Precision targeting and lead generation for IIMK

About the Client

The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) is one of the best institutes of management education and research in India offering undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, and executive education programs.

With more than 20 IIMs spread across India, the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIMK) was founded in 1996, and today, it has a reputation for excellent programs and strong alumni.

As a long-established leader in business education, IIMK has a strong academic brand and an excellent reputation.

In order to increase its popularity and the need to reach out to a larger pool of aspirants with the knowledge of their research programs, the institute identified the need for additional marketing resources and expertise in web analytics and online marketing.

For the same reason and with a goal to generate leads for their Ph.D. program, IIMK had approached us at CYFER with a mission and intention to assist the institution in meeting their marketing goals acquiring leads of interested and qualified candidates for this program.

The How

IIMK wanted to increase the number of leads for their Ph.D. program. The target audience for this purpose was quite small. Two major features of the target audience were identified as relevant interests and accessibility.

The applicants need to live within a certain distance or location accessible from the physical location of the institute i.e., Kozhikode and must be interested in pursuing higher education/ research in management.

That meant that our strategies had to cover the right areas, making sure that the right type of people within the geographical region that is accessible to the university were targeted.

The main challenge is to maintain a strong online marketing presence and a high search profile and effectively engage with prospective students. We engineered specific strategies and tactics to promote IIMK’s programs and meet our marketing goals.

The repute and brand value of IIMK preceded our efforts, and was effectively employed; our task here was to identify and target prospective students and drive meaningful traffic to the landing page to generate leads. We decided that the best way to start was to focus on profiling and mapping the target audience with interests and behaviors.

Created advanced audiences from search, site behavior

In the first leg of our marketing activities, we helped the institute build awareness at the top of the funnel for their Ph.D. programs and course offerings in order to help drive more applicants down the funnel.

We developed a marketing campaign to help IIMK build awareness. A behavioral targeting strategy was used to provide visibility to the campaign.

A review was also made to determine which keywords were most used by prospective students and leading to the most conversions. A priority list of keyword phrases was identified. We developed a customized campaign for these priority keywords, delivering quality leads.

Ran multiple A/B tests 

To make sure the conversion goals are met, we employed statistical analysis to determine which variation performs better.

User interaction and engagement with each experience were measured and collected in an analytics dashboard and analyzed through a statistical engine. We made careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results, leading to increased interaction rates.

Continuous optimization to narrow down the target audience and increase the quality of leads

A deep understanding of visitor behavior across IIM’s lead generation and registration funnels was required to facilitate their ongoing improvement. We conducted a detailed audit of the existing strategies to determine what was working and what was not.  

This enabled us to gather critical data to aid in understanding how potential applicants are engaging with them online. We employed continuous and rigorous optimization techniques to ensure the quality of leads and manufacture increased conversion rates. 

The alignment of specific tactics and strategies ultimately enabled us to optimally address the original search intent of the site visitors and to increase our opportunity to convert the visitor into a lead.

The Results

• 653% over-delivered number of leads
• 233.85% increase in interaction rate
• 112.50% increase in conversions
• 20.83% decrease in cost per conversion
• 98.70% increase in conversion rate

CYFER has been successful in achieving targets. We managed to increase the number of leads generated at an astonishing rate. We surpassed client expectations and over delivered the number of leads by 653% for IIMK’s Ph.D. program.

With such stellar growth, cost per conversion decreased significantly by 20.83%, with higher-than-ever lead acquisition rates. To top it all off, we also achieved a 233.85% increase in interaction rate. 

The result speaks for itself. CYFER offers you a team dedicated to your success. To achieve your marketing goals, and fulfill your vision and true potential as a high-performance business, start growing with CYFER today.