SHC Campaign Strikes Gold at Campaign Awards

At this year’s College Marketing Network Awards, our client South & City College Birmingham took home Gold in the Communications Campaign Award category. 

The award recognises excellence in strategic messaging and meaningful connection within the education sector. Through creative, strong audience engagement, insight-led marketing, and data-driven automation, we supported SCCB in delivering a campaign with clear, measurable impact.

The Challenge

Like many education providers, South & City College Birmingham faced a familiar challenge: declining student applications. Combined with increased competition from other institutions, SCCB needed to stand out to school leaver students aged 15-18, as well as educate on the growing number of pathways available in further education, including the introduction of T Levels for 16-to-19 year-olds.

The campaign aimed to position further education not as a second choice, but a real, tangible option for young adults. Highlighting SCCB’s focus on “Real-world skills” as a unique advantage over other colleges, the goal was to drive measurable growth whilst communicating clear, compelling, and confident messaging to its target audience.

Our Approach

As a multi-channel campaign, the first step was identifying which platforms the target audience spends their time on. For this, we adopted a double-pronged approach that targets not only students, but also parents, who play a key role in the decision-making process.

Through research and insight, we recommended a focused approach across Google, Meta, and TikTok to drive awareness and visibility. We then built a suite of ads tailored to different courses, messaging, and stages of the decision-making journey, optimised across the chosen platforms throughout the duration of the campaign.

To ensure strong ad performance and a collaborative relationship, we held regular check-ins with South & City College Birmingham, keeping them updated on overall campaign activity and the key metric of number of online applications. Through these conversations and analysis of campaign performance, we were able to adapt the media spend towards courses and campuses that required the most support to ensure targets were being met.  Budget was also kept agile around key school dates such as exams, school holidays, and results day (when competition is at its highest), to ensure that we were staying at the forefront of prospective students’ minds during the decision-making process and standing out amongst other colleges in the area.

The Results

The results were significant - with over 4 million ad impressions and 45,000 clicks driven directly to the South & City website, the campaign reversed a decline in applications whilst increasing key engagement and strengthening SCCB’s brand presence among school leavers.

An award-winning result, delivered better.