Client Overview
NAIT’s vision is “to be the most relevant and responsive post-secondary institution in Canada and one of the world’s leading polytechnics.” Polytechnic meaning they deliver technology-based education across all programs, provide hands-on education, work in partnership with leading industries, and use applied research to solve real life problems.
NAIT centres itself around high quality and practical instruction and a relevant curriculum by preparing students to succeed in desired careers, providing valuable and applicable training, and increasing employment potential after graduation.
The Challenge
We were contacted by NAIT’s Business & Industry (B&I) Solutions marketing team to help improve its online presence and usage of digital marketing. The end goal was to create a useful and informative platform that would generate relevant leads for B&I services, research partnerships, corporate training, and course registrations. It was important we educated senior management on the problems of the current website, as well as our recommendations for improvement and the importance of implementing those changes.
Our Solution
We developed a detailed plan to discover the necessary changes that needed to happen to the NAIT B&I’s website content and online presence. Our strategy was broken up into three specific areas:
- Audits. We undertook several audits, including a technical SEO audit, competitive audit, and landing page audit. We also provided recommendations for site architecture changes, content optimization, and analytics setup.
- Content. We reviewed the web content architecture, performed keyword research, and advised on B&I site architecture and content to reflect best practices.
- Advertising. We developed NAIT B&I’s online advertising setup and managed a pilot campaign to educate NAIT staff on the impact of digital marketing.
How Did We Do It?
We implemented each aspect of the project and created several reports with recommendations for the relevant sections of the website. Many aspects of the work, although focused for B&I, had implications that were across the entire NAIT.ca website, such as analytics tagging and SEO opportunities. Our complete findings were then used to create an overall digital marketing roadmap for NAIT’s B&I marketing team, specific to their needs.
Our focus was to provide recommendations that would improve NAIT’s B&I site content, resolve technical/analytics barriers, and outline digital marketing opportunities. To ensure users were locating the information they needed quickly and effortlessly, we conducted thorough research and multiple audits including an analytics audit, competitive audit, technical SEO audit, landing page audits, site content architecture audit, a content optimization audit, and keyword research. Additionally, we created both paid search and display advertising campaigns to promote multiple offerings, such as training, B&I services, and specific courses.
31%
of pageviews for Summer Guide pages were from paid digital advertising
77%
of pageviews for the corporate training page were from the digital ad campaign
62.5%
of Summer Guide direct entrances resulted from digital ads
Our Impact
One of our core goals was to inform and educate NAIT’s marketing team and executives on the possibilities available to them online. Throughout the process, we guided multiple internal teams within NAIT to aid them in implementing our recommended changes. One significant impact was that of implementing Google Tag Manager site-wide for significantly improved event tracking and the setup of goal conversion tracking; allowing detailed reporting of lead generation and registrations.
We also had the opportunity to work with B&I’s team on managing twenty digital ad campaigns over a three month period. This resulted in a dramatic effect for the Summer Guide, driving a third of all pageviews during the campaign period. More impressive was the increase in traffic to the B&I section of the website, where we saw almost 79% of pageviews to the top B&I page come from digital ads, and similarly 77% of pageviews for the Corporate & International Training page.
Overall, we provided NAIT’s B&I team with the information they needed to understand where the opportunities in digital marketing exist and the recommended channels and tactics to see success.
The Long Game
Working with multiple teams at NAIT to implement our plan was a truly rewarding experience. We were excited to share with NAIT’s senior marketing management our recommendations for enhancing both B&I’s online presence and NAIT's website as a whole to better serve the needs of its users. We’re proud our work with NAIT has established their continued usage of more digital mediums in their marketing and spurred our team’s continued work in the Education market.