Onboarding Medical Students Through Lead Generation

Lead generation for the number one medical and educational institute, St. George’s University (SGU).

Located in Grenada, West Indies, the University has more than 22,000 graduates, and offers medical and veterinary medical degrees in the Schools of Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and independent and dual graduate degrees in the sciences, public health, and business.

Earlier in 2021, Crowd was appointed to consult, plan, and execute an always on performance media strategy over the following twelve months to increase university admissions, lead generation, brand awareness, and education, targeting the MENA region including key source markets such as the United Arab Emirates, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt.

Basing our media plan on gathered consumer insights from defined audiences – students, parents, peers, and influencers – Crowd was able to launch and activate a 360 digital strategy across paid social, search and display that has consistently generated MQLs and led to new student admissions.

Challenge

Although digital campaigns were active before appointing Crowd, SGU’s biggest challenge lay with both the quality and volume of leads being generated from the MENA region. With four other agencies to manage across the world, SGU required a proactive local partner that could evaluate, benchmark, and propose a data-driven approach to attract and convert prospective students into their onboarding roster.

Crowd’s challenge surrounded the development of an effective results-driven performance strategy, with no preliminary data from this region or baseline performance metrics to plan from. Given only creative assets and landing pages from the client to launch with, we needed to first understand our audiences better to ensure our plan and budgets would be maximised to their fullest potential.

Solution

Based on supplied demographics from the client, we first developed usable insights and audience parameters for SGU’s regional market through our consumer research partner – Global Web Index (GWI).

By interpreting behaviours, attitudes, and media consumption, we utilised this data to create pen-portraits and construct a targeted media plan that not only generated a 300% increase in lead volume in the first month, but led to a better keyword bidding strategy, generating lower CPCs and CPLs in due course.

Our campaign structure was set up to deliver display campaigns for awareness and consideration, whilst ramping traffic (search) campaigns, where pixels collected relevant data points to re-market to our intent and lookalike audiences. We worked with the client to further consult on creatives and messaging through data gathered and optimised monthly spendings across each phase accordingly to not overload and continue to deliver qualified interests to the admission teams.

With a key objective of reducing CPLs, our initial approach for the first quarter was to drill down on our targeting, optimising reach, impressions, and CPC. By the second and third quarters, we were in the perfect position to confirm our primary and secondary markets, introduce new ones, and lower interaction with those markets that weren’t converting.

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