Background
Harvard, a prestigious university, offers a leading professional education program. The program provides various courses designed for four types of individuals: those looking to acquire new skills, advance existing skills, further their careers, and change their career trajectory.
With growing competition and an increase in the availability of online courses, gaining share in the professional education category and growing enrollment has become a challenge.
Goal
Harvard University set out to accomplish one main goal: drive enrollment by 13%.
Approach
To help Harvard achieve a 13% increase in enrollment, Anagram devised a full-funnel, omnichannel strategy that would help Harvard:
- Increase its online presence. Anagram reached Harvard’s target audience across channels to drive awareness of Harvard not only as a University but also as one that offers a professional education program.
- Drive interest in its program. To generate interest in Harvard’s professional-education programs, Anagram ran program-specific campaigns that served tailored ads to the most relevant audience segments of prospective students.
Anagram created custom segments of audiences suited for each of Harvard’s professional-education programs.These segments were based on several data points, such as professional industry, job experience, job title, and intent. To build these segments, Anagram used a combination of first-party CRM data like previous class rosters to help identify likely candidates for additional courses, data on site visitors to identify high-intent audiences, and third-party B2B data segments.
The omnichannel campaign included media placements across SEM, programmatic display, mobile, and paid social. Anagram reached Harvard’s audience segments using B2B data and contextual data to deliver messaging to highly-relevant audiences in highly-relevant settings.
Anagram maximized ad exposure amongst Harvard’s “high-intent” audiences to ensure optimal campaign performance. Anagram also increased media spend across high-performing channels like search and social to drive enrollment for courses with historically low registration rates.
Results
With Anagram’s help, Harvard exceeded its goal of driving a 13% increase in enrollment by 103%. Instead, enrollment increased 26.4% year-over-year as compared to the same period in 2019.
