Objectives
Deliver qualified candidate leads for 12 different graduate programs at Cornell University through specific targeting while efficiently managing a strict per campaign budget. These campaigns have some obvious overlaps within their target audiences, and Fundamental Media was tasked with effectively managing these campaign budgets and targeting to properly co-exist within the same media landscape.
Strategy
Program audiences generally have key overlaps in ages, industries and markets. Because of this, traditional blue-chip sites for higher education prospects could be eligible options for any of these programs. To counter this, Fundamental Media focused on the areas of slight differences in each program suite to effectively target each audience.
With this campaign being responsible for a wide range of programs and marketing strategies, many different channels were employed throughout the fiscal year. These include YouTube advertising, out of home display on public transit and other key areas, audio through Spotify or public radio, programmatic display, directly negotiated display with top industry sites, and targeted email campaigns.
Awareness strategies were viewed with a “rising tide lifts all boats” philosophy, where branding media was looking to spread general awareness to assist our specific campaign targeting. We saw cross-pollination throughout our campaign, where users may have listened to an MBA ad and searched for these keywords but ended up eventually converting within an MPS form fill.
By trusting our defined audiences and directly marketing to these prospects, we were able to run concurrent advertising campaigns with the same partners (such as New York Times or Washington Post), with first-party and demographic/geographic parameters layered in which allowed our programs to co-exist within the market.
Leveraging firmographic data from Alphix Solutions, Fundamental Media’s sister company, we were able to target our campaigns to specific companies that fit the appropriate campaign. For example, an MPS campaign could be targeted to a university IP, while an EMBA Healthcare campaign was targeted to a hospital’s IP.
By focusing on and trusting in our targeting parameters, we were able to effectively market multiple unique programs while using the same media mix. Each campaign had clearly defined run lists, markets, and industries where we were able to meet our prospects at the right time and place. This resulted in an increase in click efficiency, active users, and lead generation for each program.
