Client Success: Increasing Program Enrollment for a Local School

Achieving high enrollment rates is a priority for any educational institution. But when one Arizona school district was forced to alter its teaching modality in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization had to move quickly to launch a new online learning academy.

While the launch was a success, a new challenge quickly took center stage: as both school districts and student learning were thrown into disarray, parents were scrambling to find the best virtual education option that could meet the needs of their children. To grow its enrollment and maximize the value of its online learning academy, the school district reached out to Cox Media to build an advertising campaign in support of this venture.

The Goal

To turn its online learning academy into a successful virtual institution, the school district couldn’t settle for simply building awareness about the academy among local students and parents. Instead, it was under pressure to quickly convince parents that its online academy was the best local schooling option for those students.

As a result, the school district needed to not only build awareness, but also trigger engagement and calls to action during a compressed period of time where parents were on the search for the right educational opportunity. Cox Media was tasked with generating quality leads for the school district, with an ultimate goal of pushing its enrollment as close to maximum capacity as possible.

The Solution

After working with the client to understand its goals and its timeline, Cox Media professionals designed and implemented a multi-channel advertising solution that utilized TV Everywhere to deliver video ads to parents of school-aged children in the school district’s target area.

The solution also leveraged paid search and display and video campaigns to reach parents searching for local schooling options, as well as local audiences whose demographics and online viewing behaviors aligned with the markers of the clients’ target audience.

Cox Media also implemented a retargeting campaign to engage website visitors who left without making a conversion. Retargeting played a crucial role in keeping the online learning academy top-of-mind among parents still searching for local education options. This retargeting strategy addressed the challenges of building brand awareness for the academy while also recovering potential converts who required multiple points of contact to be successfully converted.

The Results

Over the course of a three-month multi-channel campaign, Cox Media’s advertising solution delivered the following results:

• Nearly 25,000 total visits to the online academy’s website;
• A total of 1,479 phone calls driven by the advertising solution;
• 100 percent enrollment in the online academy by the end of the three-month ad campaign;
• A robust waitlist to ensure high enrollment numbers in the future.

All of the campaign performance metrics exceeded the expectations of the client, as well as Cox Media’s forecasted results. Thanks to this success, the school district was able to maximize the value of its online academy, strengthening its local reputation and helping both students and the district itself adapt to virtual learning operations.

Find out how Cox Media can help deliver similar results for your educational institution. Contact us today to learn more.