The Challenge Zoni Language Centers:
Zoni is the biggest ESL School in New York metropolitan area, which includes Queens, Manhattan and New Jersey. Some of the main competitors of Zoni are multinational language schools with thousands more of students and resources around the globe such as EF or Study Group. The increasing competition in the local area forced Zoni to move its marketing to a new arena… the online marketing, locally Zoni was very strong but online competitors were very strong and were taking away business from Zoni more and more, when I started to work with Zoni 75% of their business used to come from agents around the world, so the capacity of Zoni to attract students directly was very limited and its core business was depending exclusively on these agents, by nature the relationship which agents is not stable since they are permanently in demand for better deals with new partners. In 2006 Zoni has almost no presence in search engines, the organic ranking in Google was just a couple of terms and none of them were ranking on the first place; today Zoni ranks for more than 100 keywords in search engines, a lot of them on the first place in all Google, Yahoo and MSN, the daily traffic on the website went from 567 visitors per day average to more than 2,500, four times more. The ranking achieved by 2008 can be verified here
Here below i described step by step what i did to tripled the number of leads, students registered and how i ranked more than 100 terms related to Zoni business in 24 months.
My Approach: I improve the content and the density of the keywords that Zoni were trying to rank for. In order to increase this keyword density and the general content of the page I applied different strategies:
1. Specialized Content: Zoni have campuses in three major cities in North America but they used to have just one site where they were talking about all of them, specialized information of each campuses were found under the menu “locations”, an internal page with no ranking so ever. The first thing I did was divide the site in three different mini sites and dedicate each one of them to the specific local content of that campus and that city. That change not just helped students find the information quicker and easier, but also helped us to increase the content of every section and the page in general at least by three times. Every one of the sections were populated with specific information about each campus and each city, just that change along helped Zoni to increase rankings where people were searching for specific regional information on search engines. Queries made through Google, Yahoo or MSN targeting schools in New York, Miami or Vancouver started to appear for the first time. There are the three mini-sites:
2. Social networking site for students: I created a social network for students where they could write about their experiences at Zoni and on every city in general, this site updated at least 4 times per year have increased the content of the page on at least 100% after two years of being in place. This mini “Social Site” included certain tools for students such as calendar of events, pictures, articles, classifieds and news. The site helped increase the traffic to www.zoni.com as well as the ranking in search engines, the private social network for Zoni can be seen here: www.studentslife.zoni.com
Social Site For Students at Zoni
3. Ecommerce Platform: The ecommerce I implemented for Zoni in 2005 helped them to increase related English keywords on the page by adding all courses and books of every campus. Currently some of the pages ranking high in search engines come from the ecommerce website itself. The ecommerce site also allowed students to pay from overseas without the need of an intermediary agency, which helped Zoni to capitalize last minute opportunities and minimize the cost of student’s enrollment by getting rid of commissions.
Zoni Language Centers Online Store
I created an aggressive online marketing campaign to recruit local and international students
1. PPC Campaigns in Google, Yahoo and Bing: I used Google, the biggest worldwide search engine to advertise Zoni courses and schools, I advertised on search results as well on other websites associated to Google [Ad Network]; the campaign was created in 15 different languages and was permanently monitored to intelligent improve the performance of every AD group, some of the campaigns went from less that 1% in conversion rate to 10% and 15%. Besides Google I also used other major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. The campaign in Yahoo was particularly interesting since I used the educational section of Yahoo called Studylink to add an editorial profile of Zoni where international students (specially from Asia) were looking for courses and schools in United States, this one was like an special king of campaign combining affiliate marketing and search engine marketing.
