Activating a Rebrand:
County by County
Blackburn College is a private liberal arts college in southern Illinois. The college is one of the few Work Colleges in the country, yet, like many small colleges across the country is struggling with enrollment.
To combat market effect, Blackburn rolled out a new website — complete with a brand refresh-along with a plan to activate it in 2022. From a marketing perspective we needed to be a steward to the new brand as well as to the overall media budget. Essentially, we needed to balance building the brand along with meeting specific enrollment goals.
Strategic Approach: Where to play and how to win.
Knowing that it would be difficult to serve both enrollment goals and activate the brand in a short period of time, we decided to approach our strategy in a segmented way.
Where to Play
Combining both market and audience data, we developed an enrollment profile for each county in Illinois. We then indexed each county based on specific enrollment attributes that indicated which county had a prospective student population most likely to be interest in Blackburn College. This created a tiered system as well as gave us a clear snapshot of important markets.
How to Win
Once we had our county tiers outlined, we used the county profiles to develop three segments. We used the segments to develop positioning, messaging and communications objectives.
Not only was this approach use to inform our digital marketing efforts but was beneficial in undergraduate admissions planning.
