On the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, in the bustling student-friendly city of Lausanne, lies IMD Business School. Consistently ranked one of the top business school programs in the world, IMD is dedicated to developing global leaders through high-impact executive education.
Now at this point you might be wondering why an elite education organization is being covered by a publication normally dedicated to luxury. When it comes to defining what makes a brand a luxury brand, there is often debate.
But if we can agree that a luxury brand or business is one that offers its customers an elevated experience, by being the best in its field, by telling a story if its values, and with an unwavering dedication to being the best, then in the world of leading global executive business programs, IMD is one that stands at the top.
The team behind IMD's success also believes in high-impact marketing programs that drive the flow of business-experienced executives looking to up their education. The challenge faced by IMD was that it was far from the only business program looking to attract top candidates and it needed an effective way to drive lead generation without disrupting other areas of its business too much.
Behind the scenes at IMD the impact of search engine marketing was being discussed, and it was determined that this should be a key area of focus for the school. Having seen the success that Digital Luxury Group (DLG, parent company of Luxury Society) had had in search engine optimization (SEO) activities for luxury brands and services such as TAG Heuer and private bank, UBP, the agency was called up to answer the challenge of how to grow student applications through search engines.
Not only did IMD want to increase visits from search engines, but it wanted to increase qualified leads and do it all without modifying the existing website. To put it simply, IMD wanted SEO results without changing a single comma or letter on their website. Given DLG's approach to SEO of only using "white hat SEO techniques" (techniques publicly approved by search engines), this was a real challenge.
Working together, IMD Business School and DLG addressed the challenge by taking on a mindset that IMD was a brand and needed to approach its search engine marketing efforts in the same way a consumer brand would.
After a website audit, the DLG team established the three core optimization areas in order to achieve IMD's goals:
Search Engine Optimization: strategies and techniques used to ensure a website ranks highly on search engine results pages
Funnel & Conversion Rate Optimization: simply put, analyzing why visitors aren't converting to a lead or sale and fixing it
Heat Map Testing: a graphical representation of data where varying degrees of a single metric are shown using colors directly on website screenshot
To provide the necessary solution without modifying the existing website, DLG created "its own" website within the IMD.org structure. The purpose of the new structure was to allow DLG to create and manage dedicated search engine landing pages. When a prospective program participant does a search on Google for "Management Training Programs", for example, they are redirected to a dedicated landing page specifically designed to convert that lead into a registration.
Once the website within the existing website has been created, DLG immediately began a continuous series of split testing (driving people to different page designs to determine which design converts better) to determine which design provided the best conversion and track path from visit to lead. This process, over a period of 4 months, allowed IMD to significantly increase the number of qualified leads it was receiving online.
In parallel, a mapping of the school's corporate website was done to better understand how visitors interacted on the site, where they clicked, and also important - where they didn't click.
At the end to generate targeted visits and qualified leads for IMD, Digital Luxury Group's luxury-influenced approach took the form of:
Optimizing IMD.org to be search engine & visitor friendly
Analysis of over 700k keywords to identify the most strategic ones
Coordinating the creation and integration of articles in IMD.org
Making necessary adjustments on the code of each page to strengthen the ranking of IMD on priority keywords
Testing multiple page designs to identify the best converting design for each education program
This approach produced tangible results for IMD. By the end of September 2016, the website DLG built within IMD.org website welcomed:
If the same results were accomplished through digital advertising IMD would have had to spend 1.9 million USD in media in 2016 alone.
Claudio Crivelli, IMD's Head of Program Marketing, had positive things to say about results: "The DLG team has shown insightful expertise in analyzing and understanding IMD customer behaviors online. Their work in optimization has led to improved search engine rankings, better user experience and digital being our number one business channel. And importantly we are now able to measure the effectiveness of all of our online marketing and multi-channel activities to promote research and generate sales leads."
Now that's a testimonial for the IMD and Digital Luxury Group teams to be proud of.
Published on 02 Mar 2017 under Strategy • Search • Digital
Source: How IMD Business School Capitalizes on Search Engines to Drive Results
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