1. M A R K E T I N G R E S O U R C E S
The IMR Story
Our Unique Approach to
Inbound Marketing for
Higher Education

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Table of Contents
How We Got Here.....................................................3
The Content Marketer’s Blueprint............................4
Working With Us: What to Expect............................5
Why We Use Hubspot.............................................11
Our Commitments and Pricing...............................12

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The IMR Story
At Innovative Marketing Resources (IMR), our team of marketing strategists, content experts,
designers, and developers is 100 percent focused on one thing:
Helping private schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher education
achieve their enrollment goals.
We have refined our inbound marketing methodology over years and through successful
engagements helping schools like yours attract new prospective students to their websites and
nurturing those students to the point of being ready to engage with your admissions team.
Our mission is to build for our clients sustainable automated
admissions engines that deliver high-quality prospects, build
reputations, and create a growing applicant pool.
This unique methodology, which we call the Content Marketer’s Blueprint, didn’t come from a
textbook or marketing guru and didn’t emerge overnight.
How Did We Get Here?
For some time now, the traditional methods of higher education marketing have been losing
effectiveness. Direct mail, email campaigns using purchased lists, telemarketing, billboards,
print advertising and college fairs are all meant to disseminate a school’s message as broadly as
possible in hopes of triggering a response from a prospective student at the exact moment that
he or she is ready to apply.
The most significant change in the marketplace in the past few years has been the explosion of
information readily accessible and searchable by anyone on the Internet. Potential students and
their parents now have the ability to do their own research and comparison shop without the
need to interact with anyone on the admissions team. Your prospects are learning about your
school through their own means.

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School marketers have observed that prospective students are spending more time online
researching schools themselves and do not want to be contacted by anyone until they are
good and ready to consider a school. Studies indicate that that anywhere from 33% to 50% of a
school’s applicant pool can be considered “stealth applicants.” That’s where inbound marketing
comes in.
Rather than relying on traditional tactics to flood prospective applicants with unwanted
information, inbound marketing uses educational online content that attracts potential students
with useful information about the questions they have.
So the challenge has become how to create great content, how to connect with prospects that
are searching for that content, and how to nurture the interest of these leads to the point that
they are ready to engage with admissions or apply.
A Blueprint Comes Together
At IMR, we were enthusiastic early adopters of the inbound marketing philosophy, but in our
early client engagements, what we sold was transactional marketing services: blogging, web page
content development, email nurturing campaigns, website design services, landing page and call-
to-action creation and implementation, marketing analytics, and so on.
We soon realized that, while each of these services can play a critical role in an inbound
marketing campaign, they are most effective sustaining a strong and growing applicant pool
when they’re working together according to a carefully planned strategy. Blogging without lead
nurturing, for example, doesn’t help increase applications.

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The strategy we came up with evolved by observing the way prospects engaged with content
using a platform called HubSpot. We called our strategy the Content Marketer’s Blueprint. What
this blueprint builds is an automated sales engine, an online reflection of our clients’ offline
admissions process, designed to move prospects smoothly through the admissions funnel, from
just starting their college search to a readiness to apply.
The fuel that drives this engine is content: written, visual, audio and
video material that attracts students and their parents. Every inbound
marketer recognizes the need to create content, but what many of them
struggle with is the most effective content to create and how to use it on
their website.
We’ve gotten over that hurdle. We’ve learned exactly what type of content works for prospective
students that are aware of their problems and are searching for helpful information, what type
of content helps students identify and consider potential schools, and what type of content helps
students to submit an application.
Working with IMR: What to Expect
Before you consider partnering with us to increase your applicant pool, we need to create a
plan together, a complete blueprint showing how your school’s offline admissions process can
be modeled online using content, and how your prospective students can be attracted to that
admissions engine with helpful information.
This is the first step in our process no matter what.
Step 1: Introductory call
The purpose of this 30- 45 minute call is to understand your admissions goals and
objectives. We want to use this time to learn about your school and what makes
it unique. We will talk about your current marketing activities, results, goals and
challenges. We will share how inbound marketing activities can be a vital part of
your marketing plan.

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Step 2: Discovery call
During this meeting we will dig deeper into the marketing goals and objectives that
we covered during the introductory call. We will work together to capture your
insights about your ideal students’ problems, what questions they will ask when
confronted with these problems, and how to answer these questions.
We will also spend some time to understand your current admissions process.
This exercise is designed to give us a clear understanding of your target student
persona(s) and the process this persona goes through to make an application
decision. This discovery call takes about an hour.
Step 3: Proposal Presentation
We take the information we learned during our two calls and create an inbound
marketing proposal for your school. While there is no “on-size-fits-all” solution,
there are three consistent components of an IMR proposal: strategy development,
building the inbound marketing engine, and analysis/refinement. The proposal
includes the goals of our strategic relationship (i.e., measure and improve ROI of
current marketing spend, increase qualified applicant pool, gain visibility into the
online enrollment pipeline, etc.).
Proposal accepted and engagement with IMR starts

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Step 4: Strategy Development (6-8 weeks)
It is important that we can clearly articulate your school’s value proposition. What
differentiates your school from other schools? As part of this process, it is critical
that we understand the process students and their families use for evaluating your
school and their other educational options. We use the process of creating student
personas to help shed some light on this journey.
Once we identify how decisions to apply are made, we can create a content
marketing plan that will demonstrate how content will satisfy the prospective
students’ and their families’ need for information at each stage of the research and
evaluation process. The Content Marketer’s Blueprint™ will identify the specific
assets needed to meet students’ and their families’ need for information. This
content could come in the form of blog posts, eBooks, infographics, presentations,
and videos. Here are some examples of recommendations that will be delivered as
part of this plan:
• Blog article titles
• Premium content titles
• Testimonial subjects
• Automated emails
• Marketing automation recommendations

