Ivy Tech Community College is the largest community college in America, with 19 campuses, numerous satellite facilities, and over half a million alumni all over Indiana. As can happen with such a large and complex institution, sometimes very worthy programs aren’t as fully utilized as they could be, for any number of reasons. Sometimes, it can just be a simple case of the people for whom the program was designed not being aware of its benefits …or even of its existence. That’s where effective, targeted advertising can really save the day.
Take, for instance, the school’s Achieve Your Degree (AYD) program. AYD is a partnership between Ivy Tech Community College and nearly 300 local employers. When an employer becomes a partner, their employees can earn a job-relevant degree or certification with no upfront cost to the student. This program provides a path for companies to skill up their workforce and allows employees to learn new skills and earn a free credential from Ivy Tech while still working full-time. Unfortunately, this terrific company benefit was being underutilized, mostly due to a lack of awareness among the employees for whom it was created. Williams Randall was asked to help remedy the situation and, in October 2024, we kicked off a campaign designed to do exactly that through the microtargeting of a very specific audience: the employees of a select group of those partner businesses. By the campaign’s midpoint, it was clear the tactics were paying big dividends: AYD enrollment among the targeted employers was already up an eye-catching 8.1%!
The campaign instituted a media strategy that utilized paid tactics, a targeted mix of social media, streaming audio, digital display ads, and site retargeting. In numerous cases, precision geotargeting to the exact location of a member company’s campus was used. Other components of the media strategy included spreading the media buy out over a larger span of time than previous campaigns, and using individual aspects of the campaign to move audiences through each part of the conversion funnel: Spotify ads garnered awareness with a 98.9% ad completion rate; Facebook/Instagram ads piqued interest, with 10K clicks and 176 ad shares; then the new-to-the-campaign paid search tactic delivered big dividends with even-better-than-expected conversions: over 8.3K clicks and 136 clicks to contact.
By mid-campaign, some noteworthy trends had emerged from our campaign monitoring, trends too established and consistent to dismiss. Relative to the numbers before we started the campaign, the rate of clicks to Ivy Tech’s AYD landing page had doubled, we had nearly cut our cost per click in half, and we had produced twice as many clicks to contact per advertising dollar spent. But perhaps the most significant stat of all remains the aforementioned 8.1% rise in program enrollment among employees of targeted AYD partner employers.
And that’s just the mid-campaign enrollment figure—it’s still rising! Clearly, with some insight and expertise from Williams Randall, Ivy Tech’s Achieve Your Degree program is well on its way to achieving a degree of success much more befitting such a unique and valuable employee resource.
