Focus On Digital Yields 200% Inquiry Boost

When Wentworth’s College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE) decided to expand its student base by growing its degree programs, they asked us to evaluate their existing marketing plan and develop efficient, effective strategies to grow enrollment. Primary goals included increasing the number of leads within the existing budget and effectively target the appropriate candidates.

To meet CPCE’s growing desire to develop a culture of data driven decision making, we established a detailed measurement structure focusing on campaign specific landing pages, trackable phone numbers and inquiry forms tied to databases easily accessed by admissions personnel.

Wentworth’s existing media plan focused heavily on print with more than 70% of spend allocated to local and regional newspapers, radio, and direct mail.

We helped modernize their pay per click search strategy by focusing beyond the basic “back to school” keywords and crafting campaigns around CPCE’s best known professional sectors – construction, architecture, engineering and facilities. Starting with a budget about half the size of their monthly print spend, we were able to demonstrate a lower student acquisition cost than any other media channel and scale lead growth until PPC search soon became Wentworth’s top lead generator.

Later we launched Wentworth’s first programmatic display campaigns (with banner, video, and social ads) and leveraged our in house real time bidding ad platform to effectively target new prospects for much lower acquisition costs than traditional direct buys.

During the nearly four years we worked with Wentworth CPCE, our teams’ combined efforts increased leads by 200%, helped successfully launch three new master’s programs (the first in CPCE’s history), and fill the school’s first 100% online cohorts in three master’s and one bachelor’s degree program.