Local Bank Marketing Campaign: Targeting Homeowners in the DFW Metroplex
If you want a local marketing challenge, just try being a locally owned bank.The fight for your audience’s trust is probably highest in the banking...
7 min read
Rogue Marketing
Aug 19, 2021 1:21:37 PM
How can a university increase registrations in an 8-week, open-enrollment course? Rogue Marketing consulted with a prominent DFW-area university to solve their revenue challenge.
Warning: We’re going to speak in generalities to protect our client’s identity. Hope you don’t mind.
Let’s dive in:
A prominent DFW-area university hosts open-enrollment courses across many specialties, including finance, entrepreneurship, economics, American history, entrepreneurship, and many more. In order for these programs to stay open, they had to be self-sufficient, and drive the funds required to maintain them.
The entrepreneurship course was held three times a year at a cost per attendee of $800. Classes were held once a week in 3-hour sessions where business leaders like Chris Cook, the founder of Sleep Experts, and Mike Muhney, founder of ACT software, would teach key business practices which led to their success.
So in 2016, the program directors approached Rogue with a problem: the course was facing dwindling enrollment, despite them not having altered their marketing tactics. What had once been a thriving class with 60+ individuals in attendance for each cohort, had gradually shrunk over the course of several years to 20-30 people registered per cohort.
They had help, too. In fact, a major ad agency based in Dallas was responsible for paid media and creative direction for the course’s ads; even so, they were driving less and less ROI each year.
If the program directors could not increase registrations, then they would have to shut down the course. They set an ambitious goal of returning the course to its former enrollment.
Of course, there were complications: The only funds they could direct to a different agency was the ad spend that the major agency had. The program’s budget was locked into the department’s overall retainer with the larger agency. So if the program leaders were going to do anything, they’d have to go rogue with nothing more than the paid media budget earmarked for the major agency to use on their specific program.
Here’s what happened after they went Rogue.
The program directors had developed relationships with a veterans group to provide the course at a 35% discount. The veterans group would consistently send 8-10 participants. While the discount was noble, it also dramatically reduced the margins the program needed in order to remain open.
Apart from the veteran’s group, the program had a list of approximately 300 individuals to whom they sent a cadence of 4 emails within two weeks of the $800-course beginning. Each cohort, they welcomed fewer and fewer individuals from that mailing list.
The program had a Facebook page, but not one that had been regularly updated or maintained. It consisted mostly of group shots of each cohort and the occasional post about a new cohort about to begin.
Rogue knew they had to start at the end: How do we get the enrollment back up to 60 individuals? There are 2 options for every step of the conversion process:
At every step, Rogue either consulted with current data or provides recommendations to begin tracking key data points that will provide answers to each question. Then through a backward-mapping exercise, Rogue started to identify possibilities, and eliminate those areas where we could not directly influence the outcome:
Conversion Rate Optimization
Email – When someone chooses to receive communications from the university, especially regarding the entrepreneurship course, what are they expecting to see?
Paid Channels – How can we target the right audience and draw in people waiting to take action?
Video – How can a person come to believe as quickly as possible that the course will be $800 well spent?
Long story short, the course went from 27 students in February 2016 to 55 in June 2016 during Rogue’s first shot at the campaign. Then the course went to 81 in October of 2016, and maintained a steady 60-70 for years afterward.
There was plenty more we wanted to tackle. Resources were a major limiting factor. In fact, they always are. Rogue has never worked with a client with limited resources; so if you had the thought, “Well why didn’t you do THIS too/instead?” then that’s a great thought! Something’s always gotta give, and Rogue works with the client to determine what they can handle, and what they can’t.
You can go through this exercise yourself. No one doubts that for a second. In fact, so could the program directors at the university we just discussed here. But you already have a full-time job; so does everyone on your team. And no one is wasting time. So how do you switch gears when you’re so busy keeping up with everything you’re already doing?
You get an agency.
You get an agency because you need perspective; you need expertise; you need people who can formulate a vision, and turn it into a strategy; you need people who can take a strategy, and then pick up the pencil and do the work.
If you need to try something a little different…a little off the beaten path…a little rogue, we’re ready and waiting to hear from you.
If you want a local marketing challenge, just try being a locally owned bank.The fight for your audience’s trust is probably highest in the banking...
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