Case Study National Institute of Medical Science (Online & Offline Marketing)

Insight:

Nims University has emerged as the largest and best self-financed university in North-India. Structured at par with the composite model universities of the leading nations of the world, the Nims University has been legendary in quality teaching and action-oriented research in all disciplines. Adjacent to the Aravali ranges and located in the outskirts of the pink city of India, the University has been listed in the top ten medical universities in India.

It is heading towards a leading center of education in health sciences to human sciences, technical training to advanced engineering, personnel management to corporate management, creative literature to innovative multimedia, art, and architecture.

Nims University is a great platform for students from across the globe who are aspiring to become future leaders. With impeccable academic results, it draws its faculties Indian and international institute with big name and works like IIT’s, IIT’s and NIT’s.

Objective:

Due to negative publicity in the media in 2014, the number of admissions fell drastically from Approx 2000 per year to 300 per year in 2015 and kept fluctuating year after year. NIMS had their in-house marketing team, which was not able to increase the admission count. The problem was getting critical with the passing years as it was not only affecting universities name but also number of admissions

Both offline and online marketing budget was more than 4 Crore, but the ROI was very low. Ad campaigns, both online and offline, were not performing well. In online campaigns, CPC was very high, and ad quality score was very low. Consultant fee was as high as 50k/admission. The cost bar of the company was on the higher side and the returns were getting low. Company was facing various challenges in terms of marketing resource allocation as well the decreasing rate of students.

The budget was bifurcated as described below:

Year 2017

Services	Budget
Paper ads	1 Cr
Digital media	20 Lakhs
Consultant charges	50k/ Student
Banners and Hoarding	20 Lakhs
Admission Count	500 Approx

Challenges:

Our team did a detailed research and tried to analyse the loopholes in the process. We tried to work on the problems before putting our entire focus on the working areas. These were some of the major challenges:

First thing that we found out was that all the ad campaigns were not functioning well.
Leads which they were getting was not of good quality therefore conversion rate was also poor.
Limited reach and poorly managed campaigns were also a cause of concern.
We also realised that when someone enquired about NIMS university using search engines, they used to get negative links in the top results which was also a cause of concern since negative image prevented students from taking admission.

All these factors created a bad image in the minds of students which even lead to spread of word of mouth. Next step was to strategise and work on the improvement process.

Strategies:

A team of marketing professionals worked on the strategic goals that will improve the overall traffic and admissions.

First Step was to restructure whole ad campaign. Idea was clear since the existing campaign was not in good shape and there was no scope for improvement, we created new campaign and kept them in structured and organised manner. We created new landing pages, Fresh ad copies were written and overall quality score was improved to make ads more relevant.
Earlier quality of leads was poor, so we restructured the landing page. To improve lead quality we made phone number and OTP verification compulsory. It improved the leads quality and those who were really interested in taking admission filled the form.
Earlier in Facebook campaign the target audience was not set, Neither the age group was defined. We divided facebook campaign in two different groups: one targeting students of 16-24 and the other one targeting the parents age 35-55.
Budget for offline marketing, which was not yielding any results, was reduced and more focus was given on online promotion. Earlier most of the budget was spent on paper ads, Banners & Hoarding and consultant charges that was reduced to a great extent.
Due to the negative links on google, NIMS was going down in terms of reputation so we took requisite measures to remove those links. We focused on branding and reputation management using all channels(Social Media, Search Engine, Content Marketing as well as offline channels like hoarding Educational Fairs etc)

Tools Used: