How to boost continuing education sales with a new website + Effective marketing.

About HEC EXECUTIVE SCHOOL

At the end of 2019, HEC Executive's website looked outdated compared to those of its competitors. At the same time, the company's marketing and sales were losing momentum.

At that time, HEC Executive:

• had a website, but it was outdated
• Traffic and visibility were declining,
• The number of qualified leads was insufficient to increase the number of training participants,
• The number of customers (and therefore training participants) had been declining for over 1 year,

Finally, HEC Executive School :

• had no alignment between marketing and sales,
• did not have sufficient in-house knowledge to deploy an Inbound strategy
• was running out of steam in terms of marketing and sales activity.

So it was only logical that HEC Executive should call on Stratenet. In asking for our help, the company knew it was entrusting its project to an expert in digital strategy and the creation of conversion-optimized websites.

Project objectives

• Increase web sales
• Increase the number of qualified leads (SQL / MQL)
• Increase traffic
• Increase brand awareness
• Deploy marketing automation
• Measure performance and optimize over time

Solutions deployed

Stratenet helped HEC Executive School create a strong, sustainable growth strategy.

After analyzing the technological environment, it became clear that they didn't have a Marketing/Sales CRM powerful enough to track all the necessary data, as well as to carry out all digital and contact follow-up actions.

The approach adopted by our agency took place in 5 stages:

1. Situation analysis and definition of a full funnel growth strategy,
2. Implementation of HubSpot CRM Marketing Hub Pro & Sales Hub
3. Annual Growth Marketing support including 4 3-month growth plans (divided into 2-week sprints).

Some actions implemented over time:

• SEO review of website pages
• Targeted Google Ads campaigns on quality keywords (to target visitors as close as possible to the purchase)
• Facebook Ads campaign
• Conversion optimization on all website pages,
• Training program downloads via landing pages
• Qualification of prospects via personalized forms
• Triggering of Marketing Automation / lead nurturing workflows to move prospects along the purchasing path,
• Highlighting means of conversion via intelligent pop-ups / cta's
• Creation of e-mail/newsletter sequences to drive brochure downloads towards sales contact
• Lead scoring to detect the hottest leads
• Automatic follow-up of less interesting prospects via e-mail
• ...

Results

TRAFFIC

Traffic has more than tripled in less than a year! Despite the "Covid-19" period we were experiencing, which was not conducive to (face-to-face) training.

LEADS

Leads have also tripled in less than a year, and even quadrupled at certain times (publication of new website = added means of conversion)! Despite the "Covid-19" period we experienced, which was not conducive to (face-to-face) training.

CUSTOMERS

Our (online) customers have increased by 25% in less than a year!

Among these customers,

• 31.73% are from the existing DB of HEC Liège Executive Education, which we have relaunched (which proves the usefulness of relaunching substantial DBs, IN AN APPROPRIATE WAY!).
  
  
• 68.27% of these customers came from the newly generated DB (proving the importance of having a conversion-optimized website, as well as an overall digitalized marketing strategy).

This number is now only increasing, and has exploded in recent months! Because yes, it can take time to go from leads to customers. The buying decision cycle doesn't happen in 2 days... It goes through a phase of awareness, consideration and then decision (as a rule).