Nice-to-have problems are still problems

Competition for students is always fierce. And, even when you’re widely regarded as one of the highest-ranking institutions in your field, there’s no guarantee you’ll attract the number or the quality of students you want.

This was the case with Imperial College, Faculty of Medicine. Their impressively high ranking and strong brand were viewed as intimidating and putting-off high-quality students, who wrongly felt they were under-qualified to study there. In addition to this, the Faculty lacked a marketing strategy to direct them toward success.

Our help was needed to support the internal team with an overarching marketing strategy and enable their tech platforms to work harder, tracking and evaluating activity. In this way Imperial College, Faculty of Medicine would be able to identify relevant target markets and better articulate and share their attraction messages in order to become more attractive and accessible to the right people.

For real change to happen, we had to get to the heart of the problem

We investigated everything to discover what their challenges were and how to change things for the better. From macro- and micro-environment audits, audience primary research, data analysis to identify market opportunity, a social media audit and website review, we evaluated it all. Then we created a strategy focused on our findings, outlining a short, medium and long-term plan with clear KPIs for Imperial College London, Faculty of Medicine to follow.

We followed this up regularly, with ongoing support in the form of PPC workshops, aimed at equipping the internal team with the skills to manage their own online activity. We also identified what marketing activity to stop too, enabling resource to be refocused on activity that aligned to their objectives.

Regular meetings. Ongoing analysis and constant support have helped to transform the Faculty of Medicine’s marketing strategy, making it more targeted and effective. Perhaps most importantly though, we’ve highlighted the need to review and check capabilities, functions, processes and plans, in order to make sure they’re relevant and reflect the changing lives of their target audience.