Before National College of Ireland partnered with HubSpot in 2015, its marketing approach was too scattergun, says Emma Henderson, NCI’s PR and Digital Marketing Manager. The college naturally wanted to attract more visitors and convert them into students, but its tactics weren’t joined up.
Emma recalls that she was using a plethora of marketing tools, including Facebook Analytics, Tweetdeck, and Google Analytics, and they weren’t powerful enough to allow her to develop useful lead profiles.
“It was very time consuming, every day I would use six or seven different platforms to try and condense that information down into a way that I could use it. It was hard to demonstrate the ROI of our digital activities to the bottom line; it was also difficult to find out who our visitors were and build any sort of meaningful relationship with them.”
After hearing a member of the HubSpot team speak at a digital marketing conference, Emma immediately felt that the HubSpot software could help NCI streamline and improve its inbound marketing activities. NCI investigated other options, including Microsoft Dynamics, before making its decision and selecting HubSpot.
NCI attracts many different kinds of visitors to its site. They include part-time students, full-time undergraduates, parents, and the international market, as well as would-be students looking for a particular course and people who are thinking about a career change.
“Because we have such a diverse user group, the first thing we did was to set up personas. That really helped us to define our audience and understand how we should target them,” says Emma.
She began creating targeted content for these personas, driving its potential with Landing Pages and Smart CTAs. Emma also began to schedule and publish messages across NCI’s social media accounts with the Social Inbox. She used the Blog App to set up and run the college’s blog – previously, it had been hosted separately to the website, so NCI hadn’t been able to reap the benefit of any traffic to it. Now, with the help of the HubSpot software’s built-in SEO tools, it is a key landing point for website visitors.
According to Emma, the HubSpot software makes it easy to ensure each visitor gets a personalised experience on-site. “It has helped us improve dramatically what we do. We’re giving our visitors the content they want when they want it,” says Emma.
Emma is an advocate of the Reporting Add-On, which allows her to easily demonstrate measure the value of her work. With it, Emma says, she can see at a glance what content is performing well, what needs to be tweaked and what she should be doing more of.
“I love how efficient HubSpot is! It helps me show the ROI of what we do. I can now show our team how many visitors we get to the website, and how many of them convert into leads and become students.”
