Online University Case Study

Company Background

Client is an industry-leading provider of non-accredited paralegal certification and continuing education for the legal community, and initially approached RefractROI for our Paid Search Management expertise. Besides its branded online education offerings, Client leverages relationships with established universities to deliver “white label” courses to students of these schools.

Business Challenges

Client had virtually no inbound lead generation through digital marketing, relying solely on outbound cold calling and their relationships with universities to drive student enrollments. Substantial investments had been made to an online infrastructure, however digital marketing best practices were never applied. The website was an effective tool to facilitate educational course work, but incapable of producing leads and converting those to enrollments. Initially, Client goals were to achieve the following:

• A new and predictable source of lead generation
• CPA’s low enough to deliver a compelling ROI
• Reduce the reliance on an antiquated approach to sales and outside partners to achiee revenue goals

In the 5 years since being acquired, Client had a steady, but very slow rate of growth. The current owner was willing to make new investments in marketing, but wanted to a chieve a 30% increase in sales and at a favorable ROI. Furthermore, with retirement on the horizon, Client expected a profitable exit from the business.

Solutions

Originally approached for their expertise in SEM (Paid Media/PPC), RefractROI quickly determined that paid search efforts would fail due to the highly competitive environment for target keywords and low conversion rates. Based on the long-term business goals of the business, it was recommended that the digital marketing focus be organic search, or search engine optimization (SEO).

An initial assessment of keyword strategy and search volume allowed RefractROI to create an investment model for organic search. This confirmed organic search had a higher potential ROI and lower barrier to entry than paid search. While organic competitors were not numerous, they were much larger (e.g. Kaplan, Duke.edu) from both a brand recognition and digital marketing perspective. This required investments in both on-page and off-page optimization to achieve national rankings for critical, non-branded keywords. This had a favorable impact to keyword rankings, website traffic, and conversions to enrollments.

To ensure continued success with organic search, the next step was to improve the conversion rate of the website. Upon further assessment, the client’s website was built on outdated architecture, had frequent performance issues, and could not be updated without the direct involvement of a developer experienced in HTML and ASP. This website prevented Client from easily changing their product offerings, making adjustments to program and product pricing, and increasing conversion rates due to the lack of a modern user interface. To solve this challenge, RefractROI migrated the website to a user-friendly WordPress Content Management System website.

Results