Recruiting with Marketo: How Laurentian University Built Lead Scoring and Saved a Year of Work
In today’s competitive academic landscape, there is a great deal of emphasis on how higher education institutions can streamline and improve their recruitment processes.
Recruitment that needed Marketo, and expertise, fast.
The key to this is implementing an effective approach for outreach and maintaining relationships with prospects. For Laurentian University this meant implementing Marketo to help them increase communications with prospective students and parents; and calling upon the experts at Demand Spring to help build and optimize their Marketo instance.
Located in Ontario, Canada, Laurentian University is one of Canada’s top 10 undergraduate universities. Laurentian is a bilingual institution offering a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate programs to over 9000 full and part-time students. Like many universities, they are experiencing increased competition for student enrollments, and are seeing more aggressive recruitment efforts being undertaken by educational institutions across the country.
The business challenge.
The goals of the Digital Strategy department at Laurentian University are primarily focused on student recruitment. The team recently determined that they would need to incorporate their Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)—Marketo—into their processes in order to effectively respond to the requirement of increasing communications with prospective students and their parents.
Laurentian’s Director of Digital Strategy, JP Rains, quickly realized that because they do not have a large Digital Strategy team, they would need to bring in outside assistance to effectively implement and optimize Marketo for their requirements. JP found Demand Spring and recognized that the team had the knowledge and experience to meet their Marketo implementation and optimization requirements.
Testimonial
“Essentially, we needed to be able to improve communication with our prospective clients, and we didn’t have the capacity in house. Demand Spring’s expertise, along with their ability to respond to our needs in a way that is much faster than what we could have developed in house, made them a great choice for us.”
Lead scoring first, then optimization.
Demand Spring was initially brought on board to help design and implement a complex lead scoring model, and then assisted with optimizing the Marketo installation.
Testimonial
“Bringing Demand Spring on board saved us a great deal of time in getting ourselves up and running. Perhaps we could have gotten there ourselves through training modules and spending a lot of time in the software figuring things out, but bringing in Demand Spring really expedited our learning curve. We probably saved ourselves about a year’s worth of work by hiring the experts at Demand Spring from the outset.”
A home-grown framework, translated into Marketo.
Laurentian challenged the Demand Spring team from the outset, bringing them a ‘home-grown’ framework for how they were going to deliver lead scoring. Demand Spring translated that framework into Marketo terms, turning an idea of what the team wanted to do into something that could actually be implemented.
Additionally, as is the case with many organizations, Laurentian’s IT department is taxed with many demands, so the Marketo implementation was not always at the top of their priority list. Demand Spring was able to bring in a plan that was flexible enough to compensate for potential delays in response from the IT side when they were working on other priorities.
Testimonial
“Demand Spring had the strategic insight to guide us, as well as the tactical expertise to deliver. The team understood more than just the tool, they took the time to understand our business. With Demand Spring’s help, we are in a much better position to deliver results.”
A year of work, saved.
Laurentian now runs its prospective-student communications on a Marketo instance built around its own lead scoring framework, and by JP Rains’ estimate saved about a year’s worth of work by starting with experts.
Testimonial
“When you are starting a new project and no one internally has experience with the specific tool, you can really save a lot of time and energy by going to experts and getting their advice from the beginning. While the Marketo training itself is very good and gives the fundamentals, you don’t necessarily know how to implement your long-term vision and make sure that what you are building towards is going to be achieved. Having an expert like the team at Demand Spring say things like, ‘if you want to go here in a year from now, you should take this path instead of that path today’ is absolutely essential.”
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About Demand Spring
Demand Spring is an integrated Revenue Marketing consultancy. We help marketing organizations scale their ability to contribute to pipeline and revenue by transforming marketing practices, delivering exceptional customer experiences, and driving revenue.
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