The higher education landscape in 2025 presents a myriad of challenges: declining enrollment rates, intensified competition, shifting demographics, the proliferation of online learning platforms, and evolving student expectations. Institutions must adapt by meeting prospective students where they are—digitally, socially, and…
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New Jersey College Grows Their Student Engagement For Their Summer Housing

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:

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.

Local State University Defies Expectations During Covid 19 At $10 Cost Per Lead

students or teenagers with files and diploma

The Challenge

This local university has a multi-million dollar marketing budget across their undergraduate and graduate programs.  Between the many competitors they have to face including prominent Georgia and Southeast Universities attracting new applicants and students has not been an easy task.  That in addition to the low brand recognition for the university, they have been slowly growing their presence, but needed new innovative tactics to help them reach the student profile that could thrive as students at their school as well as graduates.  That’s when they reached out to Propellant Media for guidance.

The Solution We Implemented

Our original statement of work included OTT/CTV Advertising and Streaming Radio/Spotify campaigns for undergraduate brand.  But as we continued to work together, they soon learned that our passion and partnership mattered just as much as the results.  It showed in our communication, our execution of campaigns, and bringing fresh ideas based on our prior experience with other colleges and universities we worked with.

Nine (9) Months into our client management approach, and supported by strong results, the University was proactively convinced to dramatically increase our SOW to include

  • Geofencing SAT & ACT locations as well as moments when the admissions team is visits certain recruitment events in the southeast
  • Full Funnel Google Ads campaign centered around brand & non brand keywords
  • Paid Social (LinkedIn & Facebook/Instagram) lead generation campaign
  • Focus on retargeting leads with urgency language to get them to convert into true applicants
  • Now handling their marketing plans for the Biz School and Multiple Grad Programs
  • Implementing a Full Funnel attribution model and tying advertising data to applicant and CRM data
  • All vital digital channels Google Adwords, Bing Ads, YouTube, Programmatic Display, lookalike modeling, CRM targeting, OTT/CTV, Pandora/Spotify, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram

Results Of The Campaign

As we launched and took over the majority of the campaigns, we helped the client lower their cost per student lead which continued to hover at $10 – $20/student for their undergraduate institution.  Our highest peak of lead flow has grown to 2,800 leads per month.

And for the graduate programs, we helped decrease the cost per lead went from $1,100 to $250, thus filling up each department across all the grad programs at the University.  We currently manage over 25 graduate programs each with their own set of strategies.

We have been a partner with the institution for over 3 years and counting.

The University was featured in several publications highlighting the roughly 20% year over year growth despite COVID-19 and the expected increase in competition due to it.

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