Campaign Launch - Digital Marketing Management - Think Campus
Client case
Ken Robinson delivered a Ted Talk in 2006 with a strong message,
¨The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed.¨
Educational systems all over the world have been facing a strong shift in focus, including science, technology, and knowledge in a more democratic way. This was the inspiration behind the specialized university Think Campus.
What was the problem:
Laureate International Group, decided to launch a niche campus inspired in new ways of learning: Think Campus. They created postgraduate, technical and independent class curricula that would allow students from different areas like marketing, arts, finance, business, and human resources to get updated and learn innovatively.
To do so, all the marketing structure of the program had to be out of the box and seem pretty novel in its context. I was hired to be the digital director of the project, by the advertising agency that was consulting this project, Young and Rubicam International.
The main responsibilities I had were:
Leveraging with the operations and executive team to understand business goals and expectations
Working alongside the creative team to establish a voice and tone of the campaign, and make sure we could transfer to digital.
Supervising all content creation including copywriting and proofreading.
Coordinating with the design and production teams all content creation
Establish budgets and ROI (return of investment) aims
Overseeing the digital launch of the project.
Supervising digital operations including paid media, community managers and design specialists.
How it was resolved
Copy-writing team came up with a creative approach to the brand and the name Think Campus. After that, they crafted a concept based on ¨re-imagining yourself¨. The target was based on 3 buyer personas including young millennial professionals, updating Xennials and foreseen the needs of coming-of-age centennials.
Together we worked through references to the values of the brand and created a superset of graphics and videos that would present diversity, creativity and forward-thinking.
For the digital plan, I was the leader of the Content Team which included a community manager, copywriter, designer, media buyer and reporting specialist.
This was the process my team followed:
Set clear objectives to understand client expectations
We did a benchmark with similar universities and programs delivered to create a comparative analysis o the programs.
Defined buyer personas to get the tone and voice of the brand online right.
Established concepts, the brand claims and created a manifest based on the brand values.
Created a Gant structure to understand production times, limitations and requirements
Produced all digital contents in graphic design, video, and copy in Spanish to start executing.
Hired a web developer exclusively for the project and defined a project roadmap.
Tracked deliverables and presented results to client: Laureate International´s Marketing Manager.
Tools and actions
We decided on a calendar that would be based on the 6 enrollment periods of the year, giving each one of them a flow of content. Every term we would start informing the audience about courses, mixed with strong branding and inspiring claims on social media. We worked with influencers in business, marketing, and production to attract potential clients.
A workflow of email marketing was created with the internal sales team of Laureate Costa Rica to ensure database efficiency and maximum reach.
We worked with several different project management tools like Asana and Trello to get all the specifics of the project going and move quickly through tasks. Also, tools like Hubspot would let us manage databases and pieces to be included in emails. Hootsuite was our social media companion and we would also track down website analytics on Google Analytics to understand independent website pages impact.
This was what a regular week would look like:
Mondays I would lead have a stand-up meeting with the content team to verify weekly goals and re-calibrate as necessary
Tuesdays would be production and proofreading day, if any videos were being produced we would use this time to also revise storytelling and brand coherence.
Wednesdays we would have a client check-up to make sure new materials were coming into drives. Calendarization and pre-posting would be done for the upcoming week.
Thursdays we would revise former week KPI´s and create reporting for the last 7 days. It would be sent out at the end of the day.
Fridays would be used for creative exercises and doing changes in social media answers guide or getting feedback from other teams like design or creative.
Implementation
For this project, I would be consulting for the 3 months before launch and the 3 months after for a total of 6 months, as I had to jump into a new project right after. Part of my tasks was that I needed to prepare to have a hand-down process to the internal team at the corporation. They would, three months into launch take ownership of community management to continue posting and implementation, according to the negotiation.
By establishing this process, it was also necessary to document the whole process and make sure that the internal team of Think Campus would get trained on how to follow through daily publications and interactions with users.
For these tasks, 3 manuals were created, all in the virtual form so that they could easily be revised by the client and their team for seamless execution.
Final Results
Think Campus has been now formally working for more than 2 years, successfully graduating their first postgraduate program students, delivering hundreds of independent courses and teaching thousands of hours of business, marketing and creative content per year.
Currently, their marketing program is the strongest and fills ups classrooms (virtual and physical) ever bimester. Thou the focus of the university has slightly changed, due to a recent acquiring process by another education corporation, the programs born in this project still to the day are the most sought after.
*Fun fact, I was hired by this campus, 6 months after ending the project and have been a professor since then. Currently, I teach Social Media, Analytics, Digital Transformation and Storytelling classes for the marketing and business programs. This was my first group of students at this campu, I’m the one in the middle wearing a black shirt.
