Media buying & trafficking
Sault College
Sault College is a mid-sized community college that maintains a yearly student population of approximately 3,500 full-time and 1,500 part-time students. The College’s marketing efforts are primarily intended to ensure the ongoing viability of College programs. Campaigns are largely recruitment focused and organized by program to allow for a tailored approach and scalability based on application and enrollment numbers. Supplementary campaigns are focused on brand and College events.
Services
- Ad trafficking & optimization
- Custom audience segments & remarketing
- Awareness, conversion & competitor targeting programs
- Keyword & audience research
- Analytics & tracking implementation
- Campaign & website reporting
Increasing applications to low-enrollment campaigns
Approach
Following the main application deadline, dig works with the College to identify beneficial programs to include in a secondary recruitment push. Included programs are chosen based on a combination of enrollment numbers, the monetary value that programs can be expected to provide, and the marketing cost to acquire applicants to each program.
Target personas are developed for each program, and tactics and channels are chosen based on those personas, often with specific buys for each program. Programs are removed from the strategy throughout the campaign as application numbers reach desired levels.
A layered persona-based approach to strategy development has been effective for the College, with emphasis on types of prospective students (i.e., high school, mature), the type of stakeholder (i.e., student, parent, spouse), and the types of job outcomes for the student. We also add in segmentation based on where audiences are in the decision making process. Campaign creative, in recent years, has focused on the possible careers associated with each program.
Results
Measurement of campaign performance for recruitment focused Sault College campaigns is typically focused on three areas: engagement on each program’s page on the website, clicks from program pages to the external program application platform, and the number of actual applications received by the College for each program.
- During and following the campaign, Sault College saw increased recruitment leads and volume of actual applications, leading to increased enrollment in at risk programs.
- The greatest success was seen in the Sports Administration program, which went from zero to nine accepted applications three weeks following the campaign start - with five directly attributed to digital ads.
