TUM Asia’s disparate tools for managing its social media, email, and content marketing campaigns were hampering the efforts of its marketing team.
The team had implemented a CRM system but found it unintuitive and overly complicated. Thus, the team continued to perform many tasks manually with spreadsheets.
The CRM system also didn’t have all the features the marketing team needed, so it turned to other tools for email and social media marketing.
With features and data split across multiple tools, the marketing team struggled to get a comprehensive view of campaign performance.
Daphne Ang, Head of Admissions and Marketing at TUM Asia, explains:
“It’s easy to lose track of different campaigns when they live on different platforms, and their relative performance isn’t easy to assess. Also, we have a lean marketing team, so we don’t have much time to pull and compile data from multiple systems.”
Having to individually create and post content on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter was also time consuming and made coordination among team members difficult.
The team faced similar issues with email marketing. Daphne and her team were using two email platforms to target two different audiences, which often meant duplicating efforts when setting up emails.
This disparate mix of marketing tools also created a steep learning curve for new users with so many platforms to master.
In addition to these challenges, Daphne was eager for marketing and recruitment to work together more closely.
“Our recruiters are the people closest to our prospective students,” says Daphne. “Marketing needs their input because they know our target audience better than anyone, and our tools were getting in the way of collaboration.”
As further impetus, Daphne understands the critical role that inbound marketing plays in student recruitment. Choosing which post-secondary school to attend, and which program to apply for, is a major life decision for students that warrants a lot of research. Consequently, educational institutions that have built robust inbound marketing programs have a distinct advantage over those that haven’t.
Today, with a global pandemic impacting travel and in-person recruiting events, inbound marketing is even more essential.
Thus, Daphne decided to engage clickTRUE, a local digital marketing agency, for help—and they introduced her to HubSpot.
With the HubSpot CRM platform in place, TUM Asia started to realize the benefits of having all marketing features and performance data on a single platform.
Today, it’s using the platform to manage its social media, email, website, and workflows without overwhelming its small marketing team.
Greater efficiency and coordination with one platform
The HubSpot CRM platform has made the coordination of marketing campaigns and posts easier and more efficient.
“With HubSpot, it’s easy for multiple users to organize and schedule social media posts in one central area,” says Daphne.
The same is true of email marketing.
“Prior, it was hard to keep track of all the emails we sent out because we were using various platforms,” says Daphne. “It was a messy process. But with HubSpot, everything is consolidated in one place.”
Also, because everything is centralized—and because the HubSpot CRM platform is so user friendly—new users can get up to speed quickly.
“New users take a shorter time to grasp the platform and thus perform their required tasks easily,” says Daphne.
Centralized performance tracking
With the HubSpot CRM platform, TUM Asia no longer has to pull data from different platforms and export to spreadsheets to get a complete picture of performance.
Instead, real-time data for all campaigns is readily available in the HubSpot CRM platform dashboard.
“HubSpot is great because it gives us an overview of growth,” says Daphne. “We know whether leads are coming from our website, emails, or social media campaigns. Everything we need is right there in the dashboard.”
TUM Asia is also using performance tracking for its paid lead generation campaigns for programs and events. With just a few clicks, both the marketing and recruitment teams can see the number of event registrants and assess the quality of sign ups.
Event registration and recruitment meetings
In addition, the TUM Asia marketing team is using the HubSpot CRM platform to make event registration more efficient.
Daphne explains:
“We don’t want to put the Zoom link on our registration page because we want to capture lead information—but manually emailing Zoom links is time consuming. We set up workflows in HubSpot to automate the process of monitoring sign ups and sending out meeting links and reminders.”
Likewise, the TUM Asia recruitment team is using automation to dramatically speed up scheduling of one-to-one student recruitment meetings by having email confirmations and reminders go out automatically.
Website pop-ups to promote additional offerings
The TUM Asia marketing team continues to explore new ways to use the HubSpot CRM platform, the most recent being website pop-ups.
The team is using pop-ups to promote additional offerings to leads when they view content on the TUM Asia website.
“Pop-ups are easy to set up and target to website visitors who have demonstrated interest in related programs through their browsing history,” says Daphne.
With the help of clickTRUE and HubSpot CRM platform, the TUM Asia marketing team increased web traffic by 60% since implementation, largely due to the increase in volume of email and social media marketing campaigns made possible by automation and greater process efficiencies.
In fact, the team sent an impressive 185 emails and scheduled 390 Facebook posts in the past 12 months.
At the same time, the marketing team is saving six to eight hours a week in manual tasks.
Today, Daphne feels good knowing that her marketing team has the tools it needs to help TUM Asia grow and scale now and in the future.
“HubSpot is our one-stop solution for crafting personalized email campaigns and social media posts while also giving us data about what’s driving our traffic. That’s why we like it.”