COMMUNITY COLLEGE ATTRACTS SUMMER STUDENTS

The local community college was struggling to reach the summer transient students – students that are eligible to take classes at the local community college during the summer and have credits transferred back to their original institutions. In addition, the local community college wanted to reach the parents of children that are most likely to participate in summer classes.

Goals

• Engagement with more students, specifically from nearby colleges that would be interested in summer classes
• Engagement with website, specifically summer transient program pages
• Engagement with social media

The strategy that was created for the local community college revolved mostly around using three tactics to reach potential students and their parents in addition to standard display ads on our owned and operated network and the extended reach ad network.

The first tactic was a latitude/longitude targeting campaign – a type of geographical targeting that focuses on very specific locations to target the areas where the likeliest audience exists. We used the lat/long targeting over six college campuses to reach students while they were on their home campus, encouraging them to save money and get ahead by taking summer classes at the local community college.

The second tactic was to use social media to target students who would be interested in taking classes while they’re home for the summer. By targeting students currently enrolled at the schools the local community college gains the most summer enrollments from those who live in a 40-mile radius of the city, we were able to target the most likely audience of students who would be interested in taking summer classes.

The third tactic was to promote sponsored content through Rich Media display about the advantages of summer classes at the community college. The goal was to communicate this message not only to potential students, but also the parents of these students as influencers via our owned and operated network. In addition to the traditional “in river” posts to promote this content, display advertising was utilized on the rich media platform, featuring creative specific to the parent and the student audience, which allowed the tracking of respondents’ engagement with the ad.

• Mobile-targeted campaign around 6 campuses garnered 16,316 clicks and achieved an overall CTR (click-through rate) of .97%.
• The transient student page saw 21,454 page views, a 136% increase from 2015.
• Traffic driven by social increased 253% year over year.