Boost Branding in Education with Social CRM in China [Case Study]

In this Social CRM case study in China, you can learn about how our Social CRM (sCRM) and Marketing Automation strategy helped a prestigious international education group:

Improve lead generation and management
Enhance data ownership and obtain data insights
Boost O2O experience and deliver a consistent experience
Craft more informed marketing strategies
Empower communication with school communities

About The Client – Education Sector

Being a part of one of the most distinguished educational groups in the Asia-Pacific region, our client is an independent international school brand.

Since its establishment in Shanghai, the International School family has grown and expanded in China and other parts of Asia and is renowned for its academic excellence, innovation, and respect for tradition.

As the digital transformation in the Education sector has been booming globally, more and more schools are leveraging digital channels and employing Marketing Automation (M.A) strategies as a key tactic for digital transformation.

However, due to the differences in China’s digital ecosystem, where:

Dominating social media channels differ from the rest of the world
SMS and emails are not the main communication channels
Private Traffic domains are concentrated in the WeChat ecosystem

The Education Group implemented a long-term digital transformation mission leveraging best-in-class Marketing Automation solutions and built-for-purpose Social CRM frameworks to empower 2 key levels in this organization:

- Group, or Brand level: Initiate the digital transformation initiative for the Brand and the Schools
- School level: Individual schools across Shanghai, Beijing, and other regions in China with unique touchpoints, managed by the school themselves

This article talks specifically about the Marketing Automation strategy on a Brand level. In the next article, you can explore the School-specific level approach.

Objectives

The ultimate objectives for the International Education Brand are to:

Enhance the brand’s perceived value
Empower all of the schools under the Brand

As many parents (the key target audience for China’s education sector) also follow the general Brand-level WeChat Official Account for initial research, this needs suitable M.A and sCRM strategies.

This is not only to more effectively convey and spread its perceived value, but also to guide the target audience to the individual school-level Official Accounts based on their interests, which helps accelerate lead generation.

Ultimately, the prestigious Education Group can maximize the value of the WeChat ecosystem as a touchpoint – the main channel of engagement for different schools and the Brand level, especially with prospective parents and students.

Solutions & Results

1. Enhance Data Ownership and Multi-Channel Synergy

The initial Digital Transformation Audit of their assets in China uncovered that there was a lack of synergy between the Private Traffic domains. It was also extremely difficult to identify the follower profile among the existing pool of WeChat Official Accounts’ followers.

The next step was to craft user journeys across different channels to create synergy and deliver a seamless omnichannel experience.

At the same time, our Social CRM consultants in China also constructed a holistic tagging strategy to:

Build and continuously enrich user profiles
Improve the tailored content delivery accuracy (push the right content to the right users at the right time), ultimately boosting user engagement

In addition, we helped enhance the synergy between WeChat and the schools’ application platform. By leveraging the Social CRM system bound with the WeChat Official Accounts, the international school can make WeChat a CRM to view a holistic user journey across the systems and channels.

This way, the International School can observe the marketing and admissions funnel, which should clearly showcase the value of conducting Marketing Automation.

Overview of how Marketing Automation and Social CRM (sCRM) system helps ensure direct data capture, build holistic user profiles, deliver tailored content to the target audience, and drive an omnichannel journey

2. Elevate Lead Generation for Schools

As this Education Group has XX schools under its umbrella, one of the key focuses for the Management level is how the Group can generate qualified leads for their individual schools – a challenge that has been troubling the organization for some time.

Aside from the difficulty in bringing potential leads to different schools from the Group level, the Brand also lacked personalized engagement content for the identified main personas, including prospective parents and job seekers.

Moreover, since the School-level WeChat Official Accounts are the actual channels for lead generation, the International School should effectively position its Brand-level OA as a navigation hub directing users to the right channels for the right information.

However, the resources for various needs (e.g. online enquiry, job searching, direction to School-level Official Accounts) were insufficient.

To tackle this issue, the Education Group needed to:

Construct a Welcome Journey enabled by Marketing Automation to drive new leads to relevant schools’ WeChat Official Accounts based on their identified interests in an automated process
Deploy keywords auto-reply for identity-based content delivery along the journey
Establish an enquiry journey for a more efficient enquiry process

An example of the Welcome Journey enabled by Marketing Automation and Social CRM-enabled enquiry

As a result, the International School Brand managed to:

Achieve significant growth in the school interest identification among all followers
Increased Journey completion rate through tailored engagement paths for new followers
Identified a remarkable percentage of users with specific content interests, along with achieving a much higher enquiry submission rate

3. Improve Decision-Making Insights

Another important aspect that this education group in China was missing is the lack of data-driven insights and performance-tracking benchmarks to provide practical findings for key decision-makers.

Our Marketing Automation and Social CRM consultants worked with the Brand to deploy a website tracking plan besides the WeChat ecosystem. By placing tracking code on the website, the International School can record user actions and integrate data across multiple platforms to better understand user behavior.

Particularly, they can identify the visitors’ interests, evaluate the conversions, and achieve an omnichannel experience, data consistency, and focused analytics.

Additionally, the Group could also receive the monthly report template to evaluate key success indicators and build multi-channel evaluation metrics for the Marketing Automation mission.

As a result, the Brand and Schools can gain a better understanding of the main personas and uncover many interesting and surprising data-driven insights.

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In the next part of our sCRM case study in the education sector, we will dive into our Marketing Automation and Social CRM initiatives for the School-level to enhance lead generation and generate more data-driven insights empowering strategic decision-making for the prestigious schools in China.

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Enhance Branding and Lead Generation in Education with Social CRM & Marketing Automation (Group-Level)

Learn about how our Social CRM (sCRM) and Marketing Automation strategy helped a prestigious international education group in China enhance branding and boost student recruitment (lead generation) for its schools.