our lead magnets, we wrote how to become a participant in such programs.
Another checklist is dedicated to how you can return your investment in education after graduation (Canada).
You can use it to find out how you can stay in Canada after graduation with the opportunity to work. You can get the information you need in several ways: through the landing page, lead form, and Facebook Messenger.
For convenience, we customized the flow of applications into one table.
Thanks to the settings, the agency’s team received contacts and could manage these leads through the internal sales funnel directly in the document. We introduced different tabs in the table for all channels: website, messenger, and lead form.
For convenience, requests from the lead form were sent to these tabs, and each tab contained a specific lead magnet and contacts. We added columns where you can update lead statuses, leave comments, and assign levels of interest in the agency’s services.
This method of keeping track of incoming requests was also convenient because it was integrated into our (team) reporting spreadsheet. It generated information about the total number of leads and their conversion into sales; the average cost of an application was automatically calculated.
Texts for advertising lead magnets
Lead magnet: financial preparation for studying abroad
Do you want to study abroad? You need not only finances but also a financial history.
Download this checklist to find out if your family’s financial history is ready to apply to prestigious universities around the world.
Lead magnet: Canada.
Do you want to study and work in Canada?
Then it will be useful for you to know how to stay in Canada legally with the opportunity to work in this country.
Lead magnet: Europe (The Czech Republic, Austria, Germany) — funding of education by other governments
Did you know that the governments of Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic fund the education of students from Ukraine?
Studying at a prestigious university can cost only 1500 euros per year! Don’t believe it? To make sure, get a checklist for eligibility for international programs.
Creatives for lead magnets
For our lead magnets, we used creatives with teenagers and university graduates to attract the attention of applicants and their parents:
3. Developed a Landing Page
The next necessary step for a successful advertising campaign was the creation of separate landing pages.
The landing pages were created on the Tilda platform. This website builder is a russian development, so we abandoned it after russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The landing pages are currently down.
We created two pages: one about studying in Canada and the other in the Czech Republic. They contained detailed information about universities in these countries, lists of universities, customer reviews, and forms for contacting the agency’s team.
The team provided the first consultation free of charge. It was a pretty good deal. 🙂
Landing pages allowed the team to track user behavior on the site. We identified the most interesting content blocks and quickly added additional information to the pages.
4. Advertising texts
In the process, we prepared 3-4 variants of advertising texts and set up their simultaneous testing. More effective variants became the basis for creating the next ones.
Some examples of texts that were tested in the project:
Canada? The Czech Republic? USA? Which country’s university would be best? Have you chosen a specialty? Have the documents for the university and visa been prepared? Is the child ready for an interview with the commission?
With 10 years of experience, the MasterStudy agency:
✅ guarantees your child’s admission
✅ conducts impartial career guidance
✅ prepares the necessary package of documents for the university and visa
We can help you apply to any country, but we recommend that you pay attention to Canada. That is why we have prepared more admission information and are ready to answer your questions. Are you planning your child’s higher education in another country?
Get a free consultation from MasterStudy specialists to save money and not lose a year.
✅ 15 years of experience guarantee your admission
More than 1,000 satisfied students
We take care of collecting all the necessary documents for the university and visa
5. Advertising creatives
When promoting a business through Facebook ADS, we need to find a way to quickly communicate the benefits of our offer to potential customers. By offer, we mean a combination of several benefits and triggers that encourage action.
We tested options with the image of the agency’s founder:
We tested variants depicting a family:
Google & Facebook ADS
First of all, we launched advertising campaigns on Google and Facebook.
Our strategy was to provide a quick result and then develop content marketing, analytics, affiliate program, and other areas that, in the overall system, give a much better result than each of these tools separately.
Google ADS
We have unsatisfactory results while running advertising campaigns on Google. Even after several cycles of edits, we were not satisfied with the results. The costs did not correspond to the results.
On average, one-click cost from $25. Later, the cost per click dropped, but it was still too high. There were few clicks because the competition in this traffic source is very high. So we quickly stopped spending money and focused all our efforts on Facebook.
Facebook & Instagram ADS
After analyzing the results of our Google ADS campaigns, we realized that we needed to be more active in Facebook ADS. We decided to develop lead magnets. We have managed to get 140 applications, and the application cost was $1.67 since the launch of the advertising campaign with lead magnets.
Results of promoting the services of an educational agency abroad through Google & Facebook ADS:
The result of the agency’s work
The advertising budget was >$500.
Customer feedback
