I recruited 120 qualified students for a program that had never taught anyone. That part went to plan. The website those students had to pass through did not, and I could not fix it, because I did not know how.
Vu Quynh Anh - Senior Marketer, full-time · Swinburne Vietnam Alliance Program (FPT), 2019
One year, one cohort
- Swinburne Vietnam Alliance Program. An Australian university’s programme, run in Vietnam with FPT Education.
- 2019 was its first intake. No alumni. No graduates. No students to photograph.
- Target: 120 qualified students (SQLs). We hit it.
- About 1% of the traffic became a SQL.
- Facebook ads and Google ads, mostly in Hanoi city, plus events at schools with a campaign before each one.
- The team: me. Later one graphic designer. A Director of Marketing joined five months after I did.
What I was hired to do
| Area | What | How it went |
|---|---|---|
| Paid | Facebook ads and Google ads for the first intake | On target |
| Events | Events at schools, with a pre-event campaign for each | Ran all season |
| Frameworks | Several online and offline approaches, tested side by side | Done |
| Measurement | Traffic to SQL, through the season | Done |
| Team | Hiring a graphic designer | Done |
| Website | The place every ad and every event sent people | Failed |
The last row is the one I still think about. So it gets the most space here.
Selling something which did not exist yet!
Most university marketing borrows from the past. Rankings. Alumni. A campus full of real students. Parents who already sent at least one child.
We had none of that. The programme was new. The only history was the partners’ names.
So there was no playbook to copy. I built several approaches, online and offline, and ran them next to each other. Then I kept the ones that brought qualified students and dropped the ones that did not.
Facebook, Google and Hanoi capital
The money went into two channels. Facebook ads and Google ads.
Most of it went into Hanoi capital. That was where the students were, and where the school events were.
The events were the offline half. A campaign ran before each one, so people arrived already knowing the name. Then the event did what an ad cannot. A student and a parent could ask a real person a real question.
What 1% means?
About 1 in 100 people who came to use became a qualified lead.
On my CV I once called this a “CTR”. It is not. It is the rate from traffic to SQL. I am fixing that here.
Is 1% good? I do not know. There was no earlier year to compare it with. It was the first intake.
But it was the number I could watch while the season was still running. The target of 120 only resolves once, at the end. If you wait for that, you get one answer and no way to steer.
The website was a mess
Every ad sent people to the website. Every event sent people to the website. Then the website lost them.
It was a mess. And I could not fix it. I had to build landing pages as alternatives.
I did not know how a website was built. I did not know what to ask for, or how to tell a good fix from a bad one. I could see the problem, but I didn’t have the skills to fix it.
I was able to bring people to the door. But, the door wasn’t properly built.
So we hit a target 120 students. But I will never know how many more we lost on the way. That is the part I am not proud of.
It is also why I started learning how to build websites after this job. I did not want to depend on someone else again to fix the page that decides whether the money worked.
A team of one, then two, then a boss
For the first months the marketing team was me. Planning, ads, events, reporting.
Then we hired a graphic designer. In education every event needs material, and every campaign needs a new visual.
Five months in, a new Director of Marketing joined. So I went from running everything alone to reporting to someone, in the middle of an admissions season. It is worth saying, because the structure under the 120 changed halfway through.
Why I left?
I left for a better offer.
I also wanted to see more of education than one international programme. Preschool, English centers, study abroad. I wanted to know how the buyer changes at each step. My next job was at Language Link Vietnam, and that is where I started finding out.
What I left behind
- The website. I left it the way I found it. A mess, with no fix I could make myself.
- A single year of numbers. One intake, one season. I never saw whether the 1% would improve once the programme had graduates and a history.
What I’d tell myself in 2019
- Learn how the website works before you spend money sending people to it. Ads and events only get people to the door. If the door is broken, you are paying to lose them.
- Name your numbers correctly. Traffic to SQL is not CTR. If you call it the wrong thing, people judge it against the wrong benchmark.
- Pick a number you can watch during the season. A yearly target gives you one answer, too late. A running one, even an imperfect one, lets you steer.
- A new product has no history, so build several approaches. Run them side by side and keep what works.
One season, one cohort, on target. I am glad I did it. I just wish I had known then what I know now about websites.
