DMS Success Story: Leveraging A Multi-Channel Media Mix To Drive High-Intent Leads
DMS Success Story:
Implementing Diverse Media Strategies to Scale High-Quality Inquiries
Background
A large higher education institution with more than 20 campuses throughout the eastern U.S. was looking to scale and optimize their inquiry flow for specific programs. They purchased contactable data on prospective students interested in their programs from various third-party sources and had their admissions team contact the prospective students to drive enrollments.
Challenge
As the agency of record, Digital Media Solutions (DMS) was tasked with generating a significant incremental volume of high-quality, high-intent prospective students within the client’s program of focus. DMS needed to find new types of lead generation opportunities to scale volume while still meeting the college’s cost per enrollment goals.
DMS Solution
To generate a reliable flow of high-quality, high-intent leads, DMS implemented a diverse media mix including pay-per-lead (PPL), live call transfer, pay-per-click (PPC), mobile click-to-call and branded social media traffic from agency-managed lead providers. DMS, a full-service digital marketing agency that develops, executes and optimizes integrated, cross-channel marketing campaigns on behalf of its clients, leveraged this diversified mix of channels to target high-intent prospective students at scale.
The DMS team sought out non-PPL opportunities from existing top-performing partners already on the college’s media buy, with targeting and filtering criteria for the new channels matching the existing campaigns. The team analyzed performance of the newer media channels both holistically and at the campus and program levels, continuously optimizing the media and affiliate mix to achieve the client’s performance goals. The team was able to more easily remove underperforming pay-per-lead affiliates without sacrificing volume, since they were now able to reallocate budgets to alternative media channels, elevating overall campaign performance.
Results
DMS achieved the client’s increased volume goal while beating the average cost per enrollment goal by more than $100, with nearly one-third of the agency-managed conversions coming from non-PPL channels. The success of the non-PPL campaigns solidified the client’s position to continue to diversify their lead generation efforts moving forward and branch out from more traditional efforts.