The Technological University of Mexico (UNITEC or Universidad Tecnológica de México) is a higher education private institution with 50 years of experience training professionals in Mexico. It has a strong focus on developing students to successfully enter the workplace, for which it has designed study formulas that meet employers’ demands.
“Today we have more than 80,000 high school, undergrad and postgraduate students, more than 4,000 professors and about 4,000 administrative employees distributed throughout seven campuses,” says Roxana Alanis, Content Director for UNITEC. “We offer more than 40 degrees and 40 educational programs, which makes UNITEC the largest private university in Mexico City and in the metropolitan area."
For an institution of this size, the three biggest challenges include the acquisition of new students, valuable content offering in order to generate interest, and creating positive word of mouth through exceptional service.
In this sense, the interaction with students and prospects can be a complicated issue. Before social networks, communication tools such as email and flyers worked well, but after a health crisis which struck Mexico in 2009, the Communications Department of the UNITEC created a blog informing students with next steps, which proved to be very useful.
Using the blog to generate prospects
In 2010, UNITEC created a content strategy that would allow them to create valuable content in order to position the university as a prestigious educational institution, positioning the blog in the center of the strategy. At first they used Blogger, then passed through Wordpress and finally arrived at Hubspot.
Eventually they realized that the blog was an effective tool, which helped to understand the needs and motivation of their target audience. However, they weren’t analyzing its performance and neither was it integrated with other marketing tools, which kept it from being an efficient channel.
It was then in 2015, with the support of Solvis Consulting, that UNITEC began migrating their blog to Hubspot, which allowed among other things to measure the content strategy ROI, identify messages with better performance as well as the most important traffic sources, and especially, to give adequate follow-up to each lead generated by each post, which today represents more than 100,000 leads per year.
Solvis Consulting supported UNITEC in campaign designs and automation. Based on a strategy that includes processes, data, and dynamic content, messages are developed by subject and aimed at 18 different buyer personas according to the educational offer and their journey stage. This has allowed them to be more assertive and effective in attracting and converting customers.
“In operational terms, Hubspot is very user-friendly when it comes to generating posts and makes your content easier to find in Google. Today we have about eight people who upload content to the blog which are not necessarily SEO experts, and is very easy for them to use it and optimize content”.
Additionally, Hubspot was integrated with other platforms such as Desk, GetSatisfaction, SocialStudio and ExactTarget, with the intention of expediting the attention and channeling of prospects, as well as managing leads in an efficient manner, and the ability to automate processes, thus building a robust digital marketing ecosystem never before seen in an educational institution in Latin America.
Great Results!
“One year after the Hubspot implementation, our blog became the ideal channel to connect with the needs of prospects and has allowed us to present the university in a kind way with a spirit of orientation and conversation, rather than a hard sales pitch,” Roxana Alanis concludes. “The platform has also helped to optimize the website and therefore increase traffic 32.8%.”
The current content strategy allows for the classification of content by degree and by the buyers’ journey stage, and it also provides for a lead nurturing process through the registration stage. Among the contents that work best are the webinars, which are ideal for online undergrad, and postgraduate candidates, in which UNITEC professors discuss specific issues related to different degrees and thus generating interest among prospects. Infographics are great among undergrads and they are used to explain the benefits and potential jobs for each degree.
