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.