How do you build a brand in an increasingly competitive market?

You go DMA by DMA.

Problem

Facing nearly five consecutive years of enrollment decline, Chico State needed to reverse this trend in an effort to maintain the overall health of the institution.

Not only were college bound populations shrinking but the market was facing steep competition through new entrants as well as increased competitor advertising spend.

The university needed an advertising solution that helped to produce short-term enrollment wins and to lay the foundation for long-term brand growth.

Key Findings

For this campaign to be successful we knew that we needed support from both marketing and admissions teams. This would allow us to identify where enrollment growth was most likely to occur and the needed resources to create future demand.

Through the combined effort from both marketing and admissions teams, we came away with two campaign insights that would form the foundation of our campaign strategy.

Insight #1: We found that if Chico wasn’t a prospective student’s top school there was a very small chance they would enroll.

Insight #2: To position Chico State earlier in the minds’ of prospects and create a response, we needed to drive admissions-related actions earlier in the college search process.

Solution

Our campaign insights formed the immediate campaign goals. Each insight would be flipped and assigned media tasks based on where the prospective student was in the college search process.

At the top of the funnel, Chico State’s Do&Dare messaging was evolved to create a consistent verbal and visual identity. This would be the Brand Campaign — used to drive brand recognition. Both messaging and media choices were made to increase awareness prior to consideration sets forming, meeting insight #1.

As students moved in-market, mid-funnel tactics would be used to increase the likelihood that they would take an admissions-related action. To drive this outcome, the Prospect Campaign messaging was developed to position Chico State relative to each target market, meeting insight #2.

Budgets and media choices were inspired by the “60/40” rule, a principle used to inform how budget is allocated across “brand” and “performance” marketing. In the case of Chico, this split would be across the Brand Campaign and Prospect Campaign (i.e. performance).

The Results

While the campaign is still in-market, we have seen a positive lift in a few early KPIs:

Total campaign impressions: 12,747,765

Total landing page sessions: 62,151

Year-over-year web traffic lift across all markets: 7%