The Case for Lead Gen and Non-Profits
I’m still pretty new to the education lead generation business so forgive me for having such a basic question, but one thing I haven’t been able to understand particularly well is why universities need lead generators. After all, the trend in most markets is toward disintermediation — and this is especially the case in markets where there are large volumes of participants, low barriers to entry, and transparent prices. To me, SEM interfaces, such as AdWords, seem like the ideal candidates to streamline Internet marketing and eliminate the need for lead generators. But, clearly, as my paycheck attests, this is not the case.
In a post by Kyle James from .eduGuru, he sheds some light on why college web departments are potentially ill-equipped to handle lead and inquiry generation on their own. And as someone who has been mired in the minutia of keywords, ad copy, and analytics for the larger part of my time in the EDU space, James’s insights are a refreshing reminder that the value proposition of lead generation is not just in what we do, but in who — as companies — we are.
The reasons he cites for colleges being ill-equipped to live without lead generators are as follows: 1) College web marketers aren’t conversion experts, 2) College web marketers aren’t agile and 3) College websites/departments are too decentralized. And these factors are even more pronounced in the traditional bureaucracy of non-profit universities (James uses Butler University’s recent spike in search traffic as a case study).
As I think about it more, Ampush, along with many others in the lead gen space, excel in precisely the areas where colleges lack. We thrive on acquiring and continually building expertise in Internet marketing through relentless testing and data analysis. We are lean, flexible, and poised to react quickly to the dynamic nature of the Internet. And we are a tight-knit team, with distributed responsibility but centralized communication and integrated workflow.
So, if lead gen is still a positive ROI source of student acquisition for the relatively sophisticated, marketing savvy, online schools, I can’t help but wonder how we can help non-profits make the leap online and revolutionize the distribution of education.
I’m trying to figure out if your questioning colleges needing lead generators is a genuine question, or a sarcastic question? Or maybe I misunderstood what you wrote.
Why would lead generation not be necessary? Even if a college puts significant effort into AdWords, etc., it would seem that one of the goals would be generating leads, not simply driving traffic to the Web site.
Care to elaborate?
BTW, prices are hardly transparent at most (non-profit) private colleges. There is the sticker price, and then there is the out-of-pocket costs after financial aid. This is even true to varying degrees at public institutions.
Hi robinteractive,
My question was definitely genuine and perhaps my short tenure in the space is partially responsible for asking such an obvious question.
The point that James’s article makes that I found interesting was that colleges haven’t been effective in turning their websites into true lead generation machines despite being able to garner significant web traffic. If you take a look at his article, particularly where he speaks about the UI of the Butler website, I think this point becomes clear.
To me, it is a bit fascinating that schools have such a huge appetite to purchase leads, but yet devote little effort (it seems) to generating leads from the very traffic they own, namely that visiting their website. So, you’re right, I may have phrased my inquiry in a suboptimal manner. I realize the value of leads and I understand that the non-rival nature of the Internet (other than bandwidth) allows schools to have a nearly unlimited appetite for student inquiry. I guess a more accurate question would have been why schools, who realize the value of leads, don’t seem to realize the potential missed value in their own Web/Internet marketing efforts.
In terms of pricing, I was referring to keyword pricing in my post, not tuition. Thanks for the feedback…hopefully this cleared things up a little.
Thanks for continuing the discussion. The argument I always make is that if colleges want to be more competitive and move up the rankings, because you can’t name me one school that doesn’t care about these BS lists, then increasing their applicants has to be important. If as school takes 1,000 students a year from a pool of 5,000 applicants and they could increase this to 6,000 applicants then are they not able to be 20% more selective? Of course this assumes that the applicants follow the same average range of applicants but why would ANY school not want to do that? No brainer and from my experience institutions just don’t get how the web can help them do that w/ some very specific best practices applied.
Ethan, in many ways it is worse than what you mention. Although the practice varies from college to college, colleges buying leads are generally buying pre-leads, i.e. they take the list they purchased (or, more accurately, rented) from ACT, CollegeBoard (the PSAT/SAT folks), etc., and send information to the prospective student asking them to join the mailing list.
They don’t throw those names into the full marketing plan until the student has actually said yes, I want to receive information from you.
I’m not debating the value of opt-in vs. auto-add/opt-out (that is a huge discussion in and of itself), but the “worse” I’m specifically referring to is not optimizing the process of converting pre-leads to leads.