Hobart and William Smith Colleges

HWS connected with VONT with the objective of raising applications and enrollment for undergrad and graduate programs. The colleges had recently rebranded and sought to develop and execute a robust digital strategy to deliver messaging to key audiences with end-to-end attribution a must.

The collaboratively developed marketing plan included a full-funnel marketing mix of awareness, lead gen, nurture, and yield campaigns across Google, Social, YouTube, OTT, and IP targeted campaigns.

Creative Support

VONT created a comprehensive prospective student landing page, developed a video asset, provided SEO consultation, and collaborated with HWS’ in-house digital designer for display ads.

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Outcomes

Slate data and reporting showed strong application trends and allowed us to tie specific applications and enrolled students back to paid traffic sources.

Matchback reporting from the IP-targeting vendor gave us concrete data on the number of enrolled students who viewed our display and pre-roll video campaigns.

Results

We tracked both campaign-level platform performance and enrollment ROI using attribution tracking including UTM Form Data Integrations with Slate, Slate Ping Code ID tracking, and Slate data exports.

Core platform and Google Analytics data showed positive results on multiple fronts. Organic traffic increased substantially, buoyed by the SEO recommendations and the mix of social, YouTube, OTT, and IP targeting awareness campaigns.

The new landing page produced a strong lead generation conversion rate: