Vishwakarma University, Pune: Capitalising the Multi-Channel Digital Marketing
From graduation to post-graduation and advanced courses, each group of higher education applicants has a unique set of needs and objectives to be achieved, when it comes to finding and selecting the right institute.
Institute who understand these needs, can easily with multi-channel digital marketing methods approach, nurture the reach, consider awareness to convert the potential candidates into admissions. Digital Marketing with its huge scope, have strategic solutions to drive up multi purposes of higher education.
Objective
- Increase admissions over 2017 intake.
- Build awareness of the University pan-India.
- Promote our mission of holistic education with a balanced commitment to the sciences, arts, and humanities and an interdisciplinary way of study.
Strategic Approach:
Used different channels to work towards a single goal with a uniform approach, and rolled out the campaign in two phases:
- Phase 1- Commenced on 1st March 2018
- Phase 2- Commenced from 1st April 2018
Hashtag: #Vishwakarmauniversity #admission2018_2019
Target Audience:
Socializing the campaign to highlights the unique position of Vishwakarma to the relevant stakeholders
- Higher Secondary Students,
- Engineering Aspirants
- Other Aspirants
Social Media Platform Used: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube
Overview
Digital transformation through Social Media for the entire Group started a good two and a half years ago. Employees are the best advocates of a company and Vishwakarma has 1500+ advocates.
A well-structured plan was put in place and a process to cascade the message of the importance of Social Media and its use, was rolled out over the next two years to our 1500+ employees. Through sustained development and leveraging of Digital Assets for each of the Groups entities we organically increased our digital presence.
Learnings from 2017
- Offline/print media marketing may not be the best option given that our efforts did not produce results commensurate with the kind of spending.
- It was debatable if our target audience, which is 12th standard pass students in the age of 17 to 21 years, had even seen the advertisements.
- Even if there was awareness created, this effort did not translate into admissions in the numbers expected and in relation to the spend.
Unique Digital Proposition
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Told Through Stories
Throughout our campaign for Admissions, there was a focus on relevant content/SEO for courses, website, landing pages, and all social media assets. As content would be continuous, strategy and tactics were looked at for the quarter. They studied competition and other practices in the academic circle.
They have benchmarked themselves against an entity we felt we were closely aligned to. They have covered courses offered, events, student engagement, industry engagement and placement, knowledge shared, MOUs with various global universities etc.
Phase 1- (Priority for Brand Awareness)
“56% of the Students spend at least 30 mints on social media platform in a day, 86% on YouTube and 71% on Facebook”
ASMA India Trends Study 2018
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Social Media Presence
The existing Vishwakarma Educational Institutes have an unmatched presence in the field of engineering education. We needed to move the narrative away to our strengths in other areas, for Vishwakarma University. Knowing that we now had a good presence on Social Media, having started the exercise a good two years prior, our approach was multi-channel. We did not dive straight into the campaign but analyzed the previous year’s efforts.
Phase 2. (Priority shifted to Admissions)
Facebook was chosen to promote new and advanced courses offered by the university. The beauty lies within the representation of post on Facebook, with attractive banner and creative content that has accelerated the students’ engagements.
Twitter engagement is slightly on the higher side than Facebook on these posts. Majority of people are actively participating via retweeting the same content.
Taking Corrective Action
- The weekly analysis of the Admission dashboard along with website analytics.
- Analysis of source of inquiries, course interest analysis, CPC analysis (lowering or raising budgets for spend).
- Constant corrections made where, and if required.
