Case Study: Transitioning to Digital

Raelene Woods, Marketing Manager at The Gordon Institute of TAFE, works with Social Garden to deliver strong enrolment results for the wide breadth of courses and demographics that traditional media isn’t able to reach.

Transcript

Raelene Woods

So, The Gordon is one of the largest regional TAFES in Victoria. We’ve been operating for more than 130 years we’ve got a really large range of courses that we offer which makes promotion quite difficult and we’re sort of appealing to a lot of different demographics and age groups so it’s quite a – quite a tricky business to promote and we have around 15,000 students a year and over 650 staff.

So, I’m the Marketing Manager. We have one centralized marketing team that looks after all of the advertising, marketing, digital assets, so the website social media, we also look after events, school liaison and the graphic design team sits in with the marketing guys as well. When I first started at The Gordon we’re only using traditional media so print and radio pretty much, as well as some special placement. The hard thing is that we have so many courses and so many different demographics that we have to reach that it’s really hard to do that with traditional media. So, the way that we can tailor digital advertising is a really good option for us.

I was actually approached by a number of different digital agencies including Social Garden and we went through a trial period for probably about six months where we had – we used three different providers and Social Garden delivered the best results. So I think working with you guys you were able to help us get the cost per lead down so really results driven. I want to get a certain amount of traffic to the website, I want to get the right people to the website and I want them converting to become lead so that they actually contact us and they make a course inquiry and I found that Social Garden was able to do that better than the other companies.

Social Garden are really easy to deal with which is great so with a marketing team that looks after all different types of promotion we can only dedicate so much time to digital. So to have that help there and to streamline it and be able to communicate really quickly and easily with you guys and get things happening is great. That’s what I love about digital is the fact that you can actually see the results, you can see how much traffic gets brought in, you can see who’s converting and taking action. Whereas in above-the-line media you are just putting it out there and really hoping for the best a lot of the time, it’s very hard to track. So I really love the track-ability of digital and we’ve certainly changed the split. So, we still use a broad range of marketing mediums but we have definitely put more and more budget towards digital since we started doing it.

I am a big one for being able to measure what I’m doing so I guess my – my advice would be to have a look at all your mediums and try to work out what is delivering well for you and what’s not and scrap the ones that aren’t and then put your money into trying something new which in this day and age generally is digital. I think what you should do if you’re looking for a solution is definitely consider Social Garden but have a bit of a think about – try to educate yourself a little bit about what it is that you want digital to do for your company. Have a basic understanding of how it works but you don’t need to know all the details, just enough so that you can actually brief Social Garden in properly and explain what it is that you want to achieve. So once you know that then you can start to look at how to measure it. I guess some people go into digital really having no idea about it at all which is fine but if you can get yourself a little bit educated then you’re going to be able to set your expectations.

I would recommend Social Garden, yes. No, but you guys have been really easy to deal with and we’ve had good results and look when the results vary we always catch up, we talk through them and we come up with new plan like some new strategies to get the cost per lead back down. It was you guys that suggested using snapchat for us which has been an awesome medium that’s really lower the cost per lead so I would definitely recommend you.