Bournemouth University Undecided CampaignOverview:

The undergraduate market has changed significantly since the introduction of fees making the market yet more competitive for students, whilst the fees themselves add a further dimension to an already complex purchasing decision for students.

Increasingly seeing themselves as consumers, value-for-money will become more important to students and institutions need to identify, define and communicate stronger value propositions to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded market, amplified by the demographic downturn in undergraduate numbers.

Brief:

The brief was to run a campaign to encourage applications before the UCAS deadline. UCAS receive 40% of total applications in the last fortnight before the closing date, so we knew there a considerable number of undecided students who we could target.

TMP created a media schedule, based on a specific profile of students provided by BU – this included the most popular geographical locations which their students come from, age profiles and specific courses which they wanted to promote. This allowed us to choose media which we could target the audience specifically, thus meaning wastage was low and ROI was high:

Google Display Network – allowed us to advertise on a huge number of websites targeted by location, age and subject. Websites used include YouTube, Facebook and ask.com

Guardian – we used behavioural targeting based on the clients to show our adverts only to visitors who matched our target locations, had visited the Guardian Education section and were reading content on target course areas.

Student Room – once again, we used online technology to target our advertising only to candidates who matched our target age, education level, geography and predicted grades.

TMP Campaign Managed all of the activity; this allowed us to check it went live and that it was performing – this happened in a real time scenario so we could ensure the campaign performed to its optimum.

BU provided the creative execution for TMP to use, but TMP resized and sent to media accordingly.

Outcome:

The campaign produced over 10,000 conversions of students who went through to the BU website and found out about their courses and how to apply.

The campaign also produced an average cost per click of £1.57