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Wasting money according to the head of sales
I feel like this could be a long post but i’ll keep it as brief as possible, i’m just after some opinions on the situation i’m in.
I work for a university with multiple campuses, my job is to drive applications from students across the world for one of our campuses in the UK or Europe with our target audience being upper class 17-23 from the MENA region.
We just launched a new campus in Ireland and the sales team are quite desperate to drive leads, I was allocated £5,000 to run a paid meta campaign across 6-7 countries in order to drive as many applications as possible.
I should mention that a lead is considered to be a user that visits our landing page and then completes a 20-30 min application to apply to a campus.
The campaign was launched, we spent the entire £5000 in a mater of days and received 0 applications.
Personally, i’m not surprised we did not receive any conversions due to the fact we were targeting a cold audience (layered by interests and demographic) with a long winded conversion action. That being said, the head of sales is furious that we did not get any applications. He stated that we are wasting money and my lead generation skills are poor, I explained that the conversion action was too long, budget was too tight and Meta was not the right platform (I explained this earlier) and how we should be trying to capture demand on Google instead of trying to create it.
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Anyway, I’m getting a-lot of shit for this. Any advice or opinions?
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Thanks
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1 Reply
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The other challenge might be targeting to many countries at once, which meant the $5,000 was spent to fast. Maybe it would have made more sense to target only 2 or 3 countries to stretch the budget. Capturing demand does make a lot more sense.
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20 to 30 minutes to complete an application is insane. I work in PPC for recruitment so it’s not exactly the same but similar enough and they’re making waaaay to hard for them to convert.
I would be aiming to create a lead form that’s much easier to complete with basic info that the sales team can then use to contact the lead and qualify from there
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30 min application is insane.
You probably need to make the form as stupid as possible so that your head of sales and his team or whoever calls the prospects back instead.
People are lazy and he should do his job… which is warming up prospects.
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Dude, you answered your own question. Fu*k the impostor syndrome. The budget is too low, the form is way too long for Meta Ads, and with that kind of budget, you’re better off trying to capture demand on Google. That’s it.
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That campaign was born dead.
What kind of 17-23 y/o person has a 30 minute attention span for something they stumbled randomly on Meta?
Next time be more assertive when you are doing something that you know is wrong.
Straight up tell them they won’t get any applications in an email, so you have evidence after the fact.
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You need to get your CEO/Founder/Whatever in a meeting and explain the situation.
“I really want to drive leads for the sales team, but the current set up is wrong. We need to use Google, not Meta. We need a very short form to fill in, as an MQL which is then passed to the sales team to contact and convert into an SQL. I don’t want to be stealing credit from sales. If we go ad->completed 30 minute application we’re never going to win. You employed me for my expertise, so we should at least test my strategy over what the sales team suggested. I don’t tell them how to close, they probably shouldn’t tell me how to get MQLs.”
or something along those lines.
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Good lord. First of all, my sympathies.
Secondly, I have done work for education clients. It is hard enough to get the short form filled out, but a 20-30 minute application? From one ad view? HILARIOUS.
Also, as others have mentioned, desired reach was way out of whack with the budget. Again, have had this conversation about a million times with many types of businesses. Nothing kills a biz’s appetite for PPC faster than spending what they *think* is a lot of money and spreading it way too thin so the campaigns have zero shot.
I like to use the term “pilot” with clients in this type of situation. For example “My recommendation is that we pilot this program by advertising specifically to x audience in y location(s)” and keep those variables to ones where the campaign has a fighting chance.
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30 min application? that’s your issue
thinking people scrolling facebook randomly think “let me join a new university!” is your second issue
should have started with Google initially, your boss sounds like a pain lmao
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You need to simply get contact info and have a team follow up and nurture via phone and email. Share pics, info, and testimonials, and have a CTA that is more along the lines of “learn more” than “Apply Now.”
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Hey, just require them to include their social security number, mother’s maiden name and a $500 deposit to get information and you’ll surely get qualified leads.
Unfortunately, this campaign should never have gotten off the ground. Perhaps you needed to be more vocal and adamant about the targeting and expectations?
Why filter so strongly at the top of the funnel?
Open up the form/lead conversion step to an insanely simple task.
Use nurture marketing to continue to warm them up free, whilst the sales team does their job and works the leads.Meta? OUCH!
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show him where it went wrong and ask for more money
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I used to work for an education agency as well. It’s pretty similar to yours, running lead gen campaign to increase university applicants.
I understand that there are lots of question need to cover but when it comes to lead gen, you have to trim it down. 20-30mins is just too crazy.
I would suggest to only include basic info in the form that is necessarily for the sales team to start the conversation.Also, using hooks such as “scholarship” or “low requirements” to attract students.
As for targeting, as our market has “national examination” that is compulsory for every high schoolers, we use that as main targeting on Facebook.
Hope this helps.
Also, have you tried Facebook lead gen form? It is very strong for lead gen
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I recommend doing an analysis of the form: event on each step of the form to show the drop and where the interest is decreasing. ????
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You need proxy conversion targets and iterate changes to your campaign every $1000 or so until you start getting sales. By the time you spend a thousand dollars and have no conversions and still decided to spend the rest of the $4000 is stupid itself.
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