Zoni Traffic Statistics - Comparing May 2007 with Sep 2008, Click To Zoom In
2. Affiliate marketing campaigns for Europe and Latin America: I helped Zoni to identify strategic partners on the industry that were able to feature Zoni as one of the favorite English as a second language schools in North America. These associated partners were specialized sites in education that were ranking well in search engines so when students landed on their pages and requested information about English studies in New York, Miami or Vancouver; Zoni was the one receiving and closing those leads. This was a typical affiliate marketing/lead generation campaign, some of the affiliated sites we used were: www.learn4good.com, www.abroadlanguages.com, and FFP Media (www.expo-studyabroad.com)
Zoni Profile Page in Abroad Languages
3. Social Network for Zoni Students: I opened a Zoni’s Facebook group that was heavily promoted in all printed material, website and newsletters, that site along were generating intensive traffic to Zoni’s website and became a point of communication between students of all campus [New York, Miami and Vancouver].
Zoni Language Centers in Facebook
4. Viral marketing campaign in Youtube: I created 13 different videos featuring Zoni campuses in all cities, these videos were uploaded to youtube, each one of them using their own keywords on their own language, these videos were linked to Zoni’s website and Zoni’s Facebook group. Quickly youtube became one of the most important site referrals to www.zoni.com. I used the current video that existed at the school, produced and directed by the marketing coordinator but its quality was very poor; even though this limitation important quality traffic were redirected to Zoni’s website, currently more than 20,000 people have streamed Zoni infomercial videos in youtube. http://www.youtube.com/zonilanguage
Zoni Video Channel in Youtube
5. Email campaigns for employees, agents, current and prospect students: I implemented a mass email system to maintain permanent contact with employees, agents, current and prospect students, these newsletters sent on regular basis helped to drive traffic back to www.zoni.com. Welcome and thank you letters to students after international education fairs gave Zoni a sense of professionalism and quality. These campaigns helped Zoni as well to run specific seasonal promotions to students that at some point contacted the school but never registered.
Zoni Newsletters
I automate some internal sales procedures and facilitate student registrations by Internet
4. Lead Management System: Zoni went from 4.000 leads received per year to almost 20.000 in less than 2 years; this volume increased as a result of the better ranking of the page, navigability and “findability” become overwhelming and Zoni and at some point they were loosing business for its delay to reply to students on a quickly and accurate manner. What I did was to implement a lead management system to help automate some of the communication between Zoni staff and students. This lead management system facilitated the assignment and control of these leads and also helped to centralize all the information on a single database. As a consequence, reporting became very easy; for the first time since Zoni was founded they were able to graphically visualize market patterns in terms of leads received, conversions and number of request by region or per campus. With this system Zoni was able to evacuate five times more leads without increasing the number of employees, the system implemented was Open Leads, a cool, easy to manage software made by a company called Open Companies in USA.
5. New “progressive” registration form: Online registration was extremely poor when I started at Zoni, one of the problems they had was that the registration form was a long boring list of 60 questions on a single page; where visitors visualized these long questionnaire in one shoot they were just very lazy to fill it out and leave. What I did was to create a progressive registration form with few questions on every step; that way the registration form became very user friendly and registrations went from 1 or 2 per day to 20 per day in average. The other advantage was that because I were keeping all registrations on a single database Zoni was able to communicate with students at a later time if for some reason they never showed up at the school, before the registrations were being received by email on text format. The system also allowed Zoni to run reports of student registered by country and other crucial data to understand its market and student demographics.
Zoni New Registration Form
I deployed a sophisticated online tracking system to monitor not just the traffic to the page but also the performance of every campaign
I implemented an analytics application to track traffic, conversions, usability of the site and more. I separately created tracking systems for the most important campaigns to individually analyze its performance over time. The important thing of these measures is not only those have given Zoni a very overview and understanding of its site but also have helped them to make improvements and plan ahead based on the intelligence analytics of this data, for the fist time Zoni were able to get rid of marketing campaigns not performing well and invest heavily on those maximizing the return of the investment. I was able to triple the traffic at www.zoni.com from 567 visitors per day in May 2006 to more than 2,500 visitors per day in October 2008. I also improved the conversion rate on every single online marketing campaign, leads received, conversions and most important the overall number of international students registered; When I started at Zoni they used to register 80 students per month by Internet referral, when I left they were registering 240 students per month in by Internet referral, three times more what they used to.
This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano