Middlesex College

Company Bio

Middlesex College, formerly known as Middlesex County College, is a public community college with a main campus in Edison, New Jersey. Founded in 1964, Middlesex College provides access to a quality, affordable education, smaller and more personal classes, and unique learning experiences for all students.

Overview

  • Industry: Education
  • Location: Edison, NJ
  • Size: 10,085 total students

Overview

The Ask

ESM created an Evergreen campaign to support Middlesex College’s year-round recruitment efforts, and to promote MC as the local college of choice among prospective students and student influencers (parents, alumni, and the local community). 

With an objective to strengthen brand awareness and increase overall applications and enrollment, ESM created an always on media strategy to spread awareness and develop measurable return.   

The Challenge

Middlesex College was looking for ways to make an impact across various mediums to help increase their enrollment and overall brand exposure, and engage with their community members. Despite their efforts to  reach prospective students and increase enrollment numbers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the college had also recently undergone a name change and rebrand. As a result, increasing exposure of their new name to create brand awareness and brand recognition was a key component of our strategy, 

Why it Worked

The Approach

The Evergreen campaign strategy and media recommendation was used as the overarching brand approach for digital media; this campaign ran for 6 months, and was utilized to target all audiences. Our channel and tactic recommendation was supported by a market analysis, which detailed the Middlesex County market and the audiences within that market regarding key factors such as average household size, median income, population by generation, and education level. We also considered language diversity when compiling this campaign strategy because of the diversified target audience.

The Solution

The media mix for this campaign included sequenced channels to maximize budget and effectively reach MC’s target audiences. All digital and social channels such as Paid Search, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok used hyper-localized targeting to reach four key audiences: adult students, alternative students, guest students, and highschool students. Additionally, traditional media placements such as traditional radio, TV, and OOH. reached the broader Middlesex County civilians and community members.  

Results

Campaign Results

The results below are a combined total from January 1 – June 30th, 2022. Overall, we were able to over deliver on total impressions ordered for each media channel, and other key metrics like video completion rate and CTR exceeded industry benchmarks. Additionally, the digital display ads had nearly 55,000 view-through conversions, while ads served on social media channels had over 316K engagements. These results allow us to believe that our ads are reaching the right people at the right time and resonating well with our audience, as they are choosing to return to the college website at a later date, and/or are engaging with the ads through reacting, commenting, sharing or saving. The success of this first, 6-month campaign, resulted in an approved budget and recommendation for the 2022-2023 academic year, which will be starting up again in October.

5.6

Impressions

75

Clicks

781

Video and Audio Completions

316

Social Post Engagements

74

Video Completion Rate