Graduate Recruitment Case Study

Description of organization: Arizona State University’s College of Public Service and Community Solutions (CPSCS) has degree programs focused on making an impact in the community and addressing social problems. Their resounding cry of “Be the solution” is at the crux of what they lead students to do: find ways to address problems in the world that they want to solve. CPSCS offers degrees in social work, criminology, nonprofit administration and even sustainable tourism.

Problem: The CPSCS team contacted us to help their team recruit new graduate students and build awareness around the Idealist Grad Fairs they would be attending in Fall 2017 following a disappointing fair turnout the previous year.

Results Highlights:

  • A considerable increase in graduate fair attendees compared to year prior
  • Over 1,000,000 campaign impressions across social media channels
  • 400% increase in social media engagement across platforms

Case Study Insights

Strategy

Our strategy for CPSCS involved a robust digital marketing plan including social media marketing, graphic design, paid campaign management and landing page development.

To promote each grad fair, we used a calculated balance of organic and paid social media activities. We kept the various CPSCS pages populated with organic content like alumni spotlights, industry news and grad fair promotions. The pages were also used to provide live updates throughout the fairs, telling people where to find CPSCS recruiters and providing end-of-day summaries for anyone who had visited. We also created ads in tandem with this content that exclusively promoted the grad fairs and highlighted the degree programs offered at CPSCS that appealed to the “idealist” students we were targeting.

Since we had ads that were laser-focused in terms of location, we tested a few ways to grab the attention of our users. We used variations of “Hey Phoenix!” in the hopes that people would see their city name and wonder what event was being promoted. We also paired those with pictures of their cities, just to try to grab their attention enough to make them stop scrolling. These ads performed very well in our A/B testing phase. We also noticed that using a question like “Thinking about grad school?” seemed to generate a higher click-through-rate.

Each ad led users to a landing page we developed that offered more information about the fair in their city and gave them the option to explore more about the degree programs. The landing page was branded to be consistent with other ASU web pages and contained one simple form that users could fill out quickly. By keeping the landing page minimal and straightforward, prospective students were more drawn to fill out the form and submit their information.

We collaborated with the CPSCS team throughout the lifetime of the campaign to determine what degrees to promote, how to target their audience and what messaging to use. After a lot of consideration, we landed on the campaign slogan: “Choose your challenge. Be the solution.” This really proved to resound with our audience and complement the “idealist” mindset.

Results

The main goal of this campaign was to raise awareness about CPSCS degree programs and promote their attendance at the Idealist Grad Fairs. As the analytics came in, we were able to see that our ads had been displayed over one million times to people in all five of our target cities. Additionally, our landing page saw over 2,000 site visits during the lifetime of the campaign and engagement across the CPSCS social platforms increased 400%.

This kind of exposure was a huge win for both CPSCS brand awareness and grad fair event promotion. The college’s recruiter even noted increased foot traffic during the fairs themselves and had over 20 leads that reached out through the landing page form.

Testimonial

Coming soon!

Campaign Graphics