Digital Marketing for Campbell University
As a small, private university nestled among larger state institutions as well as a University at the heart of a community college system, Campbell University is well positioned to serve students seeking a faith-based education.
In fact, Campbell has not only grown its academic offerings, along with the notoriety of many graduate programs nationally, the university continues to enroll more North Carolinians than any other private university in the county. To continue this growth, Campbell needed to expand their recruitment efforts beyond the traditional first-year student.
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.
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.
After 6 months, let’s just say they’re probably the most transfer-friendly college in NC.
107
Inquiry Forms Completed
106%
Increase in Traffic to campbell’s website from target markets
300%
Increase in Traffic to Transfer Pages