Growing N.C.’s Most Transfer-Friendly University
How do you deliver and sustain a complete brand story? You balance the head and the heart.
Like most colleges and universities, Campbell University needed to navigate the precipitous demographic decline and weather the instability created by COVID. Undergraduate enrollment was already down across the southeast, meaning competition would be heavily concentrated in North Carolina as well as within key states that are traditionally exporters of undergraduates.
Our insight led to identifying transfer students as a possibility for enrollment growth. Not only did Campbell benefit from a network of community colleges within close proximity but there was an opportunity to find students from neighboring markets wanting to return to their home state. Our challenge would be to effectively reach those transfer students and create compelling messaging focused on the fact that Campbell University offered a similar academic experience — and do so across the entire prospective student journey.
The Problem
Campbell University needed to expand their recruitment efforts beyond the traditional first-year student.
As a small, private university nestled among larger state institutions as well as an institution at the heart of a community college system, Campbell was well positioned to grow their transfer student segment.
We needed to create a comprehensive recruitment campaign that extended their current brand platform and sustain the campaign for 12 months.
Partnering with a centralized team, we coordinated a comprehensive transfer recruitment campaign and managed both ad creative and paid campaign management including: campaign strategy, media placement, landing page developing and tracking and reporting.
Our primary goal was to tell a more complete story by balancing University benefits, at the top-of-funnel, with the ease of the transfer process as prospective students showed more intent at the lower parts of the funnel.
YouTube and social media video ads were used to create an emotional connection broadly across our target market. We then paired the video ads with more rational messaging as the campaign progressed, either by interacting with our video ad or using specific high-intent keywords.
The Results