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Step 5: Building the Inbound Marketing Engine (6-8 weeks)
If you don’t have an engine that can turn website visitors into qualified applicants,
all of your marketing investments will be underused. After completing the strategic
work, our next critical task is to build the inbound marketing engine using your
school’s Content Marketer’s Blueprint as a guide. Once your engine is built, we
will begin to add the gas (consistent content production) that will attract leads
and make your engine run. Our activity during this phase of implementation will
include:
1. Creation of three premium content offers (whitepapers, eBooks, or special
offers) that will be used to provide valuable information that helps prospective
students identify their problems and potential solutions. Each content offer
package includes:
• An interview by our content manager with you or someone else from
marketing and/or admissions.
• Outline development with one round of revisions.
• Content creation (up to 2,000 words) with up to three rounds of revisions.
2. Development of content offers that focus on the value and advantages of your
school and its programs over those of other schools.
3. Development of offers that connect potential applicants with the admissions
team to help them make a final decision.
4. Creation of automated email workflows that nurture the student through
these different pieces of content, moving them closer to a campus tour and a
conversation with an admissions counselor.
5. Website work, ranging from optimizing existing web pages to a complete
website redesign. We will also design and implement the on-page assets you
need to put the plan into action:
• Creation of three call-to-action (CTA) buttons with one round of revisions.
• Landing page copy and implementation with one round of revisions.
• Thank you page development.

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Step 6: The Monthly Retainer (Adding Gas and Making Sure the Engine
Runs Correctly)
After your engine is built, we will add gas (blogging) to attract and engage your
student persona(s). You can expect to see a clear positive trend in website
visitors, leads and quality of leads coming through the engine. The most important
aspect of this phase however, is that all of our activity, including the content and
distribution methods will be measured comparatively against other marketing
investments you might be making.
The data gathered by IMR during this time period will be used to make regular
improvements to the inbound engine, the content being used to attract potential
applicants and the distribution methods that spread the reach of the content.
Once we have gathered three months of “closed-loop-analytics” (meaning IMR
understands which activities contribute most to the application process) strategic
investments can be made to scale results without wasting money on activities that
produce poor quality leads.
Monthly retainer services can include:
• Blogging, minimum of two posts per week to attract potential applicants
and gather subscribers.
• Automated email maintenance to increase engine performance
• Weekly update meetings.
• Monthly performance reports revealing lead quality and trends
• Social media coordination.
• Website maintenance and support.
• Education and training for your internal marketing teams.

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Step 7: Long-term Relationship (The Rocket Fuel Stage)
You may have noticed that traditional online marketing tactics like pay-per-click
advertising, social media advertising and other (paid) sources of traffic were not
mentioned in earlier stages of working with us. We believe that these activities play
a strategic role for schools using inbound marketing to grow their business, but
without hard evidence (data) to guide these investments, they can be questionable
in value. These types of investments should be considered as “rocket fuel,” used
only to scale the inbound engine, and not as a replacement for underperformance.
The Analogy: First, build your engine. Then, make sure the engine runs with regular
gas. What happens if you put gas into an engine that isn’t built yet? Once you are
confident that your engine is running efficiently, you can invest in some rocket fuel.
Without testing the engine first, rocket fuel can quickly get expensive and out of
control.
Automated Marketing Technology: An Inbound Essential
An investment in automated marketing software is absolutely necessary to get the most out
of your inbound marketing engine. The right marketing software package for you will vary
depending on your needs and budget. For many of our clients, we recommend using HubSpot.

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Our Technology Partner: HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing automation software suite that provides all the tools required
to run an effective online marketing program. Enabled by HubSpot, we can be more efficient and
effective, delivering more services and greater results in less time and cost to you. HubSpot’s
tools include:
Don’t worry, the technology platform will be managed by IMR’s team of experts, and your
Content Marketer’s Blueprint will show you exactly how each tool will be used to develop and
manage your inbound marketing engine.
• A content optimization system
• Social media management
• A blogging platform
• Prospect/lead intelligence
• A landing page creator
• A lead management system
• Keyword analysis
• E-mail marketing
• Competitor analysis
• Lead nurturing
• A link grader
• Complete marketing analytics
• A page grader
• CRM integration

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Commitments and Pricing
To be clear, our services are for schools that are serious about using inbound marketing to gain
visibility into the online enrollment pipeline to increase the qualified applicant pool, so the
commitment is significant. But, think about it this way: If the alternative is building up your
own in-house marketing team, a strategic partnership with our agency will probably be more
affordable—and you’ll have access to proven inbound marketing expertise. The annual cost of
working with IMR to implement and manage your inbound marketing engine (software included)
should be compared to a full-time equivalent marketing manager ($55,000 to $90,000 per year).
Here’s an idea of what a partnership with us might cost. Keep in mind these price ranges are
averages based on our previous and current client engagements. We’d be happy to discuss
pricing with you once we know more about your school and marketing plans.
• Development of your Student Personas and Content Marketer’s Blueprint: $5,000
• “Build the engine” Onboarding project (months 1 and 2): $8,000 to $12,000 total cost
• “Gas for the engine” Monthly retainer: $4,500 to $6,000
• Automated marketing software commitment: $1,000/month (HubSpot)
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