Berghs School of Communication: insights for data-driven marketing

Berghs School of Communication was founded in 1941 in Stockholm, Sweden, with a vision of educating world’s top communicators. They have excelled in fulfilling their vision by winning the AKQA Future Lions School of the Year award seven times at the Cannes Lions festival in recent years. Berghs is listed as one of the top creative schools in the world by the prestigious The One Club and an amazing 97% of their students find a job in their field of study within six months of graduation.

Lacking insights for data-driven decisions

It is not unusual that students get in contact with Berghs years before taking their first course. During that time there is a lot of back-and-forth interaction between the school and the potential student.

The length of the customer journeys presents a challenge from a marketing perspective. The longer the journey is the more interactions there can be, which makes it complicated to understand the customer decision-making process behind signing up for a course unless you have good visibility to your marketing funnel.

Berghs already had Google Analytics and Salesforce in use, but the platforms were not linked and the data was siloed. This prevented Berghs from gaining visibility and leveraging the critical insights needed for data-driven decision-making. It also made it difficult to analyse marketing performance.

Gaining actionable insights

Fluido helped Berghs to improve both their marketing capabilities and their ability to evaluate marketing performance by bringing the data together in one place. The tools and technologies used in the project were Salesforce Sales Cloud, Tableau CRM, Google Analytics, and BigQuery.

The project started with integrating Tableau CRM with Google Analytics and BigQuery. Tableau CRM is a powerful native app within Salesforce that empowers business with AI-driven analytics and actionable insights. A connection between Tableau CRM and Salesforce was established to bring the data from the systems into Salesforce.

Integrating these systems enabled tracking the student application pipeline and understanding the marketing funnel from the initial web visit to signing up for a course and, finally, course completion.

Marketing dashboards were built to enable Berghs to visualise the marketing performance data and leverage it for data-driven decision-making. For example, a dashboard that shows the relation between students’ application interest and signup completion was taken into use.

Full marketing funnel view

Berghs now has a complete funnel view for evaluating the performance of their marketing efforts. They can better understand how their own marketing channels perform and which of them deliver the best return on ad spend.

Berghs also now has the ability to evaluate the value added by their partners and referral channels:

“When I negotiated a big contract for a referral site, the data from my funnel was the reason that we could come to an agreement. And that was a big deal for both us and them,” adds David Lindh, Online Sales Manager for Berghs School of Communication.

The integration of the analytics platforms has given Berghs a better overview of the current and future trends concerning different business areas, courses, and products. They are now in a much better position to understand the return on marketing investment and plan future actions accordingly.