Minerva Schools, now known as Minerva University, is a global nonprofit institution of higher learning that offers educational programs for students seeking to further their education and prepare for the workforce. They have campuses and locations throughout the world.
In September of 2020, Minerva approached Media Cause to assist them with driving more awareness for their undergraduate programs and later in 2021, their MBA programs through digital ad buying.
As a global organization of learning, Minerva’s goal is to recruit students from various areas around the world, including Africa, Asia, North, South, and Central Americas, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. At the time, they were piquing potential students’ interest in their institution through college fairs and recruitment events at high schools, however, they were noticing a decline in applications in key regions. They knew they needed help attracting more applicants.
Additionally, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, recruiting potential students to travel and go to a school with locations in different places would be challenging.
Due to the challenges with COVID-19 and declining applications, we knew Minerva needed to find new ways to engage prospective students beyond their traditional “on-the-ground” recruitment methods.
Additionally, during our Discovery Phase, we learned that Minerva had another challenge: brand awareness. In order to improve brand recognition and ultimately increase application submissions, we developed an integrated advertising campaign across the Google Display Network. This approach would allow us to engage and educate prospective students—leading to clicks to the Minerva School’s website where people could learn more, consider them as an option for higher learning, and submit an application. We also used retargeting on Facebook and Instagram’s newsfeeds and stories to persuade viewers to submit an application.
During Minerva’s past performance audit, our team had already established their target audience. As a result, we knew we had to look for potential students around the world who wanted to study abroad, get involved with global entrepreneurship, and further their education by getting an undergraduate or graduate degree. The audit also helped us determine key messaging and keywords that worked well in different markets, which we could incorporate with the ads to convert viewers into submissions.
Minerva already had a strong presence on Facebook so we wanted to continue to use the platform. In order to reach even more students, we recommended they also advertise on Instagram and Google Display Network to increase reach and improve brand awareness.
We knew we needed to create unique value propositions for each key region, paying close attention to the locations that had a lower submission rate. We developed ads with different themes that spoke to the individuals who wanted to attend a university that would give them a unique opportunity, global experience, and an educational journey in specific regions, including Africa, Asia, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and South and Central America.
Leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and GDN, we created a campaign that led users to Minerva’s website to find out more about the school and submit an application.
