The full story
Macleay College, a private higher education provider with campuses in Sydney’s Surry Hills, was founded 32 years ago, and expanded to Melbourne (Macleay has since rebranded to The Institute of Creative Arts and Technology Pty Ltd (ICAT). It offers diplomas and fast-track two-year bachelor degrees in subjects that include accounting, advertising and media, journalism, digital media business, social media marketing, and user experience design.
The College competes against traditional universities by offering project-based teaching in smaller classrooms to create a teaching environment much closer to one-on-one. Courses are taught by leading and practicing industry professionals – an ethos first created by the College’s founders. This brings contemporary thinking, skills and knowledge into the classroom from day one, to give students a sense of what their career will be like in the future.
As Emma Coakes, Head of Marketing & Recruitment at Macleay College, puts it, “Our mission is to ensure our graduates are job ready with the most contemporary knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their chosen careers.”
From Scattered Efforts to Data-Driven Strategy
Macleay College overhauled its approach to digital marketing with the help of Digivizer, creating a data-led integrated digital marketing program across its digital and social marketing accounts and networks. The program continuously communicates and connects with the College’s prospective audiences, and maintains and nurtures the relationships it already has with existing prospects, and current students.
“We built this content strategy in partnership with Digivizer, to create different activity across our social media accounts, to refine our output and content in the paid space, refine our search engine marketing and optimization, and refine our digital display advertising,” explains Emma Coakes.
The Macleay College team uses real-time data to continuously measure program performance around engagement, impressions, and shares. Content is refined or changed if performance drops, and paid support refined if content is performing well.
Striking the marketing balance across the portfolio of courses on offer is more-nuanced than might be expected. “Prospect numbers at the top of the funnel remain important to us,” says Emma Coakes, “but a major focus is students who have already declared an interest in what Macleay has to offer, who are therefore closer to making a decision to apply, and then to enroll. Being able to identify where students are in their funnel, their relationship with us, and how close they are to making a decision, alongside where we are in the trimester recruiting cycle, is hugely valuable.
“We can also segment by the geographic location of students, and their areas of interest. We need to try and achieve a balance across enrolments in all of our faculties, and we’re able to adjust our spend on a weekly and a fortnightly basis. We can have more of the right conversations, with the right students, for the right reasons, at the right time.”
Macleay also used Digivizer to manage and measure the performance of its search-based marketing. “There’s a lot of activity that also goes into our search engine optimization, as well as display ads across a number of different networks too. They all work together to formulate traffic to the websites, inquiries, applications, and then ultimately, conversion to enrolments.”
Measurable Success: Increased Engagement and Enrolments
“We’ve seen our engagement increase across our social platforms by between 200 and 660%. On average, we’ve increased our followers by 12%. And in some of our paid activities, we’ve seen six figure increases in our results. Since August last year, we’ve seen this increasing trend across the key metrics that are really important to us.”
And results translate directly to Macleay College’s primary business objectives: year-on-year, leads are up by 6%, applications by month are up by 500%, and enrolments have more than doubled.
“That’s really different to where we were more than 12 months ago where we just didn’t have that level of detail, and we didn’t have the agility to actually make those changes. That’s been a really big shift for us.”
Success around the business metrics of inquiries, applications and enrolments is fed into the program measurements around paid, earned and owned media performance. Budgets are set accordingly.
“In education, there is no downtime, so it’s a continuous cycle of marketing activity. And apart from continuing to work with Digivizer and continuing to recruit students, there are a number of exciting course developments under way. So really, it’s a continuation of trying to deliver the best courses to students in the Melbourne and Sydney markets.
“There isn’t one magic bullet that creates that interest and intent for students but, through being strategic, we’ve done a lot of analysis and learnt the best ways that we can connect with those students who have a higher intent to actually come and study the courses with us.
“And at the end of the day, the true measure of success is really the Macleay College graduates that enter into the workforce.”
NB: Macleay College has since rebranded to The Institute of Creative Arts and Technology Pty Ltd (ICAT).
