“Omega has been a driving force in designing & implementing ISHCMC’s digital activities over the past 2 years. Their commitment and ability to identify opportunities has been invaluable.”
MICHAEL HARRIS
Head of Marketing & Communications at ISHCMC“Omega’s very supportive, proactive, and understands the market. The results somehow exceeded our expectations, despite the challenges of COVID-19. Their ownership & expertise of the digital landscape plays an important role in helping us meet our marketing objectives & maintaining our overall competitiveness in the market. ISSP’s marketing is running on 3 engines and Omega is one of them – and the strongest.”
HAI LE
Head of Marketing & Communications at ISSP“Omega’s work has been both consistent and dependable, it really shows the time they’ve taken to understand our school and community. They’ve helped us shape and organize our digital campaigns in a way that has not been done before. The results exceeded our goals and targets, despite the challenges of COVID-19 which we could neither control nor forecast.“
KATHERINE NGUYEN
Head of Marketing & Communications at ISHCMC – American AcademyTHE CHALLENGE
This work was part of a subcontract with a former agency partner, paperanarchy/LIT Results/Shutta. All data and images below are either from publicly accessible online tools, are partially concealed to protect clients’ competitive integrity, or are now safely irrelevant.
Vietnam was celebrating the lunar new year when news started to trickle out of China about COVID-19. Two weeks later, schools across Vietnam were closed and the country entered a nationwide lockdown.
While the swift action of the Vietnamese government was something to be admired, we were left to figure out how to continue generating leads for Cognita Vietnam’s three international schools in Ho Chi Minh City.
With out-of-home (OOH) advertising no longer an option and the advertising budget cut, the spotlight was now on us as the only viable advertising option left to generate even MORE leads with LESS budget.
Things only got worse from there.
As schools continued to remain closed…
Potential parents were too afraid of COVID-19 to tour the school campuses in-person.
Many potential parents began to question sending their children abroad at all as the pandemic worsened in the West.
Then, disaster struck.
Enrolled parents at several international schools across the country began to demand full refunds on tuition.
Some of these same parents went on to form coalitions, protesting online and even in front of one of the schools.
This whole situation was further amplified by the nation’s media, adding fuel to the fire.
Schools proceeded to open and close several times throughout the rest of the academic year in response to COVID-19 threats.
Needless to say, times were tough, especially when all eyes were on us to hit lead gen KPIs from corporate that went unchanged despite a global pandemic.
However, even with all of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we continued to generate more leads, not only meeting KPIs during the 2019-2020 academic year, but exceeding them.
How?!
Read on below to find out…
THE SOLUTION
We had been working with Cognita Vietnam on a subcontract with paperanarchy/LIT Results/Shutta since September 2018 to improve their schools’ SEO while generating leads through Google Ads and landing pages designed by Omega.
During this time we also performed in-depth competitor, keyword, and market research in order to better understand how to generate more leads for less for the international schools.
Using this information we then structured campaigns around the buyer’s journey stages of awareness, consideration, and decision.
This strategy propelled all three schools’ Google Ads to the top of nearly every ad auction for over a year.
But then everything changed.
After the pandemic hit, competition in the Google Ads space was at an all-time high due to international schools’ shift to digital advertising.
Meanwhile, lead generation was slowing down significantly due to parents’ apprehension about the future and their eyes being glued to any news about COVID-19.
This resulted in nearly a 50% drop in search volume for international schools practically overnight, which didn’t end up recovering until well after the 2020 academic year was over.
This meant it was time for something new.
First, we made significant changes to the ad and landing page copy, adopting an optimistic tone that focused on preparing children for the future through continuous learning whether in-school or at-home.
Then, to stay ahead of the competition we began employing a number of tools including Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Google Trends, and social listening to pre-empt any rise or fall in search volume.
This is how we knew when and where to allocate advertising budget.
Lastly, we heavily segmented all three schools’ campaigns by language and grade level, making for laser-targeted advertising.
This meant creating a lot more ad campaigns and landing pages for each of the three Cognita Vietnam international schools.
This was all done in the matter of days.
Not weeks or months, thanks to Omega’s Triple-A service being agile, adaptable, and aligned.
When the other international schools’ marketing teams were running around like chickens with their heads cut off and pausing ad campaigns across the board, we were still hard at work generating leads.
Having a digital marketing agency in the driver’s seat was paying off tenfold.
This allowed us to out-maneuver international schools with in-house marketing teams that lacked understanding of the nuances of digital advertising, as we continued to optimize our ad campaigns and landing pages on a biweekly basis.
Our insistance on using Instapage landing pages developed by Omega rather than the schools’ web developers was another saving grace, allowing us to pivot much faster than other international schools.
You can see the results of all our hard work below.
WE CREATE CAMPAIGNS THAT CONVERT
Over the course of the 2019-2020 academic year, we generated a total of 1,370 leads thanks to our Google Ads and landing pages, with 51% of these leads converting into full inquiries, for a total of 699 inquiries.
This is over double the lead-to-inquiry conversion rate of competing international schools.
Between the three schools, our work directly accounted for 89.12% of all digital leads of the project, with the remaining coming from Facebook ads by paperanarchy/LIT Results/Shutta.
Our ads and landing pages didn’t just generate leads though, they also drove direct inquiries, applications, and phone calls, as seen below.
41 direct inquiries.
382 applications.
142 phone calls.
We know what we’re doing when it comes to generating leads for the education sector.
We’re daring, dedicated, and dynamic, and that’s why our clients didn’t just survive COVID-19, they thrived.
We’re Omega Digital, the last digital marketing agency your international school will ever need.
Contact us now and let’s get started on supercharging your school’s leads!