Attracting students to UCB at the height of the pandemic

Challenge

To compel students to consider applying to University College Birmingham (UCB) during the turbulent peak of the pandemic.

With college applications lower than previous years, we had to encourage uncertain teenagers (and their parents) to consider University College Birmingham (UCB) for their future, at a time when when students felt uncertain about what the world would look like when they finished school. 

2020 was a write-off, especially for students. There was a sense of optimism as we approached Christmas, but the awful second wave of Covid-19 soon shattered this. 

Solution

We devised a clever and creative advertising strategy driven by insight which showed being relevant was a key focus to our target demographic.

• Being relevant meant the creative we produced needed to speak their language, and images should be authentic. Being relevant also meant using borrowed interest. The famous phrase ‘Level up’ was positive and motivating to both our audiences and was being used on TikTok to the song ‘Level Up’ by Ciara
• We were inspired to develop our single-minded audience proposition, a clear promise that encouraged them to take action: Level Up with UCB. With 88% of young people in the UK seeing themselves as creative, and with brands like JD, Spotify and Nike carving out a bold, distinctive advertising style, we knew we had to create a campaign that cut through the noise
• Our campaign creative used a range of confident 16-18-year-old models alongside neon style CGI props to represent UCB’s college courses and the headline ‘Level Up Your Ambition’. A range of executions were used to show popular courses such as sport, travel, beauty and business
• Our strategy was to:
  • GET: Driven, ‘hands on’ type students (and their parents) studying GCSEs who feel a sense of uncertainty about their prospects in a world gripped by Covid-19
  • TO: See UCB as the best choice to overcome any doubts about where they were headed in life
  • BY: Using a mix of paid digital media to encourage students to ‘Level up’ with a UCB college course
• Performance marketing wasn’t enough. We needed to build UCB as a brand as well as drive college application numbers via social media and paid media. Spotify audio ads, Google Display, user-generated content, TikTok ads and Facebook awareness ads were used to increase salience and memorability. Facebook consideration and conversion ads were used to encourage traffic and applications on the UCB website

Impact

• After the first two weeks, it was clear that the user journey wasn’t as straightforward as UCB had hoped and attributing applications to a particular channel was difficult
• We reported, managed and optimised digital media week-by-week, however as we were using a number of different channels, the most effective way of measuring overall success was the total number of college applications year-on-year
• We smashed this target (and other digital KPIs)