By Caroline Ramos | Director, Client Services
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.
Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.
But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?
It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.
Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.
A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:
- High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
- Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
- Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.
According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.
These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.
What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities? (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.
That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.
About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services
MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!
We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.
By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers. (more…)
By Sultan Riaz | Marketing Coordinator
Editor’s note: “Ask the Performance Marketer” is a regular series in which MediaWhiz’s performance marketing, SEO and digital media experts answer some of the most popular questions we from clients.
To get more answers to your performance marketing questions, download our free eBook, “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.”
Mike Sisto, MediaWhiz’s director of performance marketing, has worked in performance marketing for 14 years. He’s seen it all, from the earliest days of the industry to the current evolution in which media, mobile, content, SEO and many other digital media channels are mixed together. Needless to say, he knows how to help his clients engage, acquire and retain customers more profitably.
Recently, we sat down with Mike to discuss some of the most common questions he gets from clients about accountability in affiliate marketing campaigns, email acquisition and optimizing lead quality.
How do you ensure accountability of affiliates for campaign and creative materials compliance?
We first establish accountability with each affiliate by employing a suite of external and internal tools to monitor advertisements. We hold publishers accountable for compliance violations. Once our high standards are made clear, the possibility of losing out on business due to compliance violations exerts pressure on affiliates to comply with advertiser guidelines. With adherence, publishers have the opportunity to cultivate a long-term business relationship with MediaWhiz as they continue to provide quality traffic via compliant marketing practices. (more…)
By Sultan Riaz | Marketing Coordinator
MediaWhiz Senior Vice President of Media Services Peter Klein is a fount of information about performance marketing. Especially affiliate marketing. The guy loves affiliate marketing. The good kind, of course. Not the fraud-based affiliate marketing of the past. That kind of junk pains him. It
It’s with this perspective in mind that I recently sat down with Pete, who oversees MediaWhiz’s affiliate marketing business, to discuss a topic that he is particularly passionate about: launching performance marketing campaigns. damages the industry’s reputation, he says, and makes it harder for reputable affiliate networks, such as MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, to earn the trust and business of today’s digitally savvy CMO.
Pete’s so passionate and informed about this topic, in fact, that he’s written an eBook on it called “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.” You can download a free copy here.
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
With last week’s news of a major affiliate network closing its doors, we wanted to remind you that MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, remains one of the strongest affiliate networks in the industry. It was just three months ago that mThink ranked MonetizeIt as the No. 5 affiliate network in the world.
We’re rapidly expanding our affiliate network to include new offers in mobile, as well as game and app downloads, dating and entertainment offers. These are in addition to MediaWhiz’s extensive selection of branded campaigns in verticals such as finance, education, health and beauty and insurance.
A full listing of all of our campaigns can be found by logging into MoneitizeIt.com. And if you’re not a MediaWhiz affiliate, what are you waiting for? We’ve made it easier than ever to join our affiliate network and start monetizing your site(s).
By Peter Klein | SVP, Media Services
Yesterday, we announced an important milestone in the 10-plus-year history of MediaWhiz: the expansion of our affiliate network, MonetizeIt. As part of our cross-publishing capabilities with our parent company Matomy Media Group, we are now able to offer a broader selection of domestic and international affiliate marketing campaigns, including game and mobile app downloads, as well as entertainment and dating campaigns. These are in addition to our extensive selection of branded campaigns in verticals such as finance, education, health and beauty and insurance.
This initiative represents an important step in our integration with Matomy and follows the recent launch of MediaWhiz Mobile, our mobile performance marketing practice.
Approximately 150 new domestic, international and mobile affiliate campaigns will initially be available through our affiliate network, MonetizeIt. We’re also expanding our base of experienced publishers, allowing advertisers to garner additional traffic to their websites and mobile apps.
Publishers interested in joining MonetizeIt can do so here. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
In the Digital Age of marketing, connections are everything. Whether it’s connections with consumers (what modern marketers now call “engagement”), connections between consumers and brand advocates or consumer-to-consumer-to-brand connections by way of online review sites, we live in an increasingly interconnected world. Our offline lives have largely merged with our online lives.
Yet one critical aspect of consumers’ offline and online connections has been missing — until now. The announcement by Facebook of the launch of new “partner categories” marks a critical turning point in marketers’ quest to connect offline consumer purchasing habits and intent with online advertising opportunities.
