Stevens Institute of Technology did most of their marketing in-house for many years. Similar to Kennesaw State University, in 2020 Stevens came to us to give them access and expertise on geofencing marketing and programmatic display advertising. It’s now grown to manage digital campaigns across all channels, including programmatic, geofencing, Google Ads, YouTube, Meta, and LinkedIn for multiple graduate programs and brand awareness.
Propellant Media is now engrained with their entire marketing and admissions team executing lead generation and brand awareness campaigns.
Instead of producing specific metrics for any respective campaign program, we wanted to speak to the campaign strategy we developed for a unique segment of their marketing team that needed our assistance in reaching in-market students for summer housing in New York.
Overview & Objective
Stevens, despite being located in Hoboken, their objective was to reach students looking at summer internship housing options in New York and direct them to Stevens’ housing options. Our team was already used to the brand awareness and lead generation campaign we were running, but this was a one-off request that they needed assistance with.
They were wanting to market their properties for housing to students both in New York and around the country. Despite this being a one-off request, we implemented a strategy that incorporated mostly Google Ads.
The Strategy
Our team is very methodical in how we consider ad campaigns for higher education brands. And knowing we had a limited budget to work with, we came up with the following strategy on Google Ads. Use in-market “summer housing” terms, but split out the campaigns as geo-specific campaigns with a high intention of specific terms in each of them.
For example, if we targeted students in New York City, we wanted to leverage similar terms below that we pulled from Google Keyword Planner that had respectable demand.
But for geo specific regions outside of New York and students looking at New York City for summer housing, we built a campaign for just that region alone. The campaign was called Summer Housing (Outside Of New York). We leverage geospecific terms for that campaign including:
- New York intern summer housing
- New York city summer housing
- Manhattan summer housing
This approach allowed us to segment campaigns accordingly by keywords and geography, limit waste of students who are solely looking for summer housing options in New York, and compare campaign performance of the two campaigns (Outside New York vs Inside New York).
Results Of The Campaign
Despite the budget being limited, we constantly received feedback that the summer housing rooms were being booked and the general interest team for summer housing was receiving an uptick in requests compared to prior years.
