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Driving an unprecedented 64% uplift in applications year-on-year for ANU’s Crawford School of Public Polify

Strategy

With a goal to increase lead volume and applications for postgraduate courses in Semester 1, 2020 the Crawford School of Public Policy partnered with Social Garden to take the lead on a multi-channel advertising strategy. Social Garden identified an opportunity to not only deliver return on investment for the Crawford School, but also level up their content with a student-led approach. It was important that a ‘one size fits all’ or ‘spray-and-pray’ approach was avoided.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Social Garden for 3 years on our Crawford School National Recruitment social media campaigns. We’ve seen unprecedented growth in our Australian student numbers from this time and have achieved market impact that we have never expected. Social Garden is a highly professional, very talented and super hard-working group. I recommend them unreservedly for their creative, responsive and future-focused work.”

– Cecily Stewart, Manager, National Student Recruitment and Development, Crawford School of Public Policy.

Ongoing optimisations and purpose-built student-centred content helped to establish the Crawford School as the leading graduate public policy provider in the Asia Pacific region. Return on investment was demonstrated through attribution reporting – revealing a clear uplift in application and enrolment numbers which can be directly attributed to the Social Garden campaign.

The campaign saw significant growth in domestic student numbers, far surpassing the goal set at the beginning of our partnership.

“We’ve seen unprecedented growth in our Australian student numbers…and have achieved market impact that we have never expected.”

Cecily Stewart,
Crawford School of Public Policy

Creating and customising a Sales Process

Adopting a multi-channel advertising strategy meant that we could utilise each channel to its strengths in the campaign. Google delivered a high volume of high intent traffic, supported by a wider prospecting pool available through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

We developed and executed an audience-segmented creative strategy to construct a personalised user experience from the first ad impression right through to the conversion optimised landing pages. At an advertising level, multiple ad variants were produced to sit natively within each channel, from direct response Facebook lead ads to long form LinkedIn Newsfeed ads.

“When the audience is very niched, the complexity associated with the targeting greatly increases. Knowing this we focused on getting the data strategy right up front so we could put the digital platform AI to work so that we were able to identify, connect and convert prospects that met the strict enrolment criteria.”

- Georgia Worswick,
Campaign Manager

Applying creative insights to the wider communications strategy

With a focus on consistent content optimisation and split testing, the insights generated throughout the campaign provided learnings to the Crawford School marketing team to further inform their wider communications strategy:
Detailed course-specific messaging revealed the unique selling points of each study stream and different study motivations of each audience
A/B testing the call to action delivered a lower cost per lead
Using student-led content for social media increased engagement
The landing page design was optimised for conversion by our UI/UX team

Applying creative insights to the wider communications strategy

Lead profiling was established throughout the campaign to capture intent, education history and demographic data to support the client’s recruitment strategy. The seamless integration of this data enabled efficient and prompt handover to their future students team, a huge win for the Crawford School.

We worked closely with ANU to establish a mutual understanding of the critical information needed to nurture prospective students through to enrolment. This helped to inform the strategy behind the data capture within Facebook Lead Ads and each landing page. Once a lead was created, the Crawford School Future Students team would receive an automated email promoting them to follow up and provide each lead with further information matched to their course preferences and advice on how to apply.

“The questions we selected together aim to collect the right amount of data without impacting conversion. Using the same questions on the. lead capture page keeps the data really consistent.”

- Kartik Misra,
Account Manager

RESULT

How we achieved unprecedented growth

64%

Uplift in applications

24%

Uplift in offers

15%

Uplift in acceptances
The success of the campaign paves the way for a direct response approach to student recruitment. Social Garden is proud to have played a pivotal role in upskilling the digital knowledge within the Crawford School and breaking new ground with performance marketing tactics.

Groundbreaking Growth In Domestic Student Numbers

All courses promoted by Social Garden saw an uplift in applications year-on-year. Broken down into a 64% uplift in domestic applications, a 24% uplift in offers and 15% uplift in acceptances.

Improved Spend Efficiencies


The optimisation and testing methodology implemented enabled us to deliver leads at an increasingly lower cost per lead than previous campaigns.

Audience Insights To Support Wider Marketing Strategy

Data capture, content and audience insights provided learnings to the Crawford School marketing team to inform their wider communications strategy.