Review your audience. Refine your strategy. Improve your results.

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Changing global PG marketing for the better

Driving focused postgraduate recruitment, across 15 Business, Finance and Management programmes, targeting 20-to-26-year olds, in the USA, UAE, across Europe, and the UK is no small feat.

For Warwick Business School (WBS) the creation of an ‘always on’ campaign, that would run from October to July, supporting their key recruitment period, was the answer.

Locating our target audience was key

This was a global campaign. We needed to be astute and targeted in order to make the best use of WBS’s time and money. Through SMRS Reporting we gained a deeper understanding of how previous campaigns had performed. This enabled us to develop a selective, multi-channel approach that would deliver cost-effective recruitment and create stand out for their brand This meant exploring channels that allowed us attract high achieving students though a mix of content, display, social and PPC. Our always on approach allowed budgets to be dialled up and down at key points in the cycle across channels and enabled us to be agile in location targeting based on real time campaign data.

Our multi-platform strategy was a winner

We knew that The Student Room (TSR) reaches a high achieving global audience. Exactly the sort of people who WBS needed to be talking to. So, WBS became TSR’s sole Business Courses partner on the platform. Ten jointly written content pieces were pushed out and targeted impressions delivered within the campaign period, helping us drive engagement and value across domestic and international markets.

We managed our paid search activity on an ‘always on’ basis and implemented keyword search at subject level. Our focus was on driving brochure downloads and applications using RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) and bid adjustments to encourage users back to the website. Social media budgets, purely focused on Instagram and Facebook, were up-weighted from October to February.

Our mix of static and carousel formats aligned content to the course, the audience or the user’s other interests, in line with the See-Think-Do audience intent framework.

We also focussed our attention on FindAMasters, driving the engagement of our relevant audience by analysing and applying behavioural data. We had individual listings for 15 programmes and new audience extension banners.

Programmatic played a key role too. Focusing on digital display we layered multiple targeting strategies including interest, behavioural, keyword, contextual and retargeting allowing us to massively increase our reach to a highly targeted and relevant audience of prospective postgraduate students.

The results speak for themselves

  • Over 34.9m impressions
  • Approximately 146,000 clicks
  • Over 100,000 unique content views on TSR
  • Over 1,240 apply clicks
  • And at the last count 890 brochure downloads

Which all goes to show how by reviewing and refining your marketing strategy, you can achieve remarkable results.