Overview
Faced with increasing competition in the Texas online education market from large national online institutions, SHSU leadership has funded 8 state and nationwide advertising campaigns. Campaign strategy was developed through student and audience segmentation, secondary market research from syndicated sources, and geographic analysis of student and public data. From the beginning, the primary goal has been to increase online enrollments. To achieve our goals, secondary and tertiary goals for first-time enrollment by student segment were established and monitored.
Marketing Strategy
Through syndicated market research and geographic analysis, I developed strategy for budgets, ad creative, and media buying for broadcast, OTT, pre-roll video, digital display, and social media channels at local, state, and national levels.
Student and public data were layered on maps in Tableau and ArcGIS. Information from these maps synthesized with market insights about online learners revealed strategic market, segment, and channel opportunities.
An example of tableau mapping can be seen here:
Creative Direction
After developing the marketing strategy, I worked cross-divisionally with our university’s marketing and communications department to provide creative direction to our in-house media team, ensuring brand consistency across our multi-channel campaign.
Collaboratively, my team of graphic designers, our video production team, and writer worked together to create the video, radio, and digital ads. All together, we produced 20 video commercials (30 second & 15 second) and 135 graphic ads for digital channels.
The copy and visuals in these ads primarily focused on general brand awareness, as well as, occasionally “featured” degree programs. See media from the campaign here:
TV/Video Ads
Commercials were created for placement on TV, OTT, and Web Video channels.
Digital Ads
These ads were designed to run on digital channels such as AdMessenger, Facebook, and Instagram.
Campaign MicroSite
The campaign microsite served as a landing page for links from digital ads. Custom UTM tagging was used to capture engagement data over time and between campaigns.
Outcomes & Results
Since summer 2019, we’ve aired commercials over 100,000 times and delivered over 50 million digital impressions in the state of Texas and nationwide through these campaigns.
The campaign landing page has been seen over 250,000 times, with campaign visitors engaging for over three minutes per session on average.
Online education enrollments have experienced significant increases each semester following advertising campaigns since the first campaign in summer 2019.
The campaigns have resulted in 4,574 first-time 100% online students. These first-time online students generated 33,722 semester credit hours in their first semester at SHSU. These course units equate to over $3.4 million in distance learning revenue. The advertising campaigns in total have had a 3.19 to 1 return on advertising expenditures.
Year over year successes can be seen in the following metrics:
Advertising in 2020-2021
In the last academic year I've run 3 brand awareness advertising campaigns for Online Education. These campaigns delivered
Impact in 2020-2021
We gained 116,736 website users from digital advertisements. The advertising campaigns yeilded 2,603 first-time 100% online students.
Optimization in 2020-2021
School year over school year, the optimization of strategy led to a 71% reduction in advertising cost while maintaining a similar ammount of impression delivery. This year we recieved an increase of 118% in campaign website users, and a 40% increase in first-time 100% online students.
