Academia has always adapted to new ways of understanding the world. Lately, it’s also had to address changing student needs to stay relevant. Students want more options from educational institutions, and institutions are finding new and creative ways to deliver more value to expand their reach and boost graduation rates. At Acadeum, we make that possible.
We’re the “AirBnB of college courses” — a course-sharing platform that enables various institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to large public universities, to quickly expand their academic portfolios with in-demand certifications, courses, and programs that attract and retain learners.
As Acadeum’s associate director of marketing, I lead growth initiatives and programs focusing on increasing engagement and optimizing our marketing activities. We had a goal to achieve 35% growth while improving customer retention. To get there, we planned to reach 75% of our target accounts with account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, moving at least 50% to the awareness stage and, eventually, to the engaged stage. But first, we needed to expand our reach, ensuring more of our target audience understood the value of Acadeum.
A crash course in reaching our niche audience
We use HubSpot for marketing automation and as a CRM. It’s an essential tool for our small team. However, we kept running into the same problem when launching ad campaigns: Our target groups were way too small for our existing platform to be effective.
We weren’t struggling to find the right audience. In fact, we were very specific in choosing our partner institutions, and the number of people we’re targeting is pretty small — so small that we were limited in how much we could do with our existing platform. We thought the best way forward was to adopt a comprehensive ABM platform that could give us access to specific audiences without worrying about the rest.
I discovered NextRoll and their B2B account-based advertising platform, RollWorks, while attending Inbound, HubSpot’s Marketing and Sales conference. The mini-sessions I attended and the conversations I had afterward blew me away. Everything confirmed that my vision for ABM was the right strategy and that our planned tactics would be successful. All we needed was a partner to help us execute, and everything I heard from the Roller team (and their customers) led us to believe RollWorks was the right way forward.
For starters, RollWorks had a leg up on everyone else because their existing HubSpot integration made it easy to add to our tech stack. But more than that, their AI-powered proprietary ABM advertising technology gives us the superpower to identify and target in-market buyers and prioritize those accounts. From there, we can work closely with our sales team to provide personalized outreach and support to massage leads, get them in the door, and increase their awareness of our value propositions.
Thanks to RollWork’s support team and additional resources, we onboarded in under a month and launched our first campaign within four months of attending the conference. It was an easy choice and even more impressive in action.
We hit the books and maximized engagement
Before RollWorks, we didn’t have much information about who visited our site unless we were “cookied,” which means the user allowed us to monitor their online activities. We would send regular emails to subscribers and try to get people to register for webinars, but it wasn’t enough. Once the person refreshed their cookies, their information would disappear. And other than the webinar registrants, our sales team found it hard to identify warm leads. (Not to mention our team’s webinar fatigue!)
RollWorks enables us to identify engaged accounts and pinpoint their intent signals. One of the most useful features is Contact Discovery, which uncovers key decision-makers and directly integrates their verified contact details into our CRM. It’s helped us improve the accuracy of our reporting, and we can tailor our marketing copy to more closely reflect who our prospects are and what they want.
“RollWorks has helped us improve the accuracy of our reporting, and we can tailor our marketing copy to more closely reflect who our prospects are and what they want.”
We also use RollWorks to serve targeted ads, ensuring prospects recognize our brand before we connect. Now, when we meet them at a conference, they don’t enter the conversation with zero knowledge of what we have to offer. This information makes a big difference. When you meet someone at a conference booth, you usually only have about five or 10 minutes with them. Now, our conversations are more effective because we don’t spend time explaining who we are.
The platform helps the sales team become more effective, too. They no longer have to chase every breadcrumb, which led to long deal cycles and wasted effort on prospects who were never likely to work with us. Now, the hot leads come in from RollWorks. Because our sales team only gets information from the most relevant prospects, it’s helped us narrow the funnel and eliminate the noise.
Passing the test with flying colors
In the five years I’ve been at Acadeum, no tactic I’ve used has increased traffic as much as RollWorks — including an article in the New York Times!
Since adopting RollWorks, we’ve:
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Increased our web traffic from target accounts by 25% every quarter.
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Moved about 37% of these accounts to the aware stage, which means we aren’t only getting them to our website, but keeping them there.
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Influenced $3.4 million in pipeline.
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Generated $320K in closed-won revenue.
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Reduced the sales cycle, as our greatly influenced opportunities close 5% faster if they’ve been engaged in an ABM campaign.
RollWorks has helped build a bridge between marketing and sales, and we now operate as one team. Sales is more aware of our campaigns, activities, and messaging. When they get engaged prospects who’ve already seen and engaged with the ABM campaign, they have a better chance of a smooth first introduction. Working with the Roller team has been great, too. If I need extra support or tech help, it’s available.
“RollWorks has helped build a bridge between marketing and sales, and we now operate as one team.”
For Acadeum, growth is about so much more than numbers. It’s about democratizing education and empowering more students. RollWorks makes it possible for us to continue doing that work efficiently and effectively.
About the Author
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