This year presented colleges and universities with unique recruiting obstacles brought on by the ongoing pandemic: campuses were closed, recruitment travel came to an abrupt halt, high school students were suddenly uncertain about their future paths. Institutions sought to establish new digital strategies to engage with prospective students and recruit a class aligned with their enrollment goals. 

One of the institutions embracing new digital strategies was “Red University,” a top public research university in the South that leads the nation in many of its academic disciplines. Founded over 100 years ago, the 4-year university now has a total enrollment of over 30,000 students. It continues to enroll 4,000 new undergraduate students each year due to its notable academic programs, hands-on experiences, post-graduation employment opportunities and alumni community. 

Partnering with Encoura

In order to boost digital outreach to students, the university turned to a trusted recruitment partner. The decision to team up with Encoura this year to strengthen its digital engagement was an easy one for the university. The variety of high-quality, effective strategies provided by the Digital Solutions team was exactly what they were looking for to support their recruitment efforts for the upcoming class. 

Encoura Digital Solutions equipped the university with services that would connect them with prospective first-year and transfer students where they are consuming the most content. That included Mobile Geofencing, Custom Audience Targeting, and targeted YouTube campaigns. With these strategies, the Digital Solutions team tracks not only the impressions and clicks from the university’s ads, but also verified actions. Encoura’s verified actions show the true effectiveness of the ads as they reveal what students are thinking while on the website and how they ultimately decide to interact with the institution.

Bringing in the Results

Over the course of these campaigns, the university saw strong engagement results. Geofencing advertising with Encoura Digital Solutions has already attracted to their website over 1,500 transfer students—their targeted audience for increasing applications. 

Additionally, Custom Audience Targeting has directly led to over 10,000 verified website actions from transfer students and over 50,000 verified actions from first-year admitted students and parents. As a result, both their application and yield efforts have been largely successful and have put the university in a strong position to bring in a great fall class. The institution now looks forward to implementing additional strategies with the Digital Solutions team to continue shaping their classes for recruitment cycles to come!