About Careers360
About Careers360Launched in 2009 by Pathfinder Publishing, Careers360 is a magazine targeting Secondary school pass outs, college goers and professionals in their mid-careers, that is the age group of 17-35 years, who want to hone their skills or venture into entrepreneurship. After completing their education, majority of students are clueless on what career choices to make, which are the best colleges for various programs and most of them struggle with countless questions. They currently rely on family or friends and seek guidance from random sources. Careers360 magazine provides them complete information about the programs and institutes along with highly trusted ranking of engineering and management colleges every year.
Objective
With the continual decline in interest towards print media and magazines, management realized that to stay relevant in future, they needed to have a substantial online presence. In July 2012, Careers360 decided to adopt digital route to speed up its journey towards becoming the largest career counsellor in the country. After launching Careers360, initially the English magazine and the Hindi edition in 2010, the company was looking to focus its attention to leverage the content, data and information, to reach out to the students through their Digital initiative.
Timeline
2009: English Magazine
2010: Hindi Magazine
2011: Counselling guides
2012: Web portal
2015: Mobile Platform
Strategy adopted
Careers360, initially launched a career counselling portal in July 2012 with unique features like mock counselling and Campus Ambassadors program. In Sep, 2012, a portal for study abroad was also introduced to enable students to study, interact and engage with dedicated study abroad counsellors, the regulators, the trade authorities of various governments and universities directly. With a detailed profile of colleges, extensive list of career options and plethora of career tools available, Careers360 embarked on an ambitious journey of being India’s most credible career counsellor.
High-Quality Content
With the high quality content being the backbone of magazine, the need of the hour was to leverage the same on a platform like digital and reach out to more audience spread across different parts of country.
Quoting Maheshwar Peri, chairman and founder of Pathfinder “Having a look at the content creators in the country, we are the largest content creators; There is no one who comes close to even 10 percent of what we do in the marketplace. The reason why student come to us, they have more and enough value to add to their decision-making.”
Since articles and blogs being published on portal is perfect case of career driven journalism, the content must be backed by data which is verifiable and authentic. Careerss360 has ensured that they follow two fold integrity : financial integrity where no one is able to influence the way they write and integrity of covering everything so that student makes an informed decision and nothing has been left out because of lack of research.
Search Engine Marketing
With monthly visits of more than 6 million, Careers360 gets close to 50 percent of their traffic from their SEO/SEM strategies. The company realized when it comes to getting your information in front of highly targeted audience at the precise moment when they are looking for information, search engines rein supreme. The two biggest categories in higher education: Engineering and Management gets close to 72 percent of whole traffic to the site. Site was made easy to crawl, optimum and effective keywords employed, analysis of competition done, google ad words and pay per click were employed as key strategies to optimize the site for the engines.
Social Media Marketing
Careers360 has employed social media marketing as an effective tool to reach young students through highly interactive tools like quiz and admission notifications of leading universities on facebook page.
Since, Customers are already talking to each other online; leading education portal thrived on high consumer engagement on social media. Social Media marketing, a cost effective mode, helped company to stay informed about student’s thinking, raised brand value, offer branding opportunity to client institutes, viral propagation of posts and so on.
E-mail Marketing
Careers360 employed email marketing as a potent tool to keeping their customers happy by updating them with latest news, notifications and maintaining an ongoing personal relationship with them. E mailers were used to encourage sharing newsletters with friends, announcing articles and tools like rank predictor.
Outcome
Careers360 has now evolved as a hub of activities on everything to do with education. The Products, Content, Forums, Experts and Events help the students, parents, policy makers, educationists and academics in taking informed decisions. The portal is driven by data, tools & products. Some very handy tools are available for students to predict their marks and percentage in various entrance exams and institutes are recommended on basis of the results given by predictor. Tool like rank predictor enables students in planning to apply in different colleges of their choice and save lot of time and money. Careers360 is proud to share that they are able to help students take the best decision every time. Careers360 now introduces themselves as a data-enabled and technology-driven Educational Products and Services Company seamlessly integrating millions of students and institutional data points with the user generated preferences of its more than 6 million monthly visitors which is almost double than the next competitor in the category. With an employee base of more than 200 employees, in excess of 20000 articles been published on site, presence of 9000+ colleges and now with a mobile app, Careers360 is the undoubtedly, biggest and most reliable education hub of India.
Image Credits: Careers360
