Description

AGENCY:
CLIENT NAME: Sommet Education
Campaign started: 1 June 2018
Campaign ended: June 30, 2019
Created at: July 24, 2019

BRIEF

Sommet runs two international hospitality management schools, with campuses in France, Switzerland, Spain, the United Kingdom and China. We manage global drive-to-web activity via paid media (primarily paid search, paid social and LinkedIn) to recruit new students.

Courses are expensive and deciding to take a three year course or a one year MBA is a highly considered decision, so key issues are dealing with a long consideration cycle and managing budget across global activity.

There are many steps in the process of becoming a student. Our focus was leads (1st step) and Opportunities (5th Step) out of 10 steps.

STRATEGY:

Accurate targeting is absolutely key to the success of this campaign. However high net worth individuals are hard to identify – and we do not have the budgets for very broad brush targeting. Further to this, there are many stages in journey from initial lead through to application. We therefore tagged up certain stages in the application process. Allowing us to monitor the quality of the leads

Consequently we have tested a series of data-led approaches to media buying:

* Scraped postcode data of the top 50 schools and universities in key markets, then geo-targeted Facebook advertising to these locations.

* Overlayed third-party data on High Net Worth individuals, combining this with core demographic data to create audiences on Facebook

* Created two core remarketing segments based on age: visitors under thirty received a ‘student’ message, over thirty was a ‘parent’ message

Budget management was important. Optimising our spends to focus on regions and countries that historically delivered the best converion rates. This allowed us to focus spend on areas that performed best and minimise wastage.

Creatively, we used a range of assets across both schools, with frequent tests and local language variants.

RESULTS:

By the close of 2018, i.e. around seven months after we had started work with Sommet, we had improved leads volume by 29% and “opportunities” (qualified leads) by 44%. At the same time, cost per lead declined by 24%.

This growth has continued into 2019 as our learnings are improving. We have also gained valuable insights into the time lag between initial lead and full student enrolment which will guide future optimisations.

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