University Expands Digital Presence for Priority Program

The Challenge

A major research university sought to increase interest and applicants in a new accelerated program, but was currently tied to traditional higher education recruitment methods. The brand desired a holistic approach to address potential demand for a new market offering.

Insights

Because competitive context was vital to understanding the brand’s positioning, Arcalea began by leveraging our proprietary Quantitative Marketing Analysis (QMA) process, designed to reveal complete competitive context and uncover existing and potential brand advantages. The analysis discovered a highly fragmented market that broadly underutilized digital tactics to differentiate. The brand analysis also recognized a limited framework to capture customer records, leading to loss of valuable customer intelligence.

The lack of market differentiation provided significant opportunities for increased market share for the brand. Arcalea identified a set of immediate and long term actions to drive share of voice, and ultimately program success. Search presence was limited in the market, opening brand opportunities for online advertising, and organic visibility. Improved targeting in new online ad campaigns, and modified landing page variants allowed immediate efficiency testing.

Customer journeys among competitors varied widely in page-level experience. Information architecture analysis recommended changes to improve visibility of priority page content, especially for mobile users.

Finally, secondary marketing channels served as another opportunity to differentiate. While most competitors used some social media components or email marketing, none fully exploited the opportunity to increase touchpoints with messages of a unique value proposition. While the brand was invested in one channel, the opportunity to expand within the channel and in new channels with redesigned messaging was identified as a low-cost differentiator.

A significant obstacle to attracting and nurturing leads, however, was the lack of a consistent data collection framework. As a result, site visit interactions, touch points, and key elements of the customer journey were lost. Implementing a data learning environment would capture customer records enabling the brand to court, reinvigorate, and convert. In absence of immediate attribution modeling, the brand implemented a short-term solution of tracking forms and email nurturing of leads.