Case Study
Client: South University/EDMC
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Description
South University enjoys a long-standing tradition of excellence in education and personalized student attention. The University has experienced continued growth transforming from a two-year college into a four-year, SACS-accredited University offering associate, bachelor, master and doctorate degree programs with campus locations in Savannah, GA; Columbia, SC; Montgomery, AL; Tampa, FL and West Palm Beach, FL.
Situation
Ten weeks, and starting from scratch. In an ambitious undertaking, South University was gearing up for a full-scale media blitz on the Tampa market. With little time to work, and no room for error, South University sought out and hired the Anderson team - Anderson Advertising and Anderson Interactive to accomplish an aggressive mission of filling classroom seats for their new Health Sciences program in short-order.
Strategy
With qualified leads needing to be generated quickly, it became apparent that a web-centric approach would best suit the situation. A team was quickly formed, comprising of South University marketing and admissions leaders, alongside key players from Anderson Advertising and Anderson Interactive. Consistency of the marketing message in the online and offline worlds was a must.
Uncovering the leads
TV and radio ads, billboards, direct mail, brochures and other offline media were used to drive interested students, parents and guidance counselors to www.abrandnewu.org. This website, dubbed the "Depot site", would be the destination point for all marketing collateral.
In conjunction with a heavy dose of offline marketing, Anderson Interactive devised a plan to reach prospective students where they spend much of their day - the Internet. Research data reinforced intuition, as thousands of prospective students and their parents were searching every month for Nursing and Health Sciences degrees in the Tampa area.
To get in front of this audience, a targeted pay-per-click (PPC) campaign would direct these searchers to the Depot site. At the same time, a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy was launched to ensure cost effective search engine visibility for the long term. E-mail lists of prospective students and high school guidance counselors were also obtained so that messages could be crafted and directed to both the primary target as well as the influencer.
Designed for performance
With five campuses fighting for representation on the main University website, the Tampa-specific Depot site was designed to speak directly to the Tampa market and work seamlessly with a new marketing campaign.
The design and purpose of the Depot site was to convert qualified visitors into leads. These leads would be instantly sent to South University Admissions Counselors for follow-up. The site would have to be clean, concise, and speak to several targets at the same time. Calls-to-action would be strategically placed throughout the framework of the site to collect contact data, while content was presented in a logical manner so visitors could quickly access the information they were in search of.
Results
In April of 2006, the Depot site and online/offline marketing plans were launched. Within days, South University was experiencing hundreds of qualified website visitors that were reacting to the campaign. The traffic was encouraging, but this project was being judged on qualified lead generation.
Within two months, the website was receiving thousands of website visitors, hundreds of which were finding the website from the natural search engine listings. This, in combination with hundreds of visitors reacting to the offline media, yielded as high as a 10% conversion rate of web visitors to leads - beating industry averages by over 300%.
The traffic was qualified, the calls-to-action worked, and most importantly, South University’s Tampa campus was full with students beginning a new chapter in their life.
- 10% conversion of visitors to leads
- 100s of first page listings in the natural/organic area of the major search engines within two months
- 1000s of qualified visitors within 30 days
