Graduate Applicant Content Marketing Campaign
// California College of the Arts
CCA wanted to increase the number of qualified applicants to its MFA in Design and MS in Interaction Design programs, but due to competing priorities, they needed a solution that required minimal use of additional copywriters or project managers.
Role
As lead strategist and primary copywriter on this project, I needed to devise a way to generate a large amount of in-depth content, for two unique and highly discerning audiences, with minimal access to in-house copywriters (who were focused on a large scale website redesign) and a limited turnaround time.
Strategy
In order to attract, nurture, and convert prospective leads into applicants to CCA’s grad programs, I developed a complete decision-stage inbound marketing campaign that leveraged paid search engine marketing, SEO-focused inbound blog content, automated nurturing/conversion emails, and a data integration with the school’s Enrollment Database in Workday.
Because research showed that my audience of prospective post-graduate students were incredibly thorough in researching their topics and programs of interest, I knew that leveraging Subject Matter Experts was going to be an essential component of creating engaging content, but due to the timing of the project, access to CCA’s expert faculty was extremely limited.
I began by conducting interviews with key stakeholders in each program to determine their audience’s most pressing questions. I then performed competitor and keyword audits to discover opportunities and ideas for positioning the content based on audience need. With that info, I developed a content strategy and outline that mapped FAQs to a user journey that spanned search, blog, and email content. I then generated a series of targeted questionnaires to be filled out by current students, alumni, and faculty, whose (copyedited) responses would form the bulk of each piece. This efficient approach provided prospective students with deeper insights coming directly from those with first-hand knowledge, and left copywriters with only a few quick intros and headlines to write based on my keyword research.
Outcome
With limited budget and in-house resources, I was able to deliver a robust campaign consisting of 6 longform blog posts, 18 emails, automated Hubspot Workflows, and a suite of Search and Display ads. Within just a single admissions cycle of rolling out the campaign, both programs saw student applications increase by 20%. Engagement grew by 75% and the conversion rate from Subscribers to Applicants increased by 23%.