Nyack College, a Christian university with campuses in Jersey City and NYC, approached us with the task of increasing overall awareness about the school and increase YoY 2019/2020 enrollment numbers. The primary focus of this campaign was on generating increased enrollments for their undergraduate programs and increasing awareness of their Jersey City campus.

As a non-traditional school, Nyack services both undergraduate, graduate, and non-traditional students (older age demographics, users with unconventional life paths, etc). With their primary targets being users within the 5 boroughs and northern NJ, this provided both a unique challenge and opportunity when developing targeting strategies and a media channel/tactic mix.

Nyack had previously run their media in-house, with their budget being heavily weighted towards traditional channels – namely, traditional radio. In an effort to enhance their market presence and increase bottom-funnel conversions without entirely uprooting the awareness efforts they had in place, we reallocated their marketing spend to include both traditional tactics geared at generating brand awareness and recognition and heavied up the budget towards digital tactics with the more robust audience and geographical targeting capabilities that drive applications. 

These digital tactics included:

• Google Paid Search ads with geo-targeted bid caps.
• An assortment of programmatic digital display, video, and audio tactics that target both 1st party and 3rd party data sets for in-market users and a growing, brand approved site list.
• A flighted paid social media plan that aimed at improving site traffic and generating new leads.

At launch, our primary goals were to increase qualified leads and applications and to ultimately drive new student enrollments. The uncertainty of navigating student enrollments in a COVID environment was considered when optimizing the campaign for success, and levels of enrollment increased YoY despite environmental impact.