So, What Did We Do?

To regain control of the media mix, the first thing we did was consolidate all the buys under one master budget. We developed a comprehensive media plan to reach potential students and their influencers to meet the university’s goal of the highest undergraduate enrollment ever. Our media objective was to generate awareness of University of Indianapolis and drive qualified engagement with landing pages (and occasionally the website) that were designed specifically to motivate prospective undergraduate students to include the school in their consideration set. Strategies to meet these objectives included awareness and lead-generation tactics, detailed audience segmentation, and using a variety of calls to action designed to appeal to prospects in different phases of the research and application process.

Establishing Awareness

To establish awareness within the most relevant and newest student prospects, we utilized targeted online display campaigns, using both behavioral and contextual targeting to reach our audience online. We also included predictive geo-targeting to build relevant display audiences using lists of past University of Indianapolis students and current high school students, and even incorporated lookalike audiences to further expand our reach.

Generating Leads

To grab prospects further down the funnel, Google search campaigns were implemented with a mix of keyword strategies, including academic program-specific, University of Indianapolis-branded, and general college education keywords. Social media ads on Facebook and Instagram, which were originally included for awareness, turned out to be key lead generators for this audience. Specifically, the targeted video and display ads we placed in social delivered strong impressions, engagement and conversions. 

Engaging the Audience

We utilized a variety of calls to action – such as “get free info” (fill out a form), “book a tour” or “apply free online” – to catch users in all stages of their consumer journey, whether they were still researching college options and needed a little push to learn more or if they were ready to apply.

We also layered in display retargeting to further engage prospects who had previously demonstrated behavior indicating some level of interest, such as visiting a landing page or visiting specific qualifying pages on the University of Indianapolis website (financial aid, admissions, academic programs, etc.). We optimized the retargeting strategies throughout the campaign to determine the best ways to encourage prospects to take the next step in the process. In addition, in a future campaign, we ran ads to a list of accepted students to persuade them to commit to the next step in the matriculation process (call to action: "make your deposit").

How Did it Turn Out?

With the secondary education advertising space growing more saturated and competitive each year, we understood that meeting University of Indianapolis’ recruitment goal was a tall order. We are happy to report that after endless hours of planning and campaign optimization, we ended up not just meeting the goal, but exceeding it. In fact, we helped bring in the largest first year class that University of Indianapolis had ever seen!

But the real story here is that we have been able to keep that momentum going. Since that first campaign, we have continued to exceed University of Indianapolis’ growing undergraduate recruitment goals, and we apply what we have learned each year to make our campaigns stronger and stronger.

Recently, our analytics specialists got to deliver this good news about our latest undergraduate campaign (all changes are year over year):

• CPC decreased by 34%
• Conversion rate increased by 236%
• Cost per conversion decreased 81%
• Overall volume of form submissions increased by 223%
• Overall volume of booked tours increased by 935%

Where Do We Go From Here?

We aren’t the type to just tackle one goal and call it a day. Although we exceeded University of Indianapolis’ initial goal and continue to have that same success with our current campaigns, we are always hungry for more. We strive to make our campaigns as innovative and cost-effective as possible, which has allowed us to optimize our budget even further and expand to new tactics like Snapchat since then. It takes planning, learning, collaborating and improving to do our best work possible. Plus the courage to look at the results and trust your gut sometimes. And it takes clients who want those exact same things. Especially the part about improving.

Because the end of every project is really the beginning of the next one.