Manchester Metropolitan University.

For an MBA course, having AMBA accreditation is vital. This prestigious award is a sign of course quality to potential suitors. One of the requisites of achieving this accreditation is to have at least 20 fully-signed-up applicants on the course.

When Manchester Metropolitan University approached us, it was because they wanted to utilize our HubSpot-powered, content and paid media-led lead gen capabilities in order to achieve the desired course numbers.

Key objectives

Use Hubspot-led content marketing to increase visits to the MBA course pages and encourage downloads.
Create guides, blogs and social content that addressed the challenges and barriers-to-entry faced by potential MBA applicants.
Use our content amplification skills to make sure that our content was seen by the right people.
Generate press and online attention that would increase awareness of the MBA course.
Use email marketing workflows to nurture any leads generated further along the buying journey.

For this campaign, we wanted leads, leads leads. Not just any leads though, carefully-selected and highly-relevant ones that were likely, if shown the right content, to sign up to the course.

So, how did we go about achieving great results?

Research

Our Insights team, through surveys, interviews and desk research, created ‘audience personas’ so that we understood and could address the challenges and concerns faced by potential MBA applicants at different stages of their journey.

Create

Using HubSpot, we created a blog area to house the content we created and encourage downloads. We created thoroughly-researched guides to act as ‘lead-gen magnets’,that we then supported and promoted using blogs, outreach, paid social and PPC.

Nurture

Finally, when the audience downloaded our content, their information would then fall into our database allowing us to further nurture their journey along the funnel using HubSpot. We used extensive and highly-tailored automated email chains that provide users with informative, thought-provoking and relevant content drove influence conversions.

The result was a highly successful campaign that won Best Low-Budget (under 50k) Campaign at the Northern Marketing Awards 2017. Don't just take our word for it: "The judges thought that this was a fantastic campaign in which clear objectives were set and very impressive results were achieved. A stand out campaign created on a small budget."