Win Enrollments with Digital Advertising

3 min. read

This month, Carly Althaus, VisionPoint Marketing’s Associate Director of Media, co-hosted a webinar with Vice President & Creative Director, Tony Poillucci, and Dana Cruikshank, Vice President of Market Strategy. Titled “Win Enrollments with Digital Advertising,” Carly, Tony, and Dana discussed the fundamentals of compelling and effective marketing and walked attendees through the many puzzle pieces that make a strong digital marketing campaign. In this discussion, they deconstructed high-performing enrollment marketing campaigns developed by VisionPoint Marketing in an effort to get to the heart of what makes the campaigns so successful. Whether you are a marketing professional or merely curious about the industry, the webinar was built in a way to benefit anyone that tuned in. 

As the Associate Director of Media, Carly considers her role to be the best of both worlds. On the back end, she gets to dive into the media planning and strategy of how to connect prospective students with their dream college or university. On the front end, by managing our Media & Optimization (M&O) team, she gets to help her team members reach their goals as well. 

The M&O team keeps campaigns running strong at VisionPoint, but by collaborating cross-functionally, we have found ways to make our client’s campaigns even more successful. One of the many benefits of working with a full service agency like VisionPoint is that the relationship between the M&O team and Creative team is more than professional; it’s also a friendship. Having robust communication between the teams allows the strong, separate strategies to come together as a cohesive unit to drive engagement. Our webinar demonstrated that cohesiveness through case studies. Carly displayed anecdotal media data, while Tony spoke to how we use that data to optimize and refine the Creative team’s copy and design.

The first step in any media campaign is to determine which channels an institution should advertise on. This is easier said than done, as there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to media planning. To have a robust understanding of the industry, Carly helps to establish the basics. When institutions put an ad out into the world, the user will need somewhere to go to get more information on this topic. This is referred to as a landing page – a unique page built specifically for this purpose and to make it less complicated for the consumer. By creating user-friendly landing pages, Carly’s team is able to collect the data necessary to see if their ad is resonating with the audience.

When conducting a creative analysis, the M&O team will start by measuring the click-through-rate (the percentage of people visiting a web page by clicking a link on a particular advertisement) and conversion rate (the percentage of users who take a desired action). This is the most efficient way to measure performance of ad creative, and gives the creative team the opportunity to adjust accordingly to optimize results.

We may be biased, but we loved listening to Carly, Dana, and Tony breakdown the intricacies of what makes a winning digital advertising campaign. It was the perfect chance to see what can happen at the intersection of great design and great digital marketing strategy and planning. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, our webinar is still available to replay! Download the recording here.

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VisionPoint’s Associate Director of Media, Carly Althaus, has expertly managed campaigns for programmatic media, SEM, and social media, and keeps an eye out for new, innovative digital media channels. Her experience equips her with a sense of flexibility for the fast-paced world of marketing, and her passion for digital marketing drives her to bridge the gap between client needs and solutions. To start a conversation with Carly on ways you can boost enrollments with digital advertising, contact us. We’re on a mission to help higher ed institutions succeed.