University College Birmingham - Integrated Campaign
Services provided: Strategy, Creative Campaign, Paid Media
Brief.
University College Birmingham (UCB) briefed SHC to devise, run and optimise an integrated digital campaign for the new academic college intake. The campaign needed to reach prospecting students aged 15 – 16 and drive completed applications.
What We Did.
As Google restricts targeting under 16s across the platform, we needed to create an integrated approach which targeted not only students but also their parents to allow us to leverage core conversion tactics across the Google network. .
The media plan focused on a full funnel approach and from a channel perspective, we focused parents’ activity to deliver across the Google, Meta and Spotify and student activity across Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Spotify. As a workaround for targeting students across the Google Network, we used an education specific platform, Educate, which used mobile data to target under 16s with display and YouTube ads.
To ensure that we were driving both students and parents down the application funnel, we ran cross-channel retargeting activity to capture engaged audiences from awareness-focused platforms such as TikTok and Spotify and retarget them with conversion tactics through the Meta network, where we saw students more in converting.
Results.
Overall the campaign delivered 4640 completed applications which is 23% uplift YoY against a target of 10% uplift. In total there were 1538 enrolled students against a target of 1300, which proves the campaign delivered a higher quality of applications year on year. Alongside these commercial figures, the TikTok creative was also selected by TikTok to be featured on the Creative best Practice platform as a top performing ad example.