Inbound Marketing Insights

Thunderbird Online was having trouble driving traffic to their site, and even worse, converting that traffic.  They needed a reliable, in-house system to manage their digital marketing efforts.

Thunderbird Online is a professional development division of Thunderbird School of Global Management. They provide online courses and executive certificates to busy professionals seeking to continue learning throughout their professional career. The Thunderbird Online team had a variety of goals for their marketing, primarily gaining more leads per month than they had been seeing. However, they were facing many challenges as they were trying to recruit new students into their wide variety of programs. Here are the high-level results of what they saw on HubSpot, and a breakdown of how those numbers were achieved.

Needed to Drive Traffic to Their Website

Before coming to HubSpot, one of the primary concerns of Thunderbird Online, was driving traffic to their website. They had recently underwent a significant website redesign and launch for online programs, but were unsure of where to begin in the SEO process of the new site. Their main source of traffic came from the primary school website and CPL providers. With no defined system set up where they could track or analyze potential keywords, they couldn't be flexible in their tactics because they had no way to tell which were working and which ones were not. Thunderbird Online needed a solution that could help them optimize their site more effectively and make maintaining it easier.

Needed a System for Blogging

In addition, their new website had no system set up for blogging and they needed to find an out of the box solution for blogging needs. Thunderbird Online's team knew that blogging was a great way to bring in new prospects to their site. They wanted a place where they could not only post press releases and announcements, but also share thought leadership.

Difficulty Capturing Lead Information 

Their final issue dealt with their difficulty to capture lead information on their highest performing pages of the website. Thunderbird Online only had the opportunity to set up one landing page with a custom URL in order to capture lead information, but were unable to modify the content based on the lead source, campaign, or specific program. They were noticing a lower conversion rate, and thought that trying a variety of landing pages would help them in this effort. However, if they wanted to create a landing page for a specific program, campaign, or to capture specific students, they had to outsource it. This process would become increasingly more costly for them.

How Did HubSpot Help?

By adding the HubSpot software to their marketing plan, Thunderbird Online was given the tools to address their issues, but more importantly it has given them the ability to manage their marketing through one system.

"We had the ability to manage our marketing initiatives through one system, and that gave us the tools and flexibility we needed to create a much more effective marketing process," said Elyse Flynn Meyer, former Director of Marketing for Thunderbird Online, and now Owner of Prism Global Marketing Solutions.

Easily Share Content

Using the HubSpot software Blogging tools, Thunderbird Online was able to set up a blog for the first time on their website. The staff is able to consistently create content that they can easily share with their subscribers and social media followers every week. Since the blogging tool is pre-configured for SEO, they are able to optimize each post so their content can be found on the first page of search engine results.

Create Multiple Landing Pages

By utilizing HubSpot’s Landing Page and Lead Intelligence tools,Thunderbird is able to create as many landing pages as they need without the added cost of a developer. They can easily create landing pages for specific e-mail campaigns, lead sources, partners, events, etc. They have 45 pages with an average 22.3% conversion rate. By creating this custom experience, their leads are landing on a page that is specific to what they are requesting information. This has allowed Thunderbird Online to gain intelligence on their leads from the time they enter the sales funnel. Today, Thunderbird Online has increased their leads by 442%, including gaining 187 leads in one month through Organic search alone. Most importantly the information they gained helped them decrease their conversion cycle from 5.5 months to 2.2 months.

Do you want to see how your higher education institution or non-profit can maximize your results with inbound marketing? Schedule a complimentary consultation with our team of inbound experts.