How does a prestigious university reach the right audience and drive registrations for its professional education courses?
About
A prestigious university with a leading professional education program that includes multi-day “boot camp” courses designed for individuals who are looking to hone existing skills, learn new skills, and are looking to advance or change their career trajectory
Current Industry Landscape
With growing competition from universities and the increasing availability of online courses,
gaining share in the continuing education category and growing enrollment has become an overwhelming challenge.
The Goal
With the reality of the competitive landscape and changing expectations for program growth, the University’s bottom line goal was to drive enrollment growth by 13%.
The Strategy
Our approach? To use an omni-channel strategy with a full-funnel media plan to increase online presence, interest, and registrations for our client’s professional education courses.
Channels included:
- SEM
- Programmatic Display
- Social Media (Facebook and LinkedIn)
- Newsletters and content Sponsorships
The objective behind meeting the University’s target audience wherever they were across digital was three-fold: to drive awareness and interest in the University as a professional education learning provider on the 1. brand and program level, 2. category level, and 3. course level.
To target the University’s messaging to each of its target audiences, we shined a light on specific types of courses that were best suited to different kinds of professionals based on industry, job experience, job title, and intent. Here are the tactics we used to make it happen:
- branded and non-branded keywords to fuel paid search
- B2B audience targeting using 3rd party B2B data segments to target by job title, job experience, and industry
- 1st party CRM data to craft audience models from past course rosters and to identify candidates who would be likely to take additional courses
- remarketing segmented by intent as well as visitation behavior to reach high-intent audiences contextual targeting to reach audiences in highly relevant settings.
To optimize campaign performance, Digilant maximized ad exposure across the “hand raisers” audience and increased media spend across search and social to drive registrations for courses with historically low registration rates. Additionally, Digilant worked alongside the University to develop strategic marketing plans to support the launch and promotion of newly introduced programs.
Results
24.6% Increase in course registrations in 2020*
*as compared to the same time frame in 2019