Educational provider - How to mix your campaigns with long-term and short-term horizons?
About this company
Mapalo Training providers educational courses in the US and abroad. They currently have 3 people working for them who are focused on the leadership trainings they offer. Without any dedicated marketing staff, their Founder is responsible for the efforts done in space.
They make use of a training method that was developed by their own founder. Who is known worldwide within his space.
The challenge
They did not have a very extensive marketing presence. A professional website + LinkedIn page and profile. However, no website traffic, not running any search ads and rarely any organic material apart from some LinkedIn posts.
Moreover, the start of our collaboration was linked to an in-person event to be held about 1 month after we first spoke.
So the challenge was two-fold. How to come up with BOFU traffic without current presence and within a timeframe of about 2-3 weeks?
The solution
What they do have is a very strong leadership model with a proven concept. Secondly, the model really related with people, especially L&D leaders and Managing Directors.
So the solution we saw was also two-fold. Given the strong model we could turn the founder into a Thought Leader on LinkedIn using Thought Leader ads. This would allow us to funnel TOFU and MOFU traffic at lower prices to the website than normal.
Secondly, we tried to set up a more conversion focused strategy for the in-person event to be held in 1 month, also using LinkedIn. However, this campaign would be very targeted. L&D professionals and Managing Directors within specific sectors that used to work well for them.
The results
While we would generally not advise to look at LinkedIn from a conversion only focus, this company could potentially see some results. These results came down to two registrations, an ok result given the very short timeframe.
However, the most ROI came from the Thought Leader campaign over time. Increasing the number of followers by 10% (635) over the past 4 months and leading to 10 registrations so far.
Conclusions & Learnings
The potential to run thought leader ads is a game-changer for many companies. A couple years ago LinkedIn ads used to really be run by tech companies trying to funnel traffic to their website with ads that now look as if they were made during the stone age. (Came across this post from Noam Nisand recently which sums this up really well).
Being able to put a face to your brand, be genuine and share knowledge does wonders for your LinkedIn performance. Why? Cause people trust people. Cause people come to LinkedIn to educate themselves. Cause this is where LinkedIn wants to go.
So don’t see LinkedIn ads as Google or Facebook ads. Those have their place in the ecosystem too. But treat LinkedIn more as SEO.