What Makes People Click: Online Marketers and Directories

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
[ Resources for Program Marketers ][ Program webpages (TESOL 2001) ] [ Bibliography ]

Online Marketers and Directories

In the wild west it was sometimes difficult to tell who was good and who was bad, since people had lots of reasons to be there, and making a fast buck was a common motivation for even the good guys. It took a few generations before people had methods of figuring out who was making a buck in a legitimate way and who had been forced to fold their tent every couple of months because someone was running them out of town.

The web is the same way, except that the tents are made of images that change pretty much constantly, and look different depending on your perspective.

It's not wrong to want to make a dollar marketing IEP programs; in fact, if someone is good at getting students from the wide world of customers, and diverting them to the right programs, everyone could be winners. The web is particularly good at sorting out various variables (i.e. do you want to live in a big city or small town? Want a large state university or a small college?), and, if given the chance, could help students find their perfect place (1).

But it's one measure of the newness of the situation, that many marketers have not yet even mastered the web itself. They have poorly made pages; they botch the application process; they confuse IEP programs with universities, etc. (2). Perhaps the first way to evaluate them is simply to navigate their webpages. Are they organized? To the point? Navigable? That actually rules out about a third of them, as of this writing.

There are many reasons one would want a directory of intensive English programs, or of colleges and universities in the US. One would be to set up a marketing scheme on the side, just as search engines are doing, in order to divert some of your traffic to those who would pay for the opportunity to receive it. Some, believe it or not, like to have good lists of things for the pure joy of keeping good lists, knowing that that list alone brings people to their door, or that a good list is a good service to a community. With that second motivation clearly in mind, I am making a list of directories and marketers myself, in hopes of helping you keep straight who is out there, and whether they deserve your business.

Getting on the Free Directories

If they maintain a free directory, by all means, get on there. Links to your site are crucial to your ratings, and anyone who stumbles upon your listing has a good chance of clicking just based on the fact that you're there. These directories may not be around forever (3), but even so, how can that hurt? They're free, they want your name and link, and the better they are, and the higher they appear on search engines, the more often prospective students will use them.

Advertising with the Marketers

In evaluating the marketers, be careful. Most are charging more for listings that used to be free; they're finding ways to make money that they hadn't thought of previously (4); they're making up ways to charge you as they go along. The market will eventually determine how much a button or a listing is worth on any given marketer's page (5), and this figure should stabilize over time.

Ask them about "visits." Do they mean unique visits? If, say, 2,000 people visit their site every month, how many of those are actually prospective customers? I've always been highly suspicious of these numbers, but I think that if someone goes to the trouble of listing "unique visits," they are at least making a reasonable attempt to sort out the people who are actually using them as a directory (and coming back constantly, checking new programs and comparing them). That is, after all, what they are there for. One can't expect a student to click one program and then attend, without comparing.

One way to evaluate marketer/directories is to see how often and when they come up on search engines. Imagine a prospective student looking for a place to study....what words would he/she type into a search engine (6)? A quick study will show that there are many directories and marketers out there, and our target prospective student could stumble upon any one of them. But you will also find that he/she will stumble upon some a lot more often than others.

This could be because some marketers have mastered the art of search engine optimization better than others (see Ch. 7) (7) . It could be that they simply have the right words in their profiles, in their titles, or in other things that they produce (8). In any case, marketers who maintain search rankings consistently are at least funneling some traffic their way; if others have sources of traffic outside of the standard searches in well-known languages, I'd like to know about them (9).

Other places to advertise

Why not just get a paid listing on Google, for example? If people are always there, anyway, looking, it would make sense, and may possibly be worth the money, to just put yourself at the top of the list (10). The downside of this is that people have a way of not looking at the paid listings. Search engines had a brief fling with going commercial, but it proved so unpopular that they gave it up. People want genuine searches, not advertising flyers. However, it hasn't proved to NOT WORK; for the money, it may be better than several of the alternatives. For example, our university recently allegedly paid $11,000 for an ad for a single year in a print-media publication. Was that worth it? Time will tell.

Footnotes:

1. One marketer has tried sorting the criteria, so that, for example, one can click on "rural", "large state university" etc. and be sorted and directed toward the places most suitable for one's requirements. I immediately began to worry that, for example, our program is both rural and in a small town, but how is the machine to know?

2. All of the above have been observed, though I've kept the names secret as these things so often change so quickly. Check for yourself. It may be that I have an old computer with Netscape, and so many designers assume we would have replaced it by now.

3. Three out of the eight marketer/directories I was aware of in 2001 are now out of business; one went into distance learning. As of this writing I am aware of over 18.

4. One way is to take over the program's application process, but that's turning out to be a problem. Students don't want to apply twice, and certainly don't want to pay twice. Another is to provide buttons that transfer the user to a page that is the home site translated one's into foreign languages, with those sites encouraging the user to apply through the marketer. This has caused problems also.

5. There has been wide price fluctuation, with huge sales offered for temporary or annual listings, and prices going up as marketers need more income. We inquired with one marketer who immediately listed us (though we hadn't asked); then sent us a bill; we were left wondering if they were hoping the large number of listings would make it appear as if everyone was signing up. It's an old marketing trick, and it works at least sometimes; otherwise people wouldn't keep trying it.

6. I in fact did a study, using words that I thought were most appropriate, and using the most prominent English search engines.

7. This involves getting lots of key words into text and headings, getting others to link to you, and submitting to various engines.

8. One marketer has forums where students write in and talk about wanting to study English in the USA; in the student's own words, this marketer now has three keywords together in the same expression that many searchers might use to find a program. These forums then lead searchers to the directory. Another trick is to write articles about the subject, and have those point to the directory. There are many legitimate ways to get search engines to boost your rankings, but as more people know where you are and link to you, that also will work in your favor.

9. One thing that surprised me was that some marketers never or rarely appeared on search engines; one, when asked, did not even seem to be aware of search engine rankings. If not, where are they getting students? There are websites that merely represent print magazines, but I know of none that have a ready supply of real-world customers that they lure into the web, through billboards or whatever. It seems to me that billboards that flash URL's don't work well, though I could be wrong. It could be that it's because you still can't type them into anything while you're driving.

10. A paid listing on Yahoo was $299 per year, last I checked, but it's a matter of pride in the search optimization community that getting into the first page of a Yahoo/Google search is inherently better than getting a listing just by paying for it. I'd like to know if it works, anyway.

Resources:

List of Directories and Marketers, from Resources for Program Marketers.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Online Marketers and Directories

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web