Cisco Networking Academy

 

As part of my long term contract with Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility team, I was brought in to analyze and improve the demand generation funnel for their education program, Networking Academy.

Summary: Previously, the program had been heavily marketed and grown through partnerships and educational institutions. Our work was designed to test a new route to market - direct to consumer (student).

Premise: What if we offered free introductory online courses to students, and then nurtured them through the course, onto a second online course, and finally into a classroom setting to take career-level classes and certifications?

See below for documentation of the work, along with results. Click on the images for access to the presentations.

 
 
 

This work has been so successful, that it has been recognized by Facebook, Marketo and Domo as a best practice case study.

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Our demand generation efforts have driven over 2 million online education student enrollments in the past 2 years, with increased cost efficiencies over this time period equaling a 94% decrease in cost per enrollment.

Enrollment increases were driven through a cross-channel combination of social media advertising, marketing automation, email nurturing, interactive content development, field enablement partnerships, website UX/design improvement, SEO and analytics optimizations, landing page conversion optimization, organic social media community management and copy/messaging simplification.

 
Derek Gillette