Inbound Marketing Success Story and Takeaway

By Founder

Case StudyGeneralPromotion

Disclaimer: I work at HubSpot.  Many of you who read this blog already know that, but I still want to be extremely transparent before I write this.  I’ve also worked at a college for six years, so I’ve been there and done that too.

I’ve been talking about inbound school marketing and what institutions need to be doing better in order to turn their website into a lead generation machine for a while.  I’ve also worked with hundreds of small to medium businesses turning their web presence into a lead generation machine.  It’s not all that uncommon for higher education folks to ask me if HubSpot has any higher education customers.  The answer is yes, and now I have a good school example to share.

The following video was put together by Lisa Alvey (@lisaalvey) and Associate DirectorGundry (@nickgundry) from Fresno Pacific University.

You can also learn more about Fresno Pacific’s success story in their case study.

Tap Your Audience as Content Creators

The other important point I want to make about this video is that it’s a perfect example of using your customers (aka students) to produce content for you and share their excitement.  HubSpot provides the framework for a customer case study, and all a customer has to do is follow the guideline and we produce the video and promote it.  It’s great for both parties!  You have to be willing to let go of control a little, but in this case we were given an outstanding final product that was better than anything we could have done on our own.

We actually have a few Flip video camera kits that we mail customers chosen for case studies.  From here they can shoot all the video they want and simply mail it back to us where we will edit and produce the final video.  Basic video editing of talking heads simply requires understanding of software like Adobe Premiere or iMovie.

There are many examples of this that colleges could do including:

  • Student Bloggers – the obvious one that stands out
  • Event Promotion – students love to promote these
  • Donor spotlights – utilize alumni to tell their stories
  • Faculty – describing their department
  • Athletic games – stories from tailgate parties possibly?

On your website, are you converting visitors to prospects and fully tapping the resources that you have on your campus to tell their success stories?  In what other ways could you utilize your biggest resource for content creation?

This post was written by:

Founder - who has written 226 posts on .eduGuru

Founderis currently the Customer in Residence at HubSpot, a Co-Founder at nuCloud and  formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. Founderis an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple national conferences and done countless webinars on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He's definitely a fairly nice guy.

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