IEC is one of leading education groups in the North India. The group decided to include digital marketing for the first time in its marketing initiatives. The idea was to test the effectiveness of the medium, before taking a deeper plunge. After due deliberations it was decided that the campaign would be more horizontal , i.e use most the media but on a comparatively low key and then enhance the intensity based on the results.
Campaign design: The campaign of IEC was based two core facets
Establish different identities for different purposes
Establish the identity of IEC a knowledge centric group.
Components of the campaign: When the campaign started IEC had two websites, with most of the traffic being directed at iec.edu.in. The following new properties were created to establish individual identities
1. iecadmissions.com : This site was created for the purpose of admissions only. This would give a specific understanding of students who would come to visit the site for admissions only. As a tool to measure the admission potential, this would give very accurate results.
2. iecbusinessschool.com : There was need to establish the independent identity of IEC Business school.
3. iecblogs.org: Around the core idea of being a knowledge centric group, a social media campaign was also started and on of the first steps was to establish the IEC blog.
4.navingupta.in : Navin is the CEO of the IEC group. Navin is central to the IEC endeavor of getting into digital marketing. Navin’s runs his own blog where he communicated with the education fraternity in general and the groups students and staff in particular.
Search Marketing
One of the core components of the strategy was to use search marketing both paid and organic search to drive traffic to the respective sites. To base line the current state we initiated an analytics tool to understand the current traffic flow. This would be latter used to benchmark the efforts of the paid search and organic search efforts.
Paid Search: A concentrated program paid search program was launched during the admission period. We used Google ad words for the paid search.
Search Engine optimization: On the newly developed properties we started a sustained SEO effort, both from the technical and content perspectives.
Social media marketing
The second dimension of our program was the use of social media for developing the brand of IEC. The program was very comprehensive in its expanse and it included, facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Slide share and Flicker apart from the education centric where we created profiles for the colleges.
The program has been very successful and has established itself as the key driver for IEC for its marketing and branding exercise. IEC has decided to pursue the program in much more detail from the next year onwards.