Here’s how AdExchanger described the new ad targeting tool:
“Facebook is adding new offline purchase data from Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon. Advertisers can now target people who buy lots of frozen veggies, for instance, or children’s cereal. They can pluck these segments from Facebook’s self-serve interface, alongside its own social data. … It’s just the latest move in a sustained effort by Facebook to absorb the methods pioneered in traditional display over the past decade.”
What ‘Partner Categories’ Mean for Performance Marketers
Facebook’s new ad targeting tools will have a significant positive effective on many aspects of online marketing and advertising. Performance marketers may benefit the most from this new advertising tool. The ability to connect consumers’ offline purchases with potential intent to purchase via Facebook, and then to serve that consumer a relevant ad or lead generation opportunity, has long been one of performance marketers’ top wishes for Facebook advertising.
Here’s how MediaWhiz Senior Vice President of Media Services Peter Klein put it when I asked him yesterday for his thoughts on these new ad targeting tools from Facebook:
“This is a great move by Facebook. Facebook’s “Partner Categories” ad targeting tool clearly lends itself to better targeting of consumers and less irrelevant ads. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
LeadsCon, a lead-generation conference, wrapped up its West Coast show in Las Vegas last week. The MediaWhiz team was all over the conference, starting with the first day’s Buyers Summit (March 18), and ending with an afternoon panel March 20 on mobile lead generation.
Beyond the ideas and insights our own team brought to LeadsCon, we learned a lot from the dozens of other speakers and vendors who were in attendance. Below is a quick synopsis of our top-3 takeaways from LeadsCon Las Vegas 2013.
RELATED: Check out our photo slideshow on Facebook from LeadsCon Las Vegas.
Trend #1: Mobile Here, Mobile There, Mobile Everywhere
Not surprisingly, mobile dominated many of the panels and presentations at LeadsCon.
Taking a page from that meme, we launched MediaWhiz Mobile at the conference. Serving as our official mobile performance marketing practice, MediaWhiz Mobile offers clients and publishers mobile performance marketing campaigns and offers across a wide range of online marketing channels, including affiliate marketing, email, social media, display, search, SEO and lead generation.
In a March 20 panel hosted by MediaWhiz (“Taking Lead Gen Beyond the Desktop”), panelists discussed best practices for mobile lead generation. One issue panelists highlighted was the need to prepare call centers for the potential flood of incoming calls that could result from making mobile landing pages too easy to convert.
Overshadowing that issue, though, was the bigger concern over whether many companies were even prepared to move beyond the current focus on mobile branding. As Rebecca Madigan of the Performance Marketing Association noted, “Mobile lead generation is a huge ‘money to be had’ opportunity for advertisers and marketers.” A great way advertisers can tap into performance marketing’s mobile lead-gen opportunities is by setting up click-to-call campaigns, according to Madigan. (more…)
By Hakan Lindskog | CEO
Last week, we announced the launch of our new mobile performance marketing practice, MediaWhiz Mobile. While it doesn’t mark our first foray into mobile marketing, it does represent our most significant and dedicated focus on the immense online marketing and advertising opportunities of mobile.
What this launch means for MediaWhiz, however, is insignificant compared to the value we believe it offers our clients. MediaWhiz Mobile will help advertisers more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers across what has rapidly become the most relevant and important digital marketing channel: mobile.
Why the launch now? As I told A4U in announcing the new service, we absolutely believe that mobile lead generation is the future of online marketing.
Consumers are projected to spend $119 billion worldwide on goods and services from the mobile and tablet devices by 2015, according to ABI Research. And with upwards of 70% of online advertising spend in the United States going toward performance-based advertising, it’s clear that advertisers are hungry for performance-based mobile marketing services that do far more than branding. They want mobile marketing services that help their brands profitably engage, acquire and retain customers in the mobile space.
Increasingly, consumers are ditching their desktop computers in favor of their smartphones and tablets. The opportunities these devices offer brands and marketers to reach, connect with and influence the purchasing habits of consumers is beyond what many of us considered possible just five years ago. More importantly, mobile and tablet devices offer advertisers an immense opportunity to acquire customers instantly and to generate leads at the click of a button.
MediaWhiz Mobile is here to service those opportunities across a variety of online marketing channels, including affiliate marketing, display advertising, search, SEO, lead generation and email. (more…)
