Challenge: To make a positive change in education around the world, Cisco Networking Academy must constantly and aggressively build their funnel of students through effective marketing.

Solution: Cisco Networking Academy enlisted krunch.co to help optimize marketing efforts.

Impact: krunch.co deployed Domo at the center of its integration efforts, giving Cisco’s marketers unprecedented awareness of which storylines resonated with groups.
 

Before Domo

Cisco Networking Academy aims to positively impact one billion lives by 2025 through education around digital technology and its benefits. This requires that they constantly build their funnel of students for their online, entry-level courses, and ensure that these students progress into tertiary institutions which can equip them for true career readiness in a digital world.

Cisco Networking Academy enlisted the help of digital agency krunch.co to help optimise its marketing and advertising efforts, looking to:

• Maximise student “return” on marketing spend;
• Improve overall enrolments as well as those in areas of need; and
• Reduce the average cost of each enrollment.

“We operate with a relatively small budget and team, which makes optimisation critical to the sustainability of
our work. Yet at the same time, we find ourselves faced with immense volumes of data—from which it can prove incredibly hard to decipher what’s relevant to our business of storytelling and inspiring students to take the first step in digital education. We needed a way to cut through the noise and the inertia that came with it, so that we could resonate amongst those who’d benefit most from the courses we can offer.”
Stephanie Kelly, Manager of Networking Academy Marketing | Cisco
 

After Domo

krunch.co deployed Domo and people-based attribution at the centre of its efforts to integrate Networking Academy’s data, which came from a range of sources including its website, digital advertising, and marketing automation channels. Domo allowed krunch.co to attribute data to specific user demographics and advertising creatives, building a single customer view—giving Cisco’s marketers unprecedented awareness of what storylines resonated with which groups. Data now comes from a range of sources, including the website, Facebook, Google Analytics, people-based attribution, and Marketo.

krunch.co’s resulting reports, supported by data from Domo, proved intuitive enough to become a central feature of the Cisco team’s weekly meetings. That, in turn, helped the team focus on quantifiable actions to take out of each session, making for faster and more agile improvements to marketing and advertising campaigns.

“Domo’s level of attribution confirmed our suspicions that traditional metrics, like cost per click, didn’t always reflect what drove meaningful outcomes, like actual enrolments. With these insights, we’ve been able to better understand how our stories and messages work across different countries, languages, and even devices; as well as how to better engage with groups like young women or younger children, where gaps in STEM education may be most prevalent. It’s given us microscopic detail with global context, in a way that provokes practical action rather than inertia in the boardroom.” Derek Gillette, Digital Marketing, Content and Strategy | Cisco

Results and Hidden Opportunities

Within six months of deployment, Networking Academy had experienced:

• 75,000 new enrolments, 68% of which came from new students;
• A 56% reduction in the cost of each enrolment.

Domo also equipped Networking Academy to extend how far it could track each student’s journey, largely thanks to the ability to attribute data from multiple sources, some of them offline.

“You see a lot of vanity metrics in marketing. That’s not something we ever want to fall into – simply using numbers to show how good we are. The information that krunch.co’s use of Domo has given us, acts first and foremost as a guide for the future, on where we need to extend our successes or find new ways to solve challenges we’re facing.” Dan Pacifico, Marketing Technology Manager | Cisco

What’s Next

Networking Academy intends to use Domo’s insights to further optimise not only enrolments in its courses, but also those in its institutional partners. That data should eventually allow them to better understand what skills and even careers its students end up adopting—allowing it to track both adherence to its mission as well as improve the ultimate outcomes for future students.

“The ability to tell a story immediately from looking at the data means that we don’t need to spend so much time collating, piling, and analysing information. It’s given us the confidence to try new things – fun, creative things—by tapping into different regions, languages, genders. I’m sure the future will even go beyond that. Being able to measure impact immediately, be quick on our feet and try new things with confidence. It’s just intuitive.” Stephanie Kelly, Manager of Networking Academy Marketing | Cisco

“Our partnership with krunch.co works incredibly seamlessly. They constantly push us to be better, but based on a really deep understanding of our operations rather than the unsubstantiated suppositions that many agencies carry into their work. We feel like they’re an extension to our team.”
Derek Gillette, Digital Marketing, Content and Strategy | Cisco