University of Sydney
Unlocking the Power of Media in China
Background
The University of Sydney worked together with Yango to develop and implement an international digital media strategy to drive growth in international recruitment from key markets across the world for their MBA program.
Target markets included China, India, Latin America and a new test market in the UK. The strategy uses an alignment of media, creative, content and custom websites to deliver success for the business school.
This case study details the complexities and solutions involved in engaging the key Chinese market.
Key Success Metrics
- Increase in Open Day Registrations and Attendance.
- Decrease in Cost Per Registration for Open Day campaigns. Decrease in Cost Per Lead for Recruitment campaigns.
Challenges
Information restrictions and government policy in China meant driving potential customers to the existing Australian landing pages was slow, and sometimes not working at all. This was significantly impacting the user experience for potential students and limiting the growth prospects in a key expansion market.
How Yango Helped Them Challenge The Status Quo
Custom landing page & creative messaging design
China presents unique challenges for student recruitment due to communication restrictions and government policy. We recognized the need to create unique custom landing pages in both simplified Chinese and Mandarin that are hosted in China to avoid restrictions on foreign based websites.
Using Chinese language and hosting allows us to sync in with very specific and unique Chinese media channels such as Baidu and WeChat where a significant portion of our target audience spend time.
In addition to language and hosting, landing pages and creative messaging was customized by region to best connect with the local audience, examples below:
Measurement & tracking
The custom landing pages included bespoke lead forms and data capture capabilities ensuring we collected accurate customer data on the prospective students. This allowed for more personalised communications and user experience compared to previous years where platforms like Eventbrite or Smartevent delivered a poor UX that limited new lead capture and student growth.
Audience targeting
The scale of the Chinese market brings enormous opportunity but also complexity. We need to be extremely targeted with media to limit wastage and ensure the message was delivered to in-market prospective students.
We used first party data to engage with users who have previously visited a specific course page in China but have not applied for a course or registered for an upcoming event. We implemented hyper local targeting ensure we were capturing users within specifically targeted geographical areas within Shanghai, Beijing and Taipei.
To ensure we were driving the highest quality of registrations, we extended the lead form to include mandatory fields including name, email address, degree the user was applying for, how they heard about the event and picture verification, similar to a captcha verification.
Results, Return on Investment
Search was the strongest performing channel delivering 90% of registrations. LinkedIn also performed well from a branding perspective delivering a video completion rate more than 4 times the LinkedIn Benchmark of 5%, however volume is limited in China.
China Open Day Events:
- 77% under campaign target CPA
By looking beyond paid media into user experience and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) through the development of bespoke and optimised landing pages we were able to track and optimise the campaign more efficiently than ever before. The results showed the personalisation of the experience for localised Chinese audiences reasonated and ultimately led to campaign improvements and increased ROI.
Yango’s expertise in digital media, strategy and implementation has been invaluable and helped deliver our most effective campaigns to date
–
JOHANNA LOWE – MARKETING DIRECTOR
Sydney University
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