At A Glance

308%

Leads increased by 308%

112%

New student enrollments increased by 112%

Backstory

Aalto Executive Education Academy (Aalto EE) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of Finland’s biggest universities, Aalto University, and offers a range of education and learning programs for the development of executives and leaders. Their Helsinki branch coordinates all of its European operations while the branch drives its Asia-Pacific operations. Apart from these, they also have a presence in multiple other locations worldwide.

Unlike Aalto University, the campus of Aalto EE doesn’t offer any undergraduate programs. They offer only postgraduate programs such as MBA, executive education programs, and a number of online courses in management, business, and leadership.

Accredited to some of the top business universities such as AMBA, AACSB, and EQUIS, Aalto EE is an internationally recognized organization and has ranked 42nd in the Financial Times Executive Education global rankings in 2020.

Backstory

Aalto Executive Education Academy (Aalto EE) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of Finland’s biggest universities, Aalto University, and offers a range of education and learning programs for the development of executives and leaders. Their Helsinki branch coordinates all of its European operations while the branch drives its Asia-Pacific operations. Apart from these, they also have a presence in multiple other locations worldwide.

Unlike Aalto University, the campus of Aalto EE doesn’t offer any undergraduate programs. They offer only postgraduate programs such as MBA, executive education programs, and a number of online courses in management, business, and leadership.

Accredited to some of the top business universities such as AMBA, AACSB, and EQUIS, Aalto EE is an internationally recognized organization and has ranked 42nd in the Financial Times Executive Education global rankings in 2020.

Challenge

Challenge

In spite of being an internationally recognized brand, the campus of Aalto EE was struggling to drive more leads and enrollments for their MBA and executive education programs.

At the time, they used to manage their marketing and promotion entirely in-house. They were aware that they needed to build more awareness about their brand among their target audiences. And so, they attended a number of career fairs and exhibitions that focused on MBA and other executive education programs.

Unfortunately, however, none of these activities yielded any decent results. The few leads that these marketing activities were able to generate, didn’t ultimately result in enrollments to their courses. What was even worse is that they had no way of tracking what was working for them and what wasn’t.

Aalto EE was grasping at straws as far as their marketing was concerned. They realized that they needed a partner with a proven track record to take them out of this slump and drive more enrollments. That’s when they reached out to eVietGlobal LLC.

Solution

Before we could offer a solution, we needed to understand where or what the bottleneck was that prevented Aalto EE from getting enough leads. For this, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of their customer lifecycle and examined the customer journey very closely.

This uncovered what we had suspected all along – something was amiss with the way they were trying to create awareness and engaging their leads. Their advertising messages were failing to connect with their audience. Plus, the content on their website failed to convey their value proposition effectively. As a result, even the few leads that they were able to generate never resulted in enrollments.

So, we decided to revamp their content marketing and advertising strategies using a 3-pronged approach:

The first was to run intelligent advertisements across digital platforms where Aalto EE’s target audience was mostly likely to be found, namely Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn (so as to drive quality leads to their landing pages).

We created a number of testimonial ads such as these since they help to offer social proof and can work wonders in building credibility for a brand.

We also ran some search ads on Google, optimized with relevant and competitive
keywords that helped us drive quality leads.

The second approach in our strategy was to revamp the content on Aalto’s landing pages and blog posts to make them more interesting and valuable (as these are the pages where leads would be redirected to upon clicking on an ad).

Optimized landing pages helped to communicate their value proposition effectively. Clear and concise CTA buttons helped move leads to the next stage by enabling them to take actions such as downloading brochures or contacting the sales team.

Informative and engaging blog posts helped to pique a reader’s interest and desire around the topics they had expressed interest in (by clicking on an ad), who could then be retargeted to the landing pages without seeming too pushy.

Finally, we helped Aalto EE with sales enablement. This is because we realized that many Enrollment or Admission Officers lacked the necessary know-how to manage leads properly when they came in (which resulted in some missed opportunities). So, we helped train the staff on how to effectively engage leads that came through and move them further up the sales funnel.

Results

As a result of our efforts, Aalto EE was able to acquire a large number of new leads, most of which resulted in enrollments to their education programs.

We helped to grow their leads by 308%.
The number of new student enrollments jumped by 112%.