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RTO Background
Prospective students are a lot like customers facing a major purchase. After all, investing time and money in a new qualification can have significant implications for their professional life. And just like those customers, students base their course decisions after a comprehensive assessment of available information.
Successful RTOs capitalise on this by reaching out and connecting with prospective students, guiding them along their buyer’s journey. Relevant content helps them make an informed decision.
With years of experience in the industry, I can say with confidence that inbound marketing truly shines as the go-to marketing strategy for RTOs to nurture prospects and boost enrolments. In this blog post, I’ll go into detail about why an inbound marketing strategy can benefit your RTO, as well as outline the most effective tools and resources.
Challenge
In this competitive world of RTO’s, need a multi-channel digital strategy that targets the right students (Australian & International) and grows conversions with increased enrolments for their courses.
Download Free Inbound Marketing Guide for RTO
Registered Training Organistaion RTO Digital Startegy
Define Goals for Digital Marketing Strategy
Before you proceed any further the first and most important step for RTO Digital Marketing is clearly identify your short-term and long-term objectives. Define the results that would like to achieve using digital marketing initiatives.
Goals could be:
- Total number of conversions from email marketing / social traffic
- Total number of social shares and page likes
- Total number of RTO’s mention on social sites
- Client reviews received on Google
- Website Optimisation – clear CTA
- Working with the CRM
- Define workflows – to automate marketing & sales processes
The advantage of digital marketing is you can see how effective your digital strategy is and identify if you are on the right path from the feedback and results achieved.
Establish Budget
It is very important to have a budget from the start so that you know the cost associated with different channels- SEO, PPC, Social Media Strategy, Social Advertising, Content, CRM, Marketing Automation and Email Marketing.
Audit Existing Digital Channels
It is very important to analyse the past and see what you are already doing in regards to digital marketing channels. Understanding where you have experienced success in past? what worked and what didn’t work can play an important role in the success and failure of your digital strategy.
Marketing Persona Outlines
The purpose of persona is to make your website and online communications more customer-centred / less company or product-centred by selecting defined target audiences to appeal to.
A Sample Persona for RTO might look like this:
Inbound Methodology for RTO
Attract – Turn Strangers into Visitors
The attract phase involves bringing new visitors to your website. Some of the techniques used in the attract phase will be –
- SEO
- Blogs
- Social Media Marketing
- Social Selling
- PPC
- conversion optimisation
- Email Marketing
Absoltz implements a strong Content Strategy for RTO, we publish regular blogs for the college and also used techniques to market the published content on the right platforms to attract more visitors to the website. We created targeted content to attract an ideal audience.
Optimised website using SEO Strategies. SEO included technical optimisation and on-page optimisation. Also worked on the Google My Business Profile for the college as well as local citations to improve rankings.
PPC played a key role in the attract phase of the inbound strategy. Clearly laid budgets with extensive result-oriented PPC campaigns were incorporated for RTO’s. Campaigns were closely monitored to identify which campaigns were working and returning more value.
Engage – have conversations with prospects to build relationships
After getting the right visitors to the website the next step is to engage with them and build relationships. Strategies implemented to achieve engagement were as below:
- Call to Actions
- Landing Pages
- Forms
- Contact Us Pages
We optimised the website to include a call to action at the right place in order to maximise engagement. We provided valuable content in return of contact information for example- Course whitepapers
Convert & Close
At this stage, you want your visitors’ contact information: their email address, phone number, or some other way to contact them.
Automated workflows were designed to convert these warm leads into customers. Using Email marketing automation to reach out with relevant information at relevant times.
Some of the tools used at this stage of Buyer Lifecycle were:-
- Workflow
- CRM
Email marketing also helped in shaping the digital strategy with emails designed by Absoltz that helped in every phase of the workflow designed specifically based on the buyer’s persona and the lifecycle stage of the buyer.