Old Dominion University is a story of transformation, starting out as an arm of William & Mary College; then a separate, regional 2-year commuter college; and now globally recognized as a university of excellence. When Spurrier Group acquired the account in 2017, no one could argue with the reality of ODU’s evolution. We immediately saw the opportunity for growth. General awareness to key audiences, namely high school students and their parents, was low compared to other schools in their competitive set.
Goals: The most important goal for ODU was increasing the amount of applicant submissions and enrollments. Within the first few years of successful awareness building campaigns, creative guidance and refreshes, we moved past learning to actionable insights. During Covid19, media consumption habits were shifting from a one-to-many environment toward Personalized Media Experiences (PME). Major changes to our lifestyles have resulted in consumers getting a taste of personalizing their media, on demand, what and when they want.
Audience: Continued optimizations resulted in growth momentum of prospecting and curating a high-quality student audience and driving them to the website where they would ultimately take key conversion actions of applying to the university.
Creative: Creative messaging was crafted by ODU’s in-house marketing team and consisted of encouraging messaging about the power within each student to be all they want to be, with tags like: “Ignite Your Future! “, “Knowledge is one thing, Wisdom is priceless! “ & “Experience the classroom and then the board room!” to name only a few.
Media: As we moved past Covid19, we earmarked a larger share of the budget to video messaging. Upper funnel OTT, Pre-roll, and YouTube tactics complemented Display and Social, all so important to building reach and frequency to key audiences and enhancing engagement behaviors.
When the digital landscape changed again with the roll-out of Apple iOS14 mobile updates, causing a majority of users to opt out of digital in-app tracking, as well as updates from Meta, Spurrier joined forces with its programmatic partners to develop an arsenal of tracking and analytical tools to help close the data gap.
The campaign landing pages received a 76% increase of new users, confirming the strategic shift worked. During the FY2022-2023 ODU brand campaign, performance to the campaign’s landing pages improved by 40% in engagement metrics (pages per session, time on site and bounce rates). Most importantly, the key performance objective of cost per acquisition, which focused heavily on driving applications, improved 35% over the prior year as our experience working on this specific campaign drove media efficiencies, even faced with industry changes.