NAIT: The One Where Our Audits and Education Led to a Clear Understanding of the Digital Marketing Opportunity

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.

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